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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#161

Post by l0b0 »

This was always one of the biggest failings of open source software. Most communities in my experience absolutely explode when anyone suggests an UI change, even if it's to bring the application in line with well-known usability, accessibility or design standards. The only two outliers are GNOME coreutils, which have at least a semblance of consistency in their command structure, and the corresponding BSD tools, which unfortunately have opted for a completely different UI standard.

I'm afraid there's only one way around this: pressure from above. Pressure from the community keeps failing every day. Newbies try something out, rant about the bonkers UI in a forum or bug tracker, and the fans shut them down with what amounts to "it's how we've always done it!" Whoever decided on the UI of many of these have clearly got too big an ego to see that they are hurting users by "differentiating" themselves.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#163

Post by myself248 »

Pmop wrote: post #121

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 pr…

YES. We spent years training our muscle-memory to understand this interface, and it's gone. It's like someone flipped gravity because they thought it was cool, and if your stomach isn't okay with that, well that's your stomach's problem.

Fuck those people.

The top 2 evils on my list right now:

Buttons that don't appear until you wave the mouse near them. I spent way too long, and had to Google, how to zoom a PDF in Chrome. Turns out there are buttons for that, they're just hidden unless you wander over into a corner where there are no other controls so you'd never go there.

Borderless windows. It's confusing enough that we seem to eschew background patterns now, but borderless windows (or like, 1px-wide borders on a high-dpi screen) make it so much harder to figure out what's going on at a glance. I've found myself trying to figure out where the title bar is, then grabbing it and wiggling the window, just to make sure I understand which UI elements are part of the thing I'm currently interacting with.

What's worse is, I can't imagine anything that was actually gained from either of these changes, other than "Sam in Widgets thinks think it looks cool". They certainly don't help accessibility. They're the worst for usability.

And they're a giant up-yours to anyone loyal to a single platform for a few years because they trusted that platform to reward their learning and muscle memory.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#164

Post by BurningFrog »

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,…

As I recall history, using icons was a main way the rest of the industry tried to copy the usability of the MAc UI, as it conquered a lot of mindshare in the 80s and 90s.

But the Mac almost never had just icons in the ui. There would usually be an icon and a text. With little space you'd revert to text only.

Apple had a team of expert Usability experts. Others... did not. So they just copied something that looked cool and was easy to implement.

That it cut down on internationalizion efforts surely didn't hurt either.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#165

Post by exprez135 »

lisper wrote: post #103
munk-a wrote: post #97

Oh yes gods slack in particular got a lot worse with the most recent update, but the site I think takes the cake is one we Canadians use for food delivery - skipthedishes.com . Gods this site breaks so many things, options to update things are hidden among menus that switch the current page while not being ctrl-clickable into a new tab (which can trash your current in-cart order) and the whole site loves "minimalism"…

Wow, you are not kidding. I went to this site to see for myself, and the very first thing I see is re-Captcha. And it doesn't even work! I have to pick out photos of tractors before I even get to see what is on the site! Holy cow, why does anyone use this? It's a hot mess.

Didn't even get the chance for a re-Captcha with me. It outright blocks me because I'm using a proxy.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#167

Post by leepowers »

ogre_codes wrote: post #143
askafriend wrote: post #6

Little of what he says is a problem on MacOS fwiw. I can resize my Slack by dragging anywhere on the toolbar, for example.

The fact that MacOS shows the menu at the top of the display all the time used to bother me but I've long since come around. As more and more cross platform Electron apps take over the desktop, I'm even more thankful that it's there, keeping a lot of this nonsense at bay. Microsoft has been going downhill for a loooong time, the stupid Ribbon Bar drove me off of MS Office 15+ years ago. The control panel in Windows X…

I was just thinking this. It sort of gives you a home base to return to, regardless of how weird/spiffy the rest of application is. Additionally "Help" is always to the right of the other menu items. And there's a search box under "Help" that you can use to search menu items. Which can be extraordinarily useful, especially in applications like Photoshop that have complex menus and panel systems.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#168

Post by mopsi »

Pmop wrote: post #121

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 pr…

It's all still there in Win32 Apps microcosm, available for anyone to use. I'm currently working on a pure Win32 application and Microsoft's tips are delightfully helpful for establishing a consistent design language across the whole platform. They call it "powerful and simple" in https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/how-t... Win32 Guidelines are also very illuminating: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/guide...

My favourite aspect of Win32 is built-in behaviour. Things like keyboard-based navigation and screen readers work without needing any dedicated effort on my part. Visual elements are drawn by the operating system and remain consistent with system theme colors, font size, contrast and other user preferences. I always think about that when I see "Now supports dark mode" in a changelog... why don't they just use standard controls and leave all the finer details to the OS to deal with. Windows has supported system-wide theming for decades.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#170

Post by roboyoshi »

FridgeSeal wrote: post #138
oftenwrong wrote: post #32

It is quite sad how often I end up having to help older relatives with their computers on account of unintuitive UI. One memorable, recent example was my mother, who could not figure out how to get her GMail sidebar to un-collapse itself. Here's a screenshot of a collapsed sidebar: https://storage.googleapis.com/support-forums-api/attachment... and a screenshot of an un-collapsed sidebar: https://techcrunch.com/wp-co…

I just started a new job and they use Gmail for the email, it has been probably well over a year since I logged into gmail on web. That’s side hamburger button throws me for a loop every. Single. Times. For some reason I keep thinking it’ll bring up the other gsuite apps, but instead the whole page shifts awkwardly aha then the sidebar disappears, “that was not what I was expecting” is my reaction every time.

You may want to try this one: https://simpl.fyi/
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