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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#151

Post by olyjohn »

the_af wrote: post #14
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,…

Is there a sane mode or config for vanilla Ubuntu 18.04? I'm considering upgrading from my trusty old 16.04 LTS (both home and office laptops) and I dread the usual pointless UI changes that come with all the reasonable bugfixes/improvements.

20.04 is due out in a few days. I hope it's good. 18.04 has been total crap for me. The lock screen randomly won't authenticate, and I am forced to reboot. My USB dock suddenly started randomly disconnecting and reconnecting, after it worked fine for months.

The "Save/Open" button in the file dialog boxes is in the title bar, which is the dumbest thing I have ever seen. Dialog boxes get tied to windows, so when I try to move the dialog out of the way to see my work, it drags the whole damn window. (Some of this is mentioned in the TFA.) I think a lot of these decisions were Gnome-driven, but still... stick with 16.04.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#152

Post by anthk »

Jtsummers wrote: post #107
crazygringo wrote: post #104

I fundamentally disagree with the entire premise of this article. Yes, usability has become less uniformly consistent within a single platform. But that's because the feature set of desktops, laptops, tablets and phones has increased exponentially , beyond what the classic desktop GUI could handle. Not only can you access a huge percentage of the world's knowledge within a few seconds, but new UX paradigms such as se…

> Now when you're trying to build an app that has a modicum of consistency across sizes from phone to desktop, whether you're using a mouse, trackpad or touchscreen, whether you've got a hardware keyboard of software one or are using dictation, and so on... Maybe we shouldn't strive for uniformity across many different interfaces. My office has switched to MS Teams, which is an abomination on the desktop. But would b…

Microsoft even had MSN Messenger. The former commenter has no excuse, but lazyness and a great lack of understanding of 90/00's computing environment. W9x-w2k/KDE's paradigm were the best ever for a DE based multitasking.

This is a PC. Why does the parent commenter want to _downgrade_ its user experience to the one from a mobile user?

Re: The Decline of Usability

#153

Post by olyjohn »

josteink wrote: post #80
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 got worse at 18.04. Logging in on desktop now requires "swiping up" with the mouse to get the password box. I don’t know about you, but I just start typing on my keyboard.

Took a while to figure out I could do that. And I only figured it out by accident.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#154

Post by doubleunplussed »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #119

I agree with 90% of this article. However, I differ on one point: as far as I'm concerned, the "File, Edit, View" categories are anachronisms from another era. They make sense in Microsoft Office†, but fail to cover the breadth of software in use today. I'm currently using Firefox (on OS X, where it still has a menu bar). The first three options under "File" are "New Tab", "New Window", and "New Private Window". Does…

Tabs and conversations aren't files, but it is nice to have a grouping of actions that create/restore/manage whatever the primary context/data-structure the app deals with is, as opposed to making changes to it (edit) or modifying how it's displayed (view). They're very logical categories, just 'file' is not generally enough named now.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#155

Post by olyjohn »

Lammy wrote: post #110
traderjane wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bit different. I can fake swipe-up on a GUI but I can't fake Ctrl-Alt-Del.

The implementation may be bad but it seems like the same idea to me, “user must interact with UI before entering credentials”.

Except you don't have to. Just start typing your password.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#156

Post by interlocutor »

galad87 wrote: post #120
flowerlad wrote: post #109

iOS/Mac also experienced a significant decline in usability after Steve Jobs died. Here's a comparison before vs after: https://uxcritique.tumblr.com/

iOS 7 was a rushed redesign. It took 5 years to fix many of those issues.

It is still unusable compared to iOS6

Re: The Decline of Usability

#157

Post by kyleee »

toohotatopic wrote: post #53

Speaking of the Firefox version 75 bar: Why has there been a change in the way the selection works? Now it takes three well-timed clicks to select an entire url. Is this an improvement?

To some apparently yes. I hate it. The URL is an input field, just like on a web form and a single click should place the cursor at the clicked position. That is the damn convention, and anything else just undermines consistency and usability

Re: The Decline of Usability

#158

Post by majewsky »

kristopolous wrote: post #130
xg15 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 video…

> here's how you could ask YouTube: "We have a few interfaces. Please tell us what you like to watch: [...]

This proposal quickly falls apart because your categories are ill-defined based on your preconceptions. I watch a ton of lectures about video games on Youtube (e.g. speed run breakdowns or game lore theories). Do I choose the "Cartoons and video games" bucket or the "Lectures and tutorials" bucket?

Re: The Decline of Usability

#159

Post by adamc »

Good piece, with accurate criticisms. I've lost count of the number of times designers insisted on re-styling links in some unintuitive way.

I suspect (but cannot prove) that people struggle to channel their natural inclination toward creativity into constructive channels. A big part of the job of a UI is to be familiar and hence easily understood. The best UIs often don't stand out -- they just let you get your work done effortlessly.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#160

Post by Florin_Andrei »

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,…

UI design lately sounds more and more like a Monty Python sketch.
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