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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#121

Post by Pmop »

I'm young (25) but my first (family) computer used to run Windows 98 (that's what we could afford). And I can recall well, UI had one "meta-language": menu bar (file, view ..., help), toolbar, and if you'd hover your mouse pointer over a widget, a tooltip would show up with explanation about what the widget does and the keyboard shortcut for that action. Once you learnt how to use one application, say Paint, you'd probably pick up any other quickly. Also, there was the always helpful Help Window (F1) with rich explanation about everything you'd want to know.

I feel that Modern UIs are awkward to use. Many applications have their own way of doing the same thing other applications do. Oftentimes their new way of doing something is badly documented (tooltips are too ugly I guess), so now you have to search the web for help; the help you found is full of useless text, ads and browser-locking javascript; soon enough you find yourself longing for Win 98 era UI.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#122

Post by chacha2 »

Kaibeezy wrote: post #74

I finally switched from Win7 to 10 about a month ago. Couldn’t put it off any longer once lockdown started. I’m tech management, so it’s office, mail, browser and graphics mainly. Illustrator 4 runs fine on an X220. Win10. I just absolutely hate it. Every day I have to relearn something obvious. I can’t find the corners of windows to grab them, and when I do, it’s one damn pixel wide and I get jitters. Why is Candy C…

https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu

There you go. Brings back the Windows 7 Start menu/

Re: The Decline of Usability

#123

Post by joe_the_user »

Animats wrote: post #10

Ubuntu got worse at 18.04. Logging in on desktop now requires "swiping up" with the mouse to get the password box. The "swiping" thing is to avoid problems with unwanted activation when the device is in your pocket. It's totally inappropriate to desktops. Then there's icon mania. I've recently converted from Blender 2.79 to Blender 2.82. Lots of new icons. They dim, they change color, they disappear as modes change,…

Ubuntu shell was a disaster and I can't imagine it's gotten better - Mate on Ubuntu is the answer for that.

And Gimp is a mess. Enabling single window mode makes it better.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#124

Post by chacha2 »

hamaluik wrote: post #67
intrepidhero wrote: post #41

Relevant quote from my reading yesterday: "Time itself is on the side of increasing the perceived need for usability since the software market seems to be shifting away from the features war of earlier years. User interface design and customer service will probably generate more added value for computer companies than hardware manufacturing, and user interfaces are a major way to differentiate products in a market do…

You might be interested in Elementary OS? https://elementary.io/

That has most the issues that this article complains about. It gets rid of both the minimise and maximise button, leaving only close because that's how the iPhone does it.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#125

Post by lloeki »

xg15 wrote: post #101
_y5hn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Krita matured nicely over the years and last time I found it quite easy to use. UI is hard. It got replaced by "UX", but nobody agrees what that really is. So it boils down to whatever impracticality designers dream up. When UI was easy, there were real research, data backing up claims of improvements and laid down rules to enforce some consistency. This became "unfashionable" and was removed.

My impression is that modern UX is data-driven alright, it just follows radically different paradigms and goals. It's not at all anymore about presenting consistent mental models, it's solely about the ease or difficulty with which particular isolated tasks can be performed. It's also not automatically the goal to make all tasks as easy as possible. Instead, discoverability and "friction" are often deliberately tuned…

> It's not at all anymore about presenting consistent mental models, it's solely about the ease or difficulty with which particular isolated tasks can be performed.

IOW following metrics optimising for local maxima instead of looking at the big picture in a non-zero sum game. Each task is made easier by itself but in doing so creates a model in conflict with everything else, making everyone miserable. Nash would be sad.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#126

Post by mceachen »

I'm having a real hard time squaring a rant about usability that expressly states that everyone should be held accountable to good design, and a website design that went out its way to be unreadable on mobile.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#127

Post by switch007 »

101404 wrote: post #118
freedomben wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just hit the Escape key. You can also just start typing your password. I often type my password and press enter before the monitor is even awake.

...just to then realize that the computer was still logged in and the focus was on a chat window, and it was only the screen that had been in power saving mode. :-}

Your post needs a trigger warning. My heart is racing.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#129

Post by ilamont »

wwweston wrote: post #33
red_admiral wrote: post #12

It's not only that every app has a different style these days, but some of them change their style or add new features via auto-update every few weeks. Even office 365 (desktop version) does this. It's not just a usability nightmare, it's an accessibility one too (although the two go hand in hand most of the time). Imagine teaching some elderly neighbour how to write a word document, and after weeks of practice they…

If you think resume-driven development is bad for developers (and it is), consider the career incentives for UI and product people. If there's a "maintain" incentive, I'm not sure what it is. "Didn't change anything about functional and satisfactory interfaces" may be a real value-add in some cases, but it's not a sizzling narrative for selling yourself on the job market.

I think a lot of companies have too many designers with not much to do. Google has a team of people responsible for changing up the art or making whimsical games on the home page every day.

I also read 10 years ago that Amazon hired a big name to take over design for the shopping portal and Bezos wouldn't let this person do much of anything.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#130

Post by kristopolous »

xg15 wrote: post #101
_y5hn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Krita matured nicely over the years and last time I found it quite easy to use. UI is hard. It got replaced by "UX", but nobody agrees what that really is. So it boils down to whatever impracticality designers dream up. When UI was easy, there were real research, data backing up claims of improvements and laid down rules to enforce some consistency. This became "unfashionable" and was removed.

My impression is that modern UX is data-driven alright, it just follows radically different paradigms and goals. It's not at all anymore about presenting consistent mental models, it's solely about the ease or difficulty with which particular isolated tasks can be performed. It's also not automatically the goal to make all tasks as easy as possible. Instead, discoverability and "friction" are often deliberately tuned…

Data driven ux seems to put all users in a single bucket.

I will readily admit in collective number of clicks and screentime, 37 year old men with advanced degrees in computer science are a super small minority.

But who is the majority then? Who spends the most time on say Reddit and YouTube? Children! Yes, people who we know are dramatically cognitively different than adults.

Why does YouTube keep recommending videos I've watched? That's what a child wants! Why does reddits redesign look like Nickelodeon?

There isn't one user and one interface that's right for everyone when we're talking about 5 year olds, 50 year olds, and 95 year olds.

We can make them adaptable to the screen, we should also do work to make them adaptable, at fundamental interaction levels, to the person using the screen.

And not in a clever way, but in a dumb one.

For instance, here's how you could ask YouTube: "We have a few interfaces. Please tell us what you like to watch:

* Cartoons and video games

* Lectures and tutorials

* Other "

And that's it. No more "learning", that's all you need to set the interface and algorithms.

Let's take Wikipedia, it could be broken up into children, public, and scholar. Some articles I'm sure are correct but are way too wonky and academic for me to understand and that's ok. There's nothing to fix, I'm sure it's a great tool for professionals. However, there should be a general public version.

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