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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#211

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Decline of Usability

#212

Post by Paianni »

b0rsuk wrote: post #141

The whole "desktop metaphor", as usually implemented, is trash. I'm a happy user of i3 window manager (a tiling window manager). It's not the first and probably not the last, but it's the first time I can quickly and efficently arrange application windows on my screen. I think this will become the default eventually, tiling WM are the way. The way it uses the screen is beyond anything. They will just make it more int…

Tiling window managers are a pain without a keyboard.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#213

Post by Causality1 »

It's all about fashion now. The less technical the target user the less capable the system is. Windows 10 drops distinct window borders? Fashion. Smartphones drop 3.5mm jacks? Fashion. Microsoft puts a fucking phone lockscreen on a desktop OS? Fashion.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#214

Post by bepvte »

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…

This behaviour has been removed in the next gnome release

Re: The Decline of Usability

#215

Post by omniscient_oce »

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…

Because software needs to stand out more as there are way more players in the game. It's like how every few days there's a post on Reddit about how someone has started their new habit tracker / Todo app SaaS. yay! Apparently it solves a problem that all the others don't... We also need a new JS framework every few months and redefine our library APIs (react router is up to what version now?) all the time

Re: The Decline of Usability

#216

Post by poink »

> Putting things in the title bar saves screen real estate! This is true to some extent, but screen real estate in general isn't much of a problem anymore.

Doubt. I may have 3x27" monitors on my desk now, but I work on a 15" laptop way more than I ever have, too. Screen real estate is at a bigger premium for me now than it has been since like 1997.

(You can't just scale up resolution past a certain point. I'm also getting old.)

Re: The Decline of Usability

#217

Post by [deleted] »

newsbinator wrote: post #60
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…

> the thing they want a lot is the 5th button from the left I agree it's normal and expected that people get used to buttons being in certain places, and moving them around too often is bad usability. That said, the fact some of my elderly relatives use and understand technology this way, by memorizing how many centimeters from the edge of the screen they should look for a button, makes life needlessly tough for them…

[deleted]

Re: The Decline of Usability

#218

Post by userbinator »

MattGaiser wrote: post #88

I work on a project meant to sell a service and meant to manage the service being sold to the consumer. However, the button to actually buy the service is hidden by a scroll bar on all but the widest of screens. Unless you scroll the widget or have a 22 inch monitor, you will not see the purchase button. Why? The UI was designed in on a wide screen and we developers are just the implementers of the picture. UI is qui…

At least there was a scrollbar... one of the worst UI disasters I've encountered involves a truly horrible LMS by a trendy startup where most of a class of ~100 students couldn't log in on the first day, because the button was in the top right corner of a gigantic fixed-width overflow:hidden element. There were a bunch of other huge fuckups, not just in the UI...

Re: The Decline of Usability

#219

Post by userbinator »

exprez135 wrote: post #165
lisper wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if that's because they had far too many pranksters ordering food for someone else.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#220

Post by Frost1x »

jl6 wrote: post #22

I find the entire Windows/Mac/Linux desktop experience has regressed terribly, with inconsistency the primary offender. I suspect this is because usability testing is only ever (a) app-specific and (b) short term. Nobody is studying the collective desktop experience across multiple applications, so every vendor thinks they have nailed it, but never notices that their version of “nailed it” is different to everybody e…

Lack of transference is a feature for businesses. The more locked in you are to a workflow or infrastructure, the less likely you are to switch.

It's a new world of lock-in. It's not in a business's interests to encourage you to jump to competitors, it is however to their advantage if the transition is difficult in any way. Consumers buy into it and a lot of new developers wanting to make their mark or do something new/different enable this. It's not sexy to implement UI concepts used for the past 20 years, I'm going to reinvent the wheel.

It's perfectly fine to improve the wheel or reinvent it if you can provide increased productivity. Instead I have so many UIs now, going through what should and have been simple workflows is like stepping through a box of puzzles.

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