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

581–590 of 719 posts

Re: The Decline of Usability

#581

Post by sirn »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #520
brabel wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 desk…

You can create a Unity-like look and feel in KDE Plasma 5 relatively easily[1]. Although the look and feel is only part of the experience, KDE Plasma 5 is very customizable that I'm sure it could be adapt fit to most workflow.

Despite its bad reputation in early days, KDE Plasma 5 nowadays is very lightweight. As in, the resource usage is pretty much on par with Xfce.

[1]: https://userbase.kde.org/Plasma/How_to_create_a_Unity-like_l...

Re: The Decline of Usability

#582

Post by m463 »

XorNot wrote: post #255
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 remember when I was playing around with building an HTPC for my car in the mid-2000s and I got to trying to put a frontend skin on the touchscreen. And I found all the existing skins completely awful because they were wall to wall arbitrary icons, in a setting where I needed at a glance functionality. Eventually made my own, and the key element? No icons at all. Just text - potentially small text - on the buttons.…

Yes, but now you have to write gobs of internationalization code. ;)

Actually, that sounds completely sane.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#583

Post by m463 »

WalterBright wrote: post #397
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,…

> You can't Google an icon. I've been complaining about that since 1983, when an Apple evangelist came to my workplace to show off the Mac's icons. Nobody was able to guess what the box of Kleenex icon was, much to the frustration of the evangelist. Of course, there wasn't a Google then, but how do you look up a picture in a dictionary? We've reverted to hieroglyphic languages. (Ironically, hieroglyphs evolved over t…

But the heiroglyphs are corporate logos crossed with app icons (that change every so often to stay "fresh")

Re: The Decline of Usability

#584

Post by InnerGargoyle »

userbinator wrote: post #414
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.

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.

guide me brother how to get into this?

Re: The Decline of Usability

#585

Post by buckminster »

ulisesrmzroche wrote: post #493
agumonkey wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's doubly odd because as many (I suppose) I firmly believed that faster pace and smaller changes would lead to global improvements (same goes for ajax web..). I think we just blew some social limit. People prefer stability, stability allows for more complex but riskier constructions, society enjoys the working ones even better. I like the notion of seasonality these days.

Are y’all deploying broken shit to prod? Why would the app be unstable?

I think they mean UI stability, not reliability.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#586

Post by rbanffy »

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,…

> Logging in on desktop now requires "swiping up"

That's not how it works here. From boot I am presented with a list of users, I click or press enter and type the password. When it's locked/suspended, all I need to do is to start typing.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#587

Post by leetcrew »

Jtsummers wrote: post #100
jimmaswell wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas too many people are either incapable of this kind of ubderstanding or it would take even longer than just giving them directions every time something changes.

The way people react to computers is similar to how many react to math. A lot of capable people are mathphobic, and it's strange to watch (as someone who took naturally to math). The expressions on the page (or the attempt to produce those expressions from a model in their mind) causes them to seize up. It's like watching an anxiety attack happen. Something about math (the subject, their experience when taking the co…

it seems like most people can get pretty good at discrete or fuzzy (for lack of a better word) types of reasoning, but rarely both. I'm not sure if it's just avoidant behavior, relying on whichever mode developed faster to the exclusion of the other, or something more innate.

given enough time to read and debug, I suspect I could eventually figure out how any piece of code worked. but if you give me a book and ask me to pick a good topic for an essay, I might not finish before the end of time.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#588

Post by coolgeek »

tomgp wrote: post #436
EEMac wrote: post #222

Part of this is because the sensors are winning. Sensors (about 70% of the population) use an application by mapping: a click here does this . Based on literature and my experience with my husband, maps are made separately for each application no matter what the similarities are. Most computer programmers are intuitives: we want things to work the same way in one application as they work in another. That makes it eas…

Where do these terms and figures come from? I’ve never heard them terms before but it’s an interesting framework with which to think about different peoples experiences with UIs. it strikes me that most people probably exist in both categories to some extent : even hardcore sensors will probably know and expect consistency some from apps, eg. some keyboard shortcuts (ctrl c, ctrl v etc) whilst some intuitives will ha…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...

Re: The Decline of Usability

#589

Post by TeMPOraL »

alpaca128 wrote: post #491
Leherenn wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Windows 10 allows a normal mouse click as well, unless Microsoft changed that afterwards.

It still does. When you do a mouse click, the lock screen moves up very fast - the animation is also a hint for the future. If you have a touch-enabled device and touch-press the lockscreen, it jumps up a little and falls back down, suggesting the swipe movement. On top of that, just typing on your keyboard works.

So MS has managed to make an interface that works just the same on desktops, laptops and touch-enabled devices, and the UX isn't bad on either.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#590

Post by elwell »

elwell wrote: post #551
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…

> monotonically worse over time An orthogonal interrogation of course, but I pontificate: does specificity truly monotonically increase by specification of some gradient being monotonic, making the modifier "monotonically" not merely monotonically increasing with grandiloquence?

Okay, I was being annoying, but I would actually like to know what the difference between "monotonically worse" and "worse" is.
Post reply on HN