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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#401

Post by CalRobert »

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 best thing about Ubuntu desktop usability might be mnemomics, where alt+ an underlined letter is your keyboard shortcut, but it seems they're dying :-(.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#402

Post by necovek »

hutattedonmyarm wrote: post #368
ben-schaaf wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

It also requires you to wait until the animation has finished. I regularly lose the first character or two of my password, because I start typing too soon, while it’s still animating away

I do not have this experience on the screen lock screen (on Ubuntu 18.04 at least) — just typing a password will put the full password into the box once the animation is gone.

I do not log-in frequently enough to remember how it behaves on log-in (even my laptop has ~90 days of uptime).

FWIW, moving away from GNOME 2.x to either Unity or GNOME 3 was a hard move to swallow, though in all honesty, Unity was better (though pretty buggy and laggy until the end)!

Re: The Decline of Usability

#403

Post by gorgoiler »

_jal wrote: post #274
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.

Gnome and KDE are both worse than useless - They poison other, useful projects. There is never going to be a unified GUI for Linux; that requires a dictator. KDE tried to provide the carrot of development-ease, Gnome tried to generate some reality distortion, but nobody cared. Carrots don't work. As far as I'm concerned, the experiment is over and it is time to embrace the chaos. Now, this is easy for me to say, I'm…

> embrace the chaos

Well said. Is your machine shop stocked by a single brand of tools all in the same color, or is it a mix of bits and pieces accumulated, rebuilt, repainted, hacked, begged-borrowed-and-stolen over the course of your development as an engineer?

A free software Unix workstation is exactly the same. It’s supposed to look untidy. It’s a tool shed.

Apologies if I’ve touched a nerve with the Festool crowd with my analogy.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#404

Post by pknopf »

The single thing I hate the most?

Showing search results immediately, while the real search is happening in the background. I see what I want, click it, and it immediately changes to be something else.

I get the need to give users instant feedback, but not at the expense of user experience.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#405

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

ordu wrote: post #379
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…

> 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 discovered that you can get the password prompt by pressing Enter. One more anecdote. I found this screen for the first time when I got my laptop to demonstrate something to a student. I didn't know what to do, started to do random thin…

I still remember the first time my young niece sat at my traditional desktop computer a few years ago. She must have been about five or six years old. She immediately started using her hands to try and interact with the screen and was utterly confused as to why nothing was happening.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#406

Post by WalterBright »

StillBored wrote: post #393
noobermin wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever these discussions come up, I don't know how much of this response is just confusing familiarity with usability. I kid you not, I knew people who bemoaned python because of tab spacing and this wasn't 2003, this was may be a few years ago (2016 or so), which I'd argue is just being unfamiliar with it. C isn't really that intuitive--I still remember learning it at 14 and finding the syntax confusing vs basic--…

The author completely failed to mention discoverability. Which is a huge part of usability because it allows _new_ people to sit down at your applications and gradually work up their expertise until they are keyboard wizards (or whatever). So, no, just having a bunch of magic unlabeled buttons and saying "use the keyboard" isn't good usability. The part that kills me, is that a lot of these applications don't even re…

> a lot of these applications don't even really have shortcut key guides

Not even Windows itself has, any where that I could find, a list of all the keyboard shortcuts. I find multiple lists, each with a different random subset of whatever the actual set is.

Sometimes I'll hit wrong keys, and something interesting happens. I don't know what I did, so it's "oh well".

Re: The Decline of Usability

#407

Post by passerby1 »

epistasis wrote: post #384
hutattedonmyarm wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also requires you to wait until the animation has finished. I regularly lose the first character or two of my password, because I start typing too soon, while it’s still animating away

iOS has been this way for a couple versions, and I can't imagine how it ever passed testing. Animations that block use input are the sort of stupidity that becomes evil in its own regard. There was even a calculator but with this. This is a massive failure at the management level; somebody actually codes these things, but that it's not caught anywhere before shipping shows that the wrong people are in charge.

It's the sin of losing the user input.

Don't make your user repeat something twice :)

Re: The Decline of Usability

#408

Post by userbinator »

MattGaiser wrote: post #297
userbinator wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't remember the name, but oddly enough I do remember that it was Canadian, and the company was very short-lived. It was around the time SPAs started becoming trendy (near the start of the last deecade), and I remember the multiple-minute load times, dozens of MB transferred, and the insane CPU usage, along with all the other horrible usability issues it had.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#409

Post by toohotatopic »

majewsky wrote: post #176
toohotatopic wrote: post #53

Speaking of the Firefox version 75 bar: Why has there been a change in the way the selection works? Now it takes three well-timed clicks to select an entire url. Is this an improvement?

I'm currently on Firefox 75 on Linux. Clicking in the address bar when not focused consistently selects the entire URL.

Right. I forgot to mention that the problem comes with X11 and the clipboard.

The first selection doesn't and shouldn't copy to the clipboard because entering a new address would focus the bar and replace the existing clipboard. It wouldn't be possible to copy any selection into the address bar.

So to use an url from the address bar requires selecting and re-selecting the entire address. That second selecting has become far more difficult.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#410

Post by dredmorbius »

boring_twenties wrote: post #341
dredmorbius wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suggestion accepted! Changed! (Bite me.)

Sorry but now I must know what the original version was!

Closer to Bennis's original: "The dog will be there to keep the hipster from touching the UI/UX".
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