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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#411

Post by necovek »

Ah, the times of the Sun contributed and led HIG — Human Interface Guidelines — for Gnome that actually made sense!

But even that (Gnome 2.0) "simplification of UI" got a lot of flack from the community, but it was based on sound principles and actual user validation (it was already brought up in this thread).

What I like to think is that we are in a chaos at the moment, where experimentation is running wild, and at some point, we'll realise again that we can't have good UX for both large and small screens, and keyboards/mice and lack of them, all in one codebase, and we'll stop trying, and all will be good. For the next 5 years at least.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#412

Post by tcoff91 »

WalterBright wrote: post #400
ordu wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 think I'm growing old, and just couldn't keep up with a pace of changing On the other hand, when my iPhone suddenly would connect with a caller, but neither party could hear the other, redialing didn't help, turning it off/on didn't work, I remembered the ancient trick of "cold boot". Which resolved the problem.

You put an iPhone in the freezer and booted it, and that fixed it? Wow. I thought that was just for saving spinning disk drives and preserving the contents of RAM for an attack.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#413

Post by jhhh »

pknopf wrote: post #404

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.

Somehow google even with all their money and rockstar developers still does this to me in search results. There's no built-in option I've found to remove the 'People also search for' popup that pushes all the content I was just about to click on after navigating back to the search results page. I had to make a filter rule instead.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#414

Post by userbinator »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #89
wwweston wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think resume-driven development is bad for developers (and it is), consider the career incentives for UI and product people. If there's a "maintain" incentive, I'm not sure what it is. "Didn't change anything about functional and satisfactory interfaces" may be a real value-add in some cases, but it's not a sizzling narrative for selling yourself on the job market.

Very true. Most people get measured by how much churn they create. The more the better. Even if it’s 100% correct for the business you are digging your own grave if you leave things the way they are.

Most, not all; if you have the right skills, you can find a comfortable job maintaining legacy code and (actually) improving it. Then again, most developers seem more interested in chasing new and shiny rather than polishing a stable system.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#415

Post by asicsp »

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 recently came across Glimpse [0] which is a fork of Gimp. They state usability as one of the reasons for the fork.

[0] https://glimpse-editor.org/

Re: The Decline of Usability

#416

Post by mixmastamyk »

Aeolun wrote: post #327
martin_drapeau wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A usable, predictable app needn't be ugly and vice-versa.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#417

Post by mixmastamyk »

pcurve wrote: post #358
wott wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's the same with urbanism for example. If I look at what was built in my country before, say, WW2, it all makes sense, even if we just consider private housing development: numerous streets around small blocks, which guarantee many communication options and no concentration of traffic on single exits, streets on the outside of the blocks, so that it can be used by outsiders too, and so that it allows future ext…

dumb question... when there's a lot of space to spread out, what would be a better way to lay out subdivisions off of main road?

Also avoid “stroads.”

Re: The Decline of Usability

#418

Post by mproud »

Pmop wrote: post #121

I'm young (25) but my first (family) computer used to run Windows 98 (that's what we could afford). And I can recall well, UI had one "meta-language": menu bar (file, view ..., help), toolbar, and if you'd hover your mouse pointer over a widget, a tooltip would show up with explanation about what the widget does and the keyboard shortcut for that action. Once you learnt how to use one application, say Paint, you'd pr…

Even computer games like Civilization II and SimCity 2000 used traditional OS menus.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#419

Post by adeel_siddiqui »

Frontend development/UI/UX design has gotten stuck in a weird loop. Many companies/startups get working on redesigning the UI every 6 months just because some competitor has a new design and a few people like it, or even worse, the designer likes the new "slick" design. It is bad because it is no longer concerns/standards about accessibility or usability driving those constant redesigns but some kind of self-created pressure to be part of a rat race.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#420

Post by rpm91 »

I'll give the author the complaints about modern scroll bars, which drive me up a wall, but the complaints about Firefox and Chrome really feel like grasping at straws to find something to dislike.

"This new take on the [Firefox] URL bar pops up when you least expect it, is very hard to get rid of and, as a bonus, covers the tried, tested and highly usable bookmarks toolbar below it."

What? It pops up when you click on it, or when you hit Ctrl+ L. That seems perfectly expected, and is how URL bars have worked as long as I can remember. And it only covers the bookmarks toolbar (should you choose to enable it) when you're using the address bar and the dropdown is visible. This is like complaining that the Save File dialog covers the tried-and-true document editor in Microsoft Word, but even more ridiculous, because you can, in fact, access your bookmarks through typing into the megabar. It's an excellent UI that provides keyboard access to a wide variety of browser features, all in one location - search, URLs, bookmarks, and even a fuzzy search of open tabs.

And the Chrome tooltips...behave exactly like normal tooltips, but with slightly different styling to make them more useful for showing the title and domain name. How is this a "crime[] against basic concepts of desktop UI design"?

(disclosure: I work for the company that makes one of those applications)

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