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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#441

Post by Leherenn »

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…

Windows 10 has the same mechanism, she might have learnt it from there first and just applied it here.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#442

Post by leeman2016 »

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

Another one to add:

Besides waiting for animation, in Windows 10, if you type the password fast enough the first character gets selected and the second character you type will replace it.

This happens frequently.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#443

Post by brigandish »

hiram112 wrote: post #279
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,…

GIMP has had no much powerful functionality while at the same time having an absolute awful UI going on 15 years or more now. And it still hasn't been fixed. I'm not a big believer in conspiracies, but if there's one I'd not dismiss out of hand, it's that Adobe or some other company has been ensuring that GIMP has never been improved or become a viable replacement for some PS users. There is obviously a large potenti…

Part of that is also down to knowing about competitors and for them to stay alive. For instance, the other day I downloaded from the Mac app store a fork of GIMP from way back called Seashore (that's since been updated and barely any GIMP code survives). I've not had much chance to use it yet but so far it's what it claims to be, simple to use, which is a breath of fresh air after using GIMP. But who knows about it? It's been around for years and I'd not heard about it.

I read an interview with the maintainer[1] and it sounds like he's put in a lot of work but as he says it's a "labour of love". I wish someone was paying him, even surreptitiously!

[1] https://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entry/meet-seashore-free...

Re: The Decline of Usability

#444

Post by zwaps »

It feels like there are many unrelated terrible reasons for "UX" being a clusterfudge. "Webified" UX and "data-driven" UX are of course terrible. Data scientists in these fields don't come from the right background to know or care about causal analysis, so whatever is measured is not UX efficiency.

But there's other issues, unrelated to that.

Computers are complex and there are certain tasks we do not have to do very often. Back in the day, the consistency allowed me to know how to do most things.

I find this most notable in Win10. Back in the day, I could intuit many things, for example how to get something in and around my task bar to work as I want. Another example is to fiddle with audio settings, bluetooth or other settings stuff in general.

Today, I have to "try around" instead. There are two control panels, plus that task bar control panel. Sometimes you need to right click somewhere and choose an inconsistently named item to get to the right setting screen, sometimes it's better to search. Sometimes the setting is available in the "task slider" screen.

I always just thought it's me getting old. Because that's how old people use a computer.

Perhaps it's rather the UX disaster.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#445

Post by TheKarateKid »

saagarjha wrote: post #23
strken wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One nice thing about recent Ubuntu is that even though they hide the password box, you can start typing on the unlock screen and your text will be entered into the password box.

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…

Wow, I would’ve never guessed that. Apple has a terrible habit of burying obscure UX features.

It’s a shame really because these undocumented features mean 99% of people WON’T ever use them. Isn’t that counterproductive to engineers?

Why aren’t employees speaking out against this?

Re: The Decline of Usability

#446

Post by pmontra »

lmm wrote: post #311
hiram112 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GIMP has had no much powerful functionality while at the same time having an absolute awful UI going on 15 years or more now. And it still hasn't been fixed. I'm not a big believer in conspiracies, but if there's one I'd not dismiss out of hand, it's that Adobe or some other company has been ensuring that GIMP has never been improved or become a viable replacement for some PS users. There is obviously a large potenti…

Good designers don't work for free. It's kind of strange that programmers have a culture of working for free (or at least of employers agreeing to open-source contributions), but we do, so gnarly algorithms get open-sourced all the time.

We developers write something for free because we need it. Even if we build something awful we still use it and maybe open source it. Then maybe we improve the UI but it's not our job so we're not good at it.

A designer that can't code will never start a software project so I guess that it's uncommon for them to get involved in one for free.

Then there are developers and designers involved in open source because their companies pay them for that. Gnome's designers are listed at https://wiki.gnome.org/Design#Team_Members

Two of them work at Red Hat, one at Purism, I didn't find any immediate affiliation for the other two.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#447

Post by Moru »

MattGaiser wrote: post #304
Ididntdothis wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I met these two mobile devs at a conference. They survived several rounds of cost-cutting at a large company by constantly convincing management to let them rewrite their mobile app in some new framework because of X. Start out with the native implementations, then they did Xamarin, tried PhoneGap, went back to native, then to React Native, and now on to Flutter. The pair of them keep their jobs constantly rewriting…

Now and then frameworks does backwards incompatible changes so you might as well rewrite the app. If you continue with the old version of the framework you are stuck with either security holes, bugs or that google and apple changes something that downprioritize your app into oblivion.

And if the UI/UX does not significantly change every 6 months, your users will give you one star reviews and "Old looking and ugly" comments. I don't envy app developers.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#448

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

necovek wrote: post #402
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

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 (tho…

When Ubuntu have removed Gnome2, I have looked at Unity, got really unhappy about it and installed gnome3. ... In a few minutes, I started to think that Unity wasn't THAT bad, after all, and went back to it.

Now when it is gone, I'm using xfce, which seems be the last decent desktop environment.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#450

Post by int_19h »

visarga wrote: post #428
int_19h wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on the period. On Windows, Microsoft eventually unified menu bars and tool bars - the widget was called "cool bar" or "rebar", and it was basically a generic container for certain specific kinds of children that organized them into floatable and dockable "bands", with automatic layout: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/reba... The widgets that can be placed on that are buttons…

I get the point about extreme customisability but I still think the "rebar" is ugly as fuck and inconsistent (non uniform look, a salad of different types of elements). As a mac user I didn't have to put up with it and was disgusted when I first saw it.

What was particularly non-uniform about it? Most toolbars looked very similar in most apps, because there were certain UI conventions, similar to main menus. Once customized, sure, it's no longer uniform, but that's the whole point.
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