Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Decline of Usability

datagubbe.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 719 posts

Re: The Decline of Usability

#321

Post by WillPostForFood »

omniscient_oce wrote: post #312
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 don't get these fake persona things I see in portfolios and on Behance and stuff. Are these a legit thing or just something that is taught in school so students do and put on their portfolio but isn't used in practice. I get the basic idea behind it but a lot of the time it comes off as quite pretentious, or filler work.

I think they are a symptom of an underlying problem: building a product not for yourself, but for some imagined customer and need. It puts your product in peril because it adds guesswork. But if you have to do it, personas at least challenge you to put yourself in someone else's mindset.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#322

Post by flir »

_y5hn wrote: post #69
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,…

Krita matured nicely over the years and last time I found it quite easy to use. UI is hard. It got replaced by "UX", but nobody agrees what that really is. So it boils down to whatever impracticality designers dream up. When UI was easy, there were real research, data backing up claims of improvements and laid down rules to enforce some consistency. This became "unfashionable" and was removed.

Hamburger menus are symptomatic of this for me. I spent /way/ too long not understanding this completely new element everybody was suddenly jamming in everywhere.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#323

Post by MattGaiser »

pragmatic wrote: post #290

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 o…

All of that lies at the feet of management (defined broadly).

The people re-elect Congress consistently. Employers reward resume driven development on the open market. UX people win prizes for how their UIs perform on high-resolution large monitors even when they will be used on mobile.

I think it would be more correct to say that management exerted greater control and deferred to the UX designers who were focused on keeping management happy as management doesn't ever go back and see whether the pretty mockup works.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#324

Post by WillPostForFood »

postalrat wrote: post #77

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

I prefer old reddit because I use it to read things. But if you are into photos, memes, etc, the new reddit is better for just infinite scrolling while scanning images without having to click into each post to see images. I understand the direction they took, it wasn't for people like us who like sites like HN.

https://i.imgur.com/TTUpTL9.png

Re: The Decline of Usability

#325

Post by worik »

tfleming wrote: post #289
worik wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ha ha.

From scratch I think. My aptitude is no use with pacman

Re: The Decline of Usability

#326

Post by RandomBacon »

rapind wrote: post #194
kristopolous wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a hard structured science, hicks law, conservation of complexity, goms analysis, fitts law ... we've tossed these decades of hard work in the garbage can because somebody in marketing didn't like the colors. It was like during the VCR wars of the 80s when consumers wanted the most features but yet the fewest buttons. Then they complained how you had to basically play rachmaninoff on their sleek minimal interfa…

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

Speaking of feature bloat...

I hate that ovens and microwaves have clocks on them. I don't need two devices in my kitchen to tell time. It's ridiculous since they usually next to each other, and most of the time have different displays. Just because there is an LCD/whatever, doesn't mean it always has to display something!

At least on the latest power outage, my microwave stopped showing the time. The oven still flashed, so I set that time and only have one clock in my kitchen now.

Even my vehicle has two clocks in it, one on the instrument cluster and one on the infotainment system. So stupid!!!

Re: The Decline of Usability

#327

Post by Aeolun »

martin_drapeau wrote: post #298
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.

The most usable application I’ve seen recently (including the ones I’m working on :( ) has been our 2000ish era work time entry system.

My initial gut reaction when I saw it was ‘oh god, how ugly’, but then I noticed how pleasant it was to use.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#328

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

philsnow wrote: post #254
swiley wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Between this and https://stopthemingmy.app/ and the various other systemd/freedesktop “anti-hacker” initiatives, I’ve been finding Linux to be more and more becoming the opposite of the operating system I’ve used for the last 20 years.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#329

Post by MattGaiser »

omniscient_oce wrote: post #312
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 don't get these fake persona things I see in portfolios and on Behance and stuff. Are these a legit thing or just something that is taught in school so students do and put on their portfolio but isn't used in practice. I get the basic idea behind it but a lot of the time it comes off as quite pretentious, or filler work.

I have seen the persona thing everywhere from startup accelerators to books on effective pitching as a consultant.

It is a useful sales tool as then the people people management types who can easily relate to the persona.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#330

Post by ben-schaaf »

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 10 is even worse. It swipes up for you when you press a key, but it won't pass that key on to the password box. So you have to press a key and then type your password. At least with gnome you can just type your password and it works as expected...
Post reply on HN