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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#231

Post by BostonFern »

Jtsummers wrote: post #180
BurningFrog wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 coo…

The old interfaces (I guess we can say that now, talking about a quarter century ago) tended to have several modes. The menu bar was always just text. The toolbars offered several options: large/medium/small/no icons, text/no text. (Not all of those options were always available.) This let you progress as a user of a system. When you first experienced it you could use the large icons with text because it made the thi…

Oh, the joy of using an application that acknowledges your subtle interactions, such as hovering over an unknown button, like a friendly old-time barber who knows just how to cut your hair. No explanations needed, he knows just what you need.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#232

Post by userbinator »

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've heard that GMail has a "basic HTML mode", but I'm not sure whether that would help in this case.

I don't use GMail so I could be considered a "fresh user", and I couldn't guess the right button from the first screenshot either --- I thought it would be the big colourful "+", because that's usually the symbol for "expand".

Re: The Decline of Usability

#233

Post by golergka »

agumonkey wrote: post #30
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…

I think we're in a strange bubble. Rapid iteration was a potential source of improvements (never going wrong since you can always adjust next week vs potential big fail every N years) and that it would yield better understanding of users by throwing every possible solutions at them. It will have to pop and rebalance itself because it leads to fatigue and false sense of progress.

Rapid iteration as a potential source of improvements is great for startups and new things in general. Word, which you teach your grandma, is NOT a startup. Startup needs to change fast or it will die, and they depend on early adopters who want something new. Word needs to think about it's huge audience that doesn't want anything to change. Remember ribbon redesign and pushback it received?

These two types of products need completely different approaches to product development. But also, don't teach your grandma Notion - Word's a much sensible option for her.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#234

Post by firefoxd »

That's because we have a new tool in our UI kit. Google.

If you are trying to underline a text using your fancy text editor, well you don't try to figure out what the icons means. Instead, you hop on google and type: how do I underline text in fancy editor. Google is part of our UI now.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#235

Post by int_19h »

dfox wrote: post #195
derefr wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Windows distinguishes default and focused, it's just a bit subtle. A button in focus has a dotted rectangle around the contents (immediately adjacent to the actual border, which is why it's kinda hard to see). A button that's the default has a thick blue outer border in Win10, and used to have a black border in the classic Win9x theme.

What is different in Win32, however, is that if any button is focused, it is also made the default for as long as focus is on it (or, alternatively - Enter always activates the focused button). Thus, there's no visual state for "focused, not default", because there's no such thing.

The distinction still matters, though, because if you tab away from a button to some other widget that's not a button, the "default" button marker returns back to where it originally was - focus only overrides it temporarily.

This can be conveniently explored in the standard Win32 print dialog (opened e.g. from Notepad), since it has plenty of buttons and other things on it. Just tab through the whole thing once.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#236

Post by 10kresistor »

EEMac wrote: post #222

Part of this is because the sensors are winning. Sensors (about 70% of the population) use an application by mapping: a click here does this . Based on literature and my experience with my husband, maps are made separately for each application no matter what the similarities are. Most computer programmers are intuitives: we want things to work the same way in one application as they work in another. That makes it eas…

I suspect that user interfaces that feel like sugary garbage to us are totally fine with them. To them it's all the same.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#237

Post by KerrickStaley »

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,…

On the GNOME login screen you can press [Enter] or [Space], or click (on the latest GNOME, 3.34) or swipe up (on the previous versions) to get to the password entry box, or you can just start typing your password. It's extremely easy and discoverable (because there are so many options, nearly anything you do will take you to the password box). I really don't think there's an issue with it.

This is with stock GNOME (on Arch); I think Ubuntu may ship a skinned / modified / older version of it (which can create UI problems).

Re: The Decline of Usability

#238

Post by madjam002 »

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 dislike it too, but doesn’t Windows 10 do the same thing?

Re: The Decline of Usability

#239

Post by jussij »

BurningFrog wrote: post #164
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 coo…

> Others... did not.

While there is no disputing Windows copy heavily from the Mac UI, the actual feel of that interface was also strongly influenced by the IBM Common User Access (CUA).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

Not only did Windows try to follow those CUA rules, Microsoft encouraged Windows applications to also follow those rules.

That meant that from a user perspective, the Windows experience was fairly consistent irrespective of which application was being used.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#240

Post by squaresmile »

nimvlaj30 wrote: post #162
postalrat wrote: post #77

https://new.reddit.com vs https://old.reddit.com

Old is much better. Even then it's not perfect. The goddamn sidebar keeps taking up 80% of the screen on my vertical monitor or portrait phone.

I'm using this userstyles that hide the sidebar when the window width is less than 1500px.

[0] https://gist.github.com/squaresmile/47ed504ba2838f51be451518...

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