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

591–600 of 719 posts

Re: The Decline of Usability

#591

Post by kgwxd »

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 stupid UX, they likely learned it there. It also supports hitting Enter, or any other key. I don't know if Ubuntu supports other keys too, I use Xubuntu to avoid these exact pointless changes.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#592

Post by thewebcount »

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.

They tried compromises like VCR Plus+[0]. It was basically a 6 digit code that would be printed next to the show name in places like TV Guide. You would enter the code into your VCR instead of a time, and it would figure out how to record it. I think it still required a working clock, though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_recorder_scheduling_code

Re: The Decline of Usability

#593

Post by leetcrew »

dleslie wrote: post #280
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…

Not all programmers are intuitives; there are a great many who are sensors who lack a mental model of how their device operates or how the software they're interfacing with at a DSL or API level operates. They have a mental map of commands and structures for everything they make, and make "new" things by following examples of new maps. Ie, copying code from SO.

I wonder if "sensors" tend to work more in legacy code. no matter what I need to do at work, something similar probably exists already in the code somewhere. first step is almost always to find that similar code, copy-paste, and tweak it until it works. if you try to get too creative, you get bitten by some weird edge case that would have been handled if you just followed the pattern.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#594

Post by fhars »

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 can't find the icons in gimp on a recent ubuntu because they all look the same these days, every icon is just 'light grey geometric shape on dark grey' with no visual distinctiveness at all.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#595

Post by TeMPOraL »

hilbert42 wrote: post #554
jpxw wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m 20 and it took me literally minutes to realise I needed to swipe up. I thought the computer had frozen.

It's not your fault. It's the shitty ergonomics that have been pervading software UI design for several decades now. From the huge number of responses to this article, it's clear the software industry has a very major problem. The question I ask is why haven't users/user complaints been successful in stopping these irresponsible cowboys. Seems nothing can stop them.

> The question I ask is why haven't users/user complaints been successful in stopping these irresponsible cowboys.

Most users don't complain, because technology is magic to them and they have no point of reference; they assume things must be the way they are for a reason. From the remaining group that does complain, many do it ineffectively (e.g. complaining to friends or in discussion boards that aren't frequented by relevant devs). And the rest just isn't listened to. It's easy to dismiss few voices as "not experts", especially today, when everyone puts telemetry in their software (see below), and doubly so when user's opinions are in opposition to the business model.

Finally, software market isn't all that competitive (especially on SaaS) end, so users are most often put in a "take it or leave it" situation, where there's no way to "vote with your wallet" because there's no option on the market that you could vote for.

The problem with telemetry is that measuring for correct things and interpreting the results is hard, and it's way too easy to use the data to justify whatever the vendor (in particular, their UX or marketing team) already thinks. A common example is a feature that's been hidden increasingly deeply in the app on each UI update, and finally removed on the grounds that "telemetry says people aren't using it". Another common example is "low use" of features that are critical for end-users, but used only every few sessions.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#596

Post by Frondo »

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #405
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 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.

Like Scotty in that iconic scene..."Hello, computer...........Hello, computer......" someone hands him the mouse, which he holds like a microphone "Hello, computer...."

Re: The Decline of Usability

#597

Post by OOPMan »

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 hasn't changed.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#598

Post by indymike »

A lot of the decline has to do with the desktop importing web-based UIs: documents with a hodge-podge of interactive widgets that glue them into a cohesive app. Every app can be different and can be optimized for its function. New desktop apps are often built with either web-tech or some new UI framework that tries to give developers and designers that same level of differentiation and task-specific optimization you get in a browser.

Honestly, it isn't surprising that web style UIs are so popular: they take a lot less time to build, and you spend more effort building functionality than integrating the standard actions your app is supposed to support (think the stuff in the File, Edit and Help menu). Also, most users do pretty well with webish apps. Better than they should and most of the time better than they do with a GUI app. As they say, Good Enough beats perfect almost perfectly.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#600

Post by marvinblum »

I don't agree with every point made in the article, but it was pleasant to read.

Especially the keyboard focus got me, as I really like to use my keyboard to do as much as possible. It's far superior to the mouse unless you really need your mouse (for image manipulation for example). We are rebuilding our UI for Emvi [1] right now in the browser "keyboard first" and I must say this feels quite right. Of course you still need to support mouse and touch devices, but it's so much more fun to start out with a clear image of what you're trying to achieve. The handling is much faster. You can read about it here [2] if you're interested.

[1] https://emvi.com/

[2] https://emvi.com/blog/a-new-experimental-user-interface-QMZg...

Post reply on HN