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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#251

Post by stefan_ »

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…

It is the web browsers fault, of course. It's amazing, it has been only a few years that web designers have discovered the concept of "components", but even today it's all a big laugh because nothing is actually properly composable. No guarantees, the web developers idea of a component is something equivalent to a "draw()" interface. Combined with the mess that CSS is this encourages people to just throw everything away with every project and redo it.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#252

Post by RedShift1 »

nxc18 wrote: post #105
RedShift1 wrote: post #20

Ironically this page only uses 70% of my screen's width on mobile, the font size is uncomfortable and paragraph sentences are broken into 6~7 words which is really annoying. Chrome suggests "show simplified view" and that definitely makes it better.

Double tap to zoom to paragraph has been a standard touch gesture for the last ~10 years at least.

But why do I need to do that in the first place? There's nothing going on in that other 30%.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#253

Post by ghettoimp »

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.

Huh. Slack's MacOS UI is the first thing I thought of when reading this article. No titlebar with standard icons. Bizarre mechanisms for popping up dialogs. It could be a poster-child for inconsistency with every "normal" mac app.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#254

Post by philsnow »

swiley wrote: post #202
zrm wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have avoided gnome as much as I can since the gnome2 days. The entire project is rife with UX decisions that leave a bad taste in my mouth.

[0] is the example that always comes to mind. I guess this made sense to somebody at the time, but it adds overhead to a process that was simple before, and isn't enabled just for "Enterprise" deployments, it's just dumped on the user to figure out how to configure screensaver hack settings by creating / modifying a theme.

[0] https://wiki.gnome.org/Attic/GnomeScreensaver/FrequentlyAske...

Re: The Decline of Usability

#255

Post by XorNot »

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,…

I remember when I was playing around with building an HTPC for my car in the mid-2000s and I got to trying to put a frontend skin on the touchscreen. And I found all the existing skins completely awful because they were wall to wall arbitrary icons, in a setting where I needed at a glance functionality.

Eventually made my own, and the key element? No icons at all. Just text - potentially small text - on the buttons. Turns out, being something you spend your entire life reading, text works great - within a sparse set, you can resolve exactly what a word is from letter shapes even if you can't directly read it, and if you don't know what something is you can just read it.

No one ever had any problem using it, even if they'd never seen it before, because every button said exactly what it did.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#256

Post by int_19h »

poink wrote: post #216

> 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 ge…

The way the "screen space" argument is used in practice, it's almost always misleading, because the same apps that insist on shoving their UI elements into the title bar, are usually also guilty of copious whitespace in the context area. The article even points that out.

I think what can work reasonably well is an option to make the title bar auto-hide (but pop up if hovered) while the window is maximized. This shouldn't be the default, because new users should be able to find the window-related commands easily - especially Close.

MATE can be configured in a somewhat similar fashion - it has auto-hide, but it doesn't expand on hover - it's just completely hidden. This works reasonably well in practice anyway, because there is a shortcut to close, and un-maximizing can be done via the task bar in the very rare case where it's needed.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#257

Post by XorNot »

pfranz wrote: post #229
rapind wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If they couldn't make it easier to set I think the clock should have been less prominent. It's necessary if you're doing a scheduled recording. It's too bad time sync over power lines didn't catch on widely (or broadcast over the radio). It would still be saving everyone from changing their digital clocks during DST.

The problem was everyone did it once, and then lost power at some point and it went into "minor task not ever important enough to be worth taking the time.

If they'd included a backup battery to retain the clock, I suspect it'd been less of a thing.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#258

Post by int_19h »

Firehawke wrote: post #85
red_admiral wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joel Spolsky has an old post somewhere where he says the reason the Palm Pilot failed but the iPhone succeeded at making mobile devices "a thing" is that desktop and mobile are two different things; the Palm tried to do a desktop interface on mobile. I'm ok with three-dot menus on mobile, especially for features like "settings" that I don't use all the time - Whatsapp's dots menu works for me. Using a dots/hamburger…

I'm generally not a hamburger menu fan, but I've come to accept it in Firefox/Chrome/Edge/etc because I rarely ever need to bring up the menu anyway so it conserves precious vertical space on a widescreen display. When I DO need to bring up the menu, I'm usually one to two clicks from where I need to go. When a hamburger menu encompasses the whole UI (metaphorically speaking) I'd definitely agree it's problematic-- a…

The typical desktop hamburger menu is still horribly unstructured compared to File/Edit/... that it replaced.

IIRC at some point in Opera, you could move the top-level menu into the hamburger, but it was still the same top-level menu as before. That would be better.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#259

Post by bhauer »

Bravo to this article.

The phenomenon is exemplified by Slack and open platforms that follows its design lead, such as the Riot client for Matrix. Legacy chat clients from the 1990s and 2000s could fit a hundred rows of chat text on a normal 30 inch monitor. Slack and Riot can display perhaps as many as 30 lines.

The reason is a bunch of excess padding between lines, the injection of handles/names in the vertical space (because width is precious on small devices?), unreasonably large circular avatar images, and a host of other "mobile first" design quirks. Taken all together, we have a user interface that squanders screen real-estate with abandon.

While a legacy chat user might have chat in a small side window, a Slack or Riot user will more often than not have their chat application fully maximized or using a substantial portion of a side monitor. It's a regrettable pattern but I don't see much momentum on the reverse course.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#260

Post by sbierwagen »

jimmaswell wrote: post #62
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,…

You can change the UI skin in the options. I've been using GIMP for years and I don't have any major complaints.

>You can change the UI skin in the options.

Holy cow! There's even the "classic" theme right there. Wish I knew this a year ago.

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