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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#191

Post by glangdale »

_y5hn wrote: post #69
kristopolous wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gimp is a great example. If you look up screenshots from the late 90s of gimp 1.0 you think "Hey wow, that looks pretty great! I know where the buttons are, I can quickly scan them and it's clear what they do! It isn't a grey on grey tiny soup, they are distinct and clear, this is great. When is this version shipping? It fixes everything!" Apparently almost everyone agrees but somehow we're still going the wrong way,…

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.

Correct. I remember traditional UI, watching users do things behind 1-way mirrors and grinding irritating and inconclusive statistics to try to get to a better interface. This used to be a speciality.

Now all you have to do is stick a bone through your beard and pronounce yourself a "UX Guru" and off you go.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#192

Post by mihaaly »

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…

Being almost 50 I agree completely. I remember enjoying learning software rapidly in various topics which made me know a broad set of tools on at least mediocre but mostly advanced level, from photo editing to system administration. Nowadays it is a pain and suffering in most of the cases and I was starting to believe I became ancient. Thanks Pmop to prove otherwise. And as the article says the most frustrating is becoming beginner in a tool again that you knew expertly just because the UI reorganizes the very same things and you cannot use it anymore to the same level while it is still there somewhere, you have to relearn.

All this for some questionable variation in visuals. Sacrificing usability.

E.g. I hate what MS did to the Skype, it was a favorite one helping me in countless life situation form business to love but I avoid it now at all cost. It is simply almost useless. But this is true for many others, also I reluctant learning new software as it is not that straightforward as before. Another hateful thing is that I rarely find something intuitively but have to Google what is the current awkward logic for its placement and activation method. The "best" is when new unwanted features in new versions are forced on by default and coupled with forensic level of investigation for the method of turning it off (assuming it can be, as in a few it is just forced on you, no questions asked, I am looking at you damn notification center! I had to chase you each and every time between OSX updates being harder and harder to achieve the goal of killing you)

Re: The Decline of Usability

#193

Post by glangdale »

dredmorbius wrote: post #187
wwweston wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

With apologies to Warren G. Bennis: The UI/UX department of the future will have only two employees, a hipster and a dog. The hipster will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to bite the hipster if they change the UI/UX.

I think this reads better if the dog's job is "to bite the hipster if they change the UI/UX", but yes.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#194

Post by rapind »

kristopolous wrote: post #82
_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.

It was a hard structured science, hicks law, conservation of complexity, goms analysis, fitts law ... we've tossed these decades of hard work in the garbage can because somebody in marketing didn't like the colors. It was like during the VCR wars of the 80s when consumers wanted the most features but yet the fewest buttons. Then they complained how you had to basically play rachmaninoff on their sleek minimal interfa…

Having rarely seen a VCR that wasn't flashing "12:00", I came to the conclusion that a clock was simply feature bloat.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#195

Post by dfox »

derefr wrote: post #177
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…

I mean, at least for the "go back" case, it seems like good sense for any non-reversible action (delete, overwrite, buy, send, etc.) to highlight the option that means that people that are just mashing their way through prompts without looking at what's going on won't be screwing themselves over by doing something irrevocable they didn't mean to do. Native macOS apps get to be a bit clever for this, in that there are…

This distinction is used by all CUA-derived GUI toolkits. Unfortunately by default windows uses same outline style for both default and focused buttons so there is no visual distinction. (there is an alternative button style on windows that distinguishes between these two states, but it tends to be used to mark buttons as two-state and anyway looks distinctly ugly and non-native)

Re: The Decline of Usability

#196

Post by sergiotapia »

kristopolous wrote: post #57
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,…

Gimp is a great example. If you look up screenshots from the late 90s of gimp 1.0 you think "Hey wow, that looks pretty great! I know where the buttons are, I can quickly scan them and it's clear what they do! It isn't a grey on grey tiny soup, they are distinct and clear, this is great. When is this version shipping? It fixes everything!" Apparently almost everyone agrees but somehow we're still going the wrong way,…

I thought you were exaggerating but holy moly it's 100% true.

What happened? search for images: "gimp 1.0" vs "gimp 2020". Wow.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#197

Post by shrimp_emoji »

Stierlitz wrote: post #29
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 .. Give Lubuntu a try. https://lubuntu.net/

LOL nOmegalol.

LXDE is dead, and jankier than Xfce.

Use Xfce (if you like jank) or KDE or Cinnamon.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#198

Post by glangdale »

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…

You don't have to be elderly to be baffled by the "amazing disappearing user interface". I've accidentally turned off UI bits in everything from browsers to dev environments to PDF viewers to games. Invariably the affordance of "please unhide this UI element" is more minimal/obscure than it should be because the goal of hiding the UI element runs counter to "leave a nice big affordance behind so I know how to get the damn thing back".

Re: The Decline of Usability

#199

Post by rapind »

glangdale wrote: post #191
_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.

Correct. I remember traditional UI, watching users do things behind 1-way mirrors and grinding irritating and inconclusive statistics to try to get to a better interface. This used to be a speciality. Now all you have to do is stick a bone through your beard and pronounce yourself a "UX Guru" and off you go.

UX to me is finding a compromise between designers who want it as sparse as possible and users who want "homer cars".

Re: The Decline of Usability

#200

Post by Jtsummers »

anthk wrote: post #179
Jtsummers wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't even go so far as to say that the mobile experience is a downgrade. The issue is one of respect for the medium the program is executing on. On a tablet, MS Teams would be (mostly) adequate. The tabbed interface is somewhat natural: +----------------------------------+ | |search/command field| | +---------+--------+---------------+ |Activity |Person1 |Chat Files Org | | |Person2 +---------------+ |Teams | |…

A touch interface for a chat application is the worst thing on usability happened on IT ever. Physical keyboards as a cover should be a must shipped item on every tablet. A tablet is a consumer/broadcasting device, like the smartphone. You are not producingwith it. You are either consuming media, or sharing it. It's the perfect ad device. And zoomers are blindly embracing it as if it was better and more "modern". The…

> A touch interface for a chat application is the worst thing on usability happened on IT ever.

That's a strong opinion, not one I'd agree with (except for the how touch-device interfaces have spilled into desktop interfaces).

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