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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#281

Post by Talanes »

XorNot wrote: post #257
pfranz wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In the days before power strips were ubiquitous, my VCR got unplugged whenever I played the Sega. There was no way anyone was setting the clock daily.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#282

Post by ajosh »

wmf wrote: post #173
saagarjha wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why hide the password box, then, unless you think that users learning to type and have magically it go somewhere invisible is a good UI design… (Interesting aside: I complained to someone on the Mac Safari team that it was difficult to search open tabs, and he told me that apparently this feature already exists! You go into the tab overview, and…just start typing. A little search bar will pop into appearance in the t…

macOS hides the password field to encourage people to use Touch ID instead, but Ubuntu probably doesn't even support fingerprint login...

Ubuntu does support fingerprint login if you have supported hardware.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#283

Post by robocat »

_lbaq wrote: post #83
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,…

The "Slide up" is gone in next LTS due in a few days. https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/ubuntu-20-04-release-fea...

About half way through article: “The new lock screen is easier to use, no longer requiting you to ‘slide up’ to reveal the password field (which now sits atop a blurred version of your desktop wallpaper):”

Great! That UI was horrific. Hitting a key like spacebar didn’t unlock.

Aside: I completely broke the Ubuntu login screen yesterday. I did `apt remove evolution*`. Unfortunately the login screen depends on evolution-data-server, so I couldn’t login from lock screen, and after reboot it dropped me to TTY!! Gnome is just getting crazy - it would be like Windows login depending on MS Outlook! Gnome is a big ball of interdependencies, becoming more like Windows. I get it, but I don’t like it. Edit: FYI: fixed in TTY3 (ctrl-alt-F3) by `apt install --reinstall ubuntu-desktop` from memory.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#284

Post by Talanes »

Noos wrote: post #224
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.

Not really, that's more a cliche. I set the clock on mine to tape programming when I wasn't there, and if anything it was probably easier than setting clock radios and watches now.

I was a child during the heyday of VCR, but I don't think any of my family was aware of timed recording. The whole concept just didn't exist in our lives until Tivo. Non-obvious features plus buying things second hand just meant you never learned everything your stuff did back before you could find manuals online.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#285

Post by ken »

userbinator wrote: post #232
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".

It does, but that mode has its share of other issues. I accidentally lose the draft I’m working on, every time I use it.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#286

Post by rileymat2 »

I may not be using the software as intended, but I like to move windows around with the title bar. Chrome was the first I noticed hostility against this with a small title bar, but all browsers have followed.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#287

Post by markus_zhang »

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…

Nowadays the hottest business model is to throw out a piece of software for "preview", and asks your customers to pay to beta-test it, and then grow it to maturity gradually during a 2-3 years span.

Guess it's very good looking to the bankers, especially if you manage to pull off a subscription model, which many of them did.

Compare Power BI nowadays with an earlier version 18 months ago or even 12 months ago, and you know what I'm saying. I mean I'm fine for patches, but a lot of basic functionalities are missing from very early versions. That's beta testing, not patching.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#288

Post by anthk »

btrettel wrote: post #37
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…

> This would be one place where free software could really shine - you could convert a lot of people with "every application works the same, and we promise we won't change the UI more than once every two years unless we really have to. This is one reason I use Xfce. My brother once told me that my computer has looked basically the same since I used Gnome 2, and he's right. I'm not entirely immune. After switching ful…

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Re: The Decline of Usability

#289

Post by tfleming »

worik wrote: post #76
the_af wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a sane mode or config for vanilla Ubuntu 18.04? I'm considering upgrading from my trusty old 16.04 LTS (both home and office laptops) and I dread the usual pointless UI changes that come with all the reasonable bugfixes/improvements.

Do not upgrade. Switch. A lot of Ubuntu software is now (Version 19.xx) only available with "snaps". They make some sense for IoT machinery (the user does not control updates, so they are deploy and forget) but I do not want to loose control. Final straw for me. I am test driving Arch now....

Did you install Arch from scratch or are you using Manjaro, etc? I love Arch but I've never installed from scratch. It's on a my bucket list. I'm currently using Endeavour OS, which is easy-install Arch Linux with way less bloat than Manjaro. It's awesome. I'll never install a *buntu type system again.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#290

Post by pragmatic »

The designers took over. They finally gained power and with it, unfortunately, users lost out.

In my unified theory of organizations, the organization is eventually taken over by the employees/"servants" and instead of serving the constituents it becomes about serving themselves.

Think Congress, teacher's unions, USPS, IT depts.

In programming it's resume driven development, playing with new toys constantly instead of delivering solutions.

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