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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#291

Post by fiblye »

kristopolous wrote: post #57
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,…

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,…

What's crazy is Gimp has always felt user-hostile to me. Loads of other people share this complaint. With every new release, there are people recommending giving it a second/third/fifty-third shot saying "They finally made it easy to use this time!"

At this point it feels like a prank that's been going on for a quarter century.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#292

Post by mceachen »

majewsky wrote: post #171
mceachen wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only on iOS. On Android and all desktop OSes, double-tap selects a word.

Huh? Not on Firefox for Android at least. I don't recall much from my pre-Firefox days on Android, but double-tap to zoom in on a paragraph has been in my repertoire for a long time.

Wow, we're both right.

Double tap on Android 10 in both Chrome and Firefox will select a word in mobile-friendly websites (I tried on https://PhotoStructure.com ) and will do the iOS-zoom-to-fit-bounding-box on websites that aren't (like TFA).

This certainly speaks to an increase in complexity/inconsistency.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#294

Post by soneca »

Recently moving from Fedora to a Mac to use my employer's computer one thing that's still very annoying to me after 6 months is the top menu bar that the Mac keeps fixed in the top of the monitor, even if I have the program window not occupying full screen.

I have a 4k 20 something inches monitor, so I keep around 4 different windows open. To go from a bottom right corner window to the top left corner File menu is a long trip.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#295

Post by nitwit005 »

madjam002 wrote: post #238
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 dislike it too, but doesn’t Windows 10 do the same thing?

Windows seems to respond to almost any input to display the password box.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#296

Post by MattGaiser »

bityard wrote: post #135
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…

It drives me crazy that even though huge, wide computer screens are completely ubiquitous, there seems to be a whole generation of UX designers that only ever use (and therefore only ever develop) full-screen applications. It's like they learned to compute on an iPad and then use the same mental model for every other device they encounter.

UX designers are appealing to their customer, who wants to see something which is very pretty on the big screen they use to present their work. They get paid for wow during the presentation, not for anything else.

A friend of mine hired a UX designer for her startup and the entire main page will soon look like a beautiful poster. But it is utterly horrendous on mobile, which is where 60% of the traffic is.

Not to mention that it is now littered with images that are going to make page load times horrible.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: The Decline of Usability

#297

Post by MattGaiser »

userbinator wrote: post #218
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...

That wouldn't happen to be Desire2Learn would it? I'm ashamed that they are Canadian.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#298

Post by martin_drapeau »

pcurve wrote: post #245

We have army of ux professionals these days. But I think engineers do better UX than most so called ux professionals and I say this as a ux professional myself. we've invented a colossal industry with good intent in the beginning, but over past 10 years, I've seen it degenerate into desperation for relevancy by constantly introducing new things. (things aren't much better in SE) Can we get back to just doing things?…

I agree with engineers doing a better job. Especially over inepexerienced UX professionals who want to try the latest fad. Ultimately users don't care - they want it to work consistently and be intuitive.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#299

Post by MattGaiser »

franga2000 wrote: post #181
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…

> UI is quite often taken from a drawing and little else The way I've solved this these days when working with people who aren't familiar with responsive design (older/inexperienced designers or clients directly) is to print them an A3 page with outlines of a vertical phone and tablet and a horizontal desktop screen, vaguely to scale, and all including a "below the fold area", and tell them to draw on that. This almo…

This is a good idea actually. Now, I just need to be in the room before they draw stuff...

Re: The Decline of Usability

#300

Post by MattGaiser »

wmeredith wrote: post #142
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…

I work with fortune 100 companies that do shit like this. It's maddening.

It is really astonishing how many 6/7 figure pieces of software are designed this way.
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