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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#511

Post by neop1x »

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?…

They are designing more for eye candy, less for usability. For example it is common to have gray text on white background, hard to read. Black themes for programming IDEs often have dark gray background, reducing contrast. Scrollbars are now thin, hard to see, often disappearing automatically and sometimes it is hard to distinguish which part is the scrollbar handle and which the background. Sometimes it is the same with switches - on/off. Is that switch on or is off? Sometimes hard to see as both states are similarly bright just different color.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#512

Post by Symbiote »

pfranz wrote: post #229
rapind wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If they couldn't make it easier to set I think the clock should have been less prominent. It's necessary if you're doing a scheduled recording. It's too bad time sync over power lines didn't catch on widely (or broadcast over the radio). It would still be saving everyone from changing their digital clocks during DST.

Do you not have a radio clock?

They're common in Europe, on a midrange bedside clock for example, and typical office/school clocks.

I remember we were foiled by one at school, when someone set the clock 15 minutes forward when the teacher wasn't looking. The hands could only move forward, so a few minutes later they started spinning 11½ hours further forward to set the correct time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_clock

Re: The Decline of Usability

#513

Post by szatkus »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #330
madjam002 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I always just press a CTRL key on both Windows 10 and Ubuntu.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#514

Post by Silhouette »

bob1029 wrote: post #492

For me the worst isn't even that the UI composition/presentation is bad. It's that the performance of these interfaces is getting monotonically worse over time. No one wants to take the time to learn the hard native UI development processes, so we just wind up throwing some shitty angular SPA application into electronjs and calling it a day. Those of us with non-sloth-like reflexes now have to experience torture as e…

No one wants to take the time to learn the hard native UI development processes, so we just wind up throwing some shitty angular SPA application into electronjs and calling it a day.

That's partly because the native development processes are so unnecessarily awkward, particularly on Apple platforms. It's also partly because most native development processes only give you software that runs on one platform at the end.

Those of us with non-sloth-like reflexes now have to experience torture as every keypress or mouse click takes an extra 50-100ms to register.

Well, that's just bad programming. There's nothing about web technologies or Electron-based applications that requires such poor performance. Someone who has managed to design a system where the most simple interactions take 100ms to get a response would probably manage to create an uncomfortably laggy experience if they built native applications too.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#515

Post by PunksATawnyFill »

andrepd wrote: post #499
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,…

>Blender fanboys argue for using keyboard shortcuts instead. The keyboard shortcut guide is 13 pages. Well to be fair Blender is a professional tool. It is expected that users read the manual and learn the shortcuts, etc. Discoverability is something that should not be optimised for in a tool for professionals like Blender.

That is such a lame, played-out excuse. A real favorite of apologists for shitty UI design.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#516

Post by rleigh »

foldr wrote: post #500
rleigh wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> embrace the chaos Linux was all about chaos and herding cats until a short number of years ago. It's the "standardisation at all costs" brigade who have killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. It's now far worse than Windows in many aspects. Freedesktop and GNOME deserve the lion's share of the blame, but RedHat, Debian and many others enabled them to achieve this.

Linux GUIs have always been worse than Windows as far as I remember (going back to the mid 90s).

That's very subjective, and not at all related to the point I was making. It wasn't about the niceness of GUIs.

Over the last decade, we have experienced a sharp loss of control and had certain entities become almost absolute dictators over how Linux systems are permitted to be run and used.

Linux started out quite clunky and unpolished. It could be made polished if you wanted that. But nothing was mandatory. Now that's changed. A modern mainstream Linux distribution gives you about the same control over your system that Windows provides. In some cases, even less. Given its roots in personal freedom, ultimate flexibility, and use as glue that could slot into all sorts of diverse uses, I find the current state of Linux to be an nauseating turn off.

And I say that as someone who has used Linux for 24 years, and used to be an absolute Linux fanatic.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#517

Post by nc30 »

jhhh wrote: post #413
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.

Care to explain how to apply that filter rule?

Re: The Decline of Usability

#518

Post by foldr »

rleigh wrote: post #516
foldr wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux GUIs have always been worse than Windows as far as I remember (going back to the mid 90s).

That's very subjective, and not at all related to the point I was making. It wasn't about the niceness of GUIs. Over the last decade, we have experienced a sharp loss of control and had certain entities become almost absolute dictators over how Linux systems are permitted to be run and used. Linux started out quite clunky and unpolished. It could be made polished if you wanted that. But nothing was mandatory. Now tha…

People have had similar complaints for a very long time: https://www.itworld.com/article/2795788/dumbing-down-linux.h...

Re: The Decline of Usability

#519

Post by SiempreViernes »

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…

In my experience Ubuntu shows a little animation of up arrows, and maybe even says "swipe to start" if you look long enough at the login screen.

It is pretty confusing the first time, and annoying every time after that, didn't conciously know about the "Enter" trick before now.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#520

Post by tannhaeuser »

brabel wrote: post #484
tannhaeuser wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on 19.10, and I'm quite disappointed. Exposing all windows as thumbnails is a big regression compared to Unity. It feels heavyweight, and just doesn't work anymore for window navigation. Pressing the app icon on the side bar brings up small, equal-sized window previews on top of each other without spatial information. Consequently I have now tens of open terminal session and browser windows. Global menu is gone,…

I was on the same boat and decided to install KDE Plasma. Very very happy with the result, the UI dark theme is very beautiful and all shortcuts and UI elements work the way "old" UIs did (unlike freaking Ubuntu 18 and 19 which changed everything for 0 reason). https://kde.org/plasma-desktop It was quite easy to install and everything worked out-of-the-box. I just customized some widgets, the dark theme, icon colors…

I've been on the brink of installing KDE many times over the years. What held me back was that screenshots always displayed bulky window decorations which I have no use for on a 13/14" notebook. Also, for space efficiency, I want global menus period. I think Ubuntu pre-18 with Unity got a lot of things right - a lean UI getting out of your way and yielding space to actual apps. I can do without the collection of desktop apps for either Gnome or KDE - on Gnome the file manager is particular anemic, on KDE it seems too Windows-y for my taste. And I don't use Gnome's mail app or video player but rather "best-of-breed" apps like Thunderbird and VLC anyway. So I guess I'll be looking at lightweight DEs/non-"DE"s going forward (but I'll give KDE a try for sure).

It's sad because gnome worked very well for me so far, and I've actually seen Ubuntu becoming the mainstream choice for freelance dev teams at many places over the last couple of years. I do feel guilty to criticize other people's hard work given for free to me without constructive criticism but as far as I'm concerned gnome shoots for a future and audience of desktop users that just isn't there when IMHO the goal should be to preserve what precious free desktop apps we have and not making app development any more difficult or gnome-centric.

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