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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#201

Post by dredmorbius »

ilamont wrote: post #66

The OECD published the results of a massive survey of member countries some years ago, titled "Skills Matter" ( https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/skills-matter_978926... ). The researchers defined 4 levels of technology proficiency, based on the types of tasks users can complete successfully. There was a very good summary published here ( https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/ ) and excerpted b…

That OECD study, and its implications, was a major inspiration for my essay "The Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User"

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...

The problem is that we're stuck between a. rock and a hard place. People -- the general population -- need to have useful devices and interfaces. The market will fill that need. But even very modestly advanced users, to say nothing of elite one, those who make technology happen, are left out.

From the essay:

Let's assume, with good reason, that the Minimum Viable User wants and needs a simple, largely pushbutton, heavily GUI, systems interface.

What does this cost us?

The answer is in the list of Unix Philosophy Violating Tasks:

- Dealing with scale

- Dealing with complexity

- Iteratively building out tools and systems

- Rapid response

- Adapting to changing circumstance

- Considered thought

- Scalability of understanding, comprehension, or control

- Integrating numerous other systems

- Especially nonuniform ones

Re: The Decline of Usability

#202

Post by swiley »

zrm wrote: post #139
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,…

> 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. Anecdote: The first time this happened, I had no idea why it wasn't working and naturally started clicking on things and pressing buttons to try to get it to do the thing. I thereby discove…

I don't care how "user friendly" you think you are, not being able to log in is an absolute fail. Even getty has a better user interface, imagine that: regression all the way back in to the 70s.

This is why I don't touch GUIs from the major binary distros or gnome3 with a 10 foot pole. If I can avoid it I don't ever install anything from those projects.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#203

Post by dredmorbius »

glangdale wrote: post #193
dredmorbius wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Suggestion accepted! Changed!

(Bite me.)

Re: The Decline of Usability

#204

Post by II2II »

dijit wrote: post #2

I'm typically a person who would agree with an article like this; I think we _lost_ something with the modern age, even if we gained a lot. (especially in terms of developer "velocity" (I hate that word)). However, I really feel like context is important. Computers today have a context given to them over time, users don't need so much hand-holding these days because the expected paradigms are ever so subtly changed.…

> New entrants to computers understand these new paradigms innately because they are already surrounded by the new context.

Much of the argument is based on the idea that the paradigm is very weak. You have things like menus, where no one really agrees upon the form (traditional menu bar, hamburger menu, ribbon). When a menu is offered by a program, there is very little agreement upon where it goes (menu bar in the title bar, or below it; hamburger menu in the top right, or top left). When menus are categorized there is even less agreement about what belongs where. That is looking at just one UI element.

These muddled user interfaces wouldn't be so bad if it was a transition period that would carry us forward another 10 or 20 years. It would simply be a new design language that we communicate through. Yet there is no real evidence that is happening. The article's author pointed out that it would be easy to confuse the pictured stack of six title bars as belonging to three applications, I can one-up that by thinking that there were only two applications after a quick glance. Part of the problem is that they are mixing too many paradigms when overloading title bars. (The four title bars looked like the title bar, menu bar, tab bar, web page head for a single window while the last two title bars looked like a title bar and tab bar for a single window to my eyes.) The ability to create this artificial situation is an amusing outcome, it hides a more serious problem: there is no agreement upon what these overloaded title bars should look like.

I doubt that there will ever be agreement simply because many of the design decisions these days are about branding.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#205

Post by kristopolous »

rapind wrote: post #194
kristopolous wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the arguments, given in the Supreme Court, by Mr. Rogers, to permit the VCR to be legally owned (I know how crazy this is sounding but it's real) was to time shift programming ... which requires a functioning clock.

Fred Rogers, 1984: "I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the 'Neighborhood' off-the-air ... they then become much more active in the programming of their family’s television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been ‘You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions’ ... I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important."

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive....

There's definitely non-crazy ways of doing this ... but it requires what at first blush, would appear to be a complicated interface.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#206

Post by userbinator »

Lammy wrote: post #38
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,…

> It’s totally inappropriate to desktops. I don’t agree. It’s important for the user to know a login UI is the real thing. For example, Windows NT used to have you hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to make the credential dialog appear so that any fake lookalike was impossible.

Unlike the Ubuntu mystery experience, Windows actually tells you to press Ctrl+Alt+Delete:

https://troubleshooter.xyz/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Enable...

Re: The Decline of Usability

#207

Post by coopsmgoops »

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,…

At the Ubuntu log in screen just start typing your password and it will automatically scroll up.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#208

Post by dfox »

traderjane wrote: post #42
Lammy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s totally inappropriate to desktops. I don’t agree. It’s important for the user to know a login UI is the real thing. For example, Windows NT used to have you hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to make the credential dialog appear so that any fake lookalike was impossible.

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

Actually the idea behond Ctrl-Alt-Del is the other way around. Application can cause the same effect as user pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del (although doing that is somewhat complex due to interactions with UAC), but there is no way how application can prevent the said effect (essentially switching virtual desktops) from happening when user presses Ctrl-Alt-Del.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#209

Post by outworlder »

Semaphor wrote: post #4

I had some reflexive reaction of wanting to disagree because there are also a lot of things that got better. But inconsistency? Hell yes. It feels like every company tries to run their own experiment, getting more and more erratic, and apparently all getting great feedback from their users (not sure if all the feedback systems are broken or something else is going on). Of course, Microsoft who in recent years started…

> But inconsistency? Hell yes. It feels like every company tries to run their own experiment

Get off my lawn!

More seriously, old apps were way worse. Specially on windows, as soon as APIs for creating non-square windows became available, everyone wanted to use them. Nevermind that performance was horrible.

Even widely acclaimed apps had zero consistency with the OS. Remember Winamp? https://repository-images.githubusercontent.com/26149893/956...

Trillian? Microsoft's own MSN? https://static.makeuseof.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/Tril...

And frankly, every single printer, scan, or motherboard utility. Some are bizarre to this day.

We can't even say that Microsoft apps followed the rules. They were one the first to break with paradigms, mainly because they could ship their own version of Microsoft's common controls library. This is how detachable button bars came about, or the infamous ribbon.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#210

Post by Animats »

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…

options are often deliberately placed into easy or hard to discover locations. (E.g. a toggle on the browser chrome, vs the "settings" screen, vs "about:config", vs group policies)

Yes, and Mozilla has become much worse about this. Turning off "Pocket Integration", or "Shared Bookmarks", or "Mozilla Telemetry", or "Auto update" becomes harder in each release.

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