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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#601

Post by TeMPOraL »

RandomBacon wrote: post #326
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.

Speaking of feature bloat... I hate that ovens and microwaves have clocks on them. I don't need two devices in my kitchen to tell time. It's ridiculous since they usually next to each other, and most of the time have different displays. Just because there is an LCD/whatever, doesn't mean it always has to display something! At least on the latest power outage, my microwave stopped showing the time. The oven still flas…

> The oven still flashed,

What's even more crazy, increasingly often I've started to encounter ovens that don't work until you set the clock. I.e. if the clock was reset and is blinking, the heater won't turn on. Took me a while to figure it out the first time I saw it.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#602

Post by anoncake »

yaktubi wrote: post #345
_jal wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome and KDE are both worse than useless - They poison other, useful projects. There is never going to be a unified GUI for Linux; that requires a dictator. KDE tried to provide the carrot of development-ease, Gnome tried to generate some reality distortion, but nobody cared. Carrots don't work. As far as I'm concerned, the experiment is over and it is time to embrace the chaos. Now, this is easy for me to say, I'm…

Honestly the problem with all software is people trying to “innovate” too much. They made this thing called a book once upon a time and those have worked for centuries. Same thing with UIs: the stacking window managers work well from Windows 95 and XP why change it?

Before codexes – the kind of book we use today – scrolls had worked for centuries.

> the stacking window managers work well from Windows 95 and XP why change it?

To get something that works better.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#603

Post by al_chemist »

elwell wrote: post #590
elwell wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

"monotonically worse" means it never gets better. "worse" without "monotonically" means it may get better for a bit, but overall it will be worse.

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

Re: The Decline of Usability

#604

Post by contextfree »

kgwxd wrote: post #591
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…

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.

I don't know about Ubuntu but on Windows you can also just click with the mouse to open it, no need to swipe up.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#605

Post by anoncake »

pmontra wrote: post #446
lmm wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thei…

In addition: If you know a tool well enough that you can design an intuitive UI for it, you don't need it.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#606

Post by lugermorph »

One of the most annoying UI design features to me is multiple ways of doing the same thing on the screen at once.

Windows 10 does this endlessly. You can use the taskbar to get to your files, you can use the Start menu to get to your files, you can use the tiles in the Start menu to get to your files. This actually makes it far more confusing when trying to quickly get to your files. At least on macOS there is one single button to get to your files (the Finder icon).

If you've ever used Maya you'll know it's the same thing. The layout is incredibly overwhelming and when you want to quickly and effortlessly switch to a different tool, you have to think about what button to press. I switched to Cinema4D as their design is simple and very intuitive.

Good UI design to me is about having labeled buttons that have a depth of interaction, rather than putting all the buttons on the same screen at the same time. Obviously you don't need to abstract away menus all the time (like the proliferation of pointless hamburger menus), but at least cleaning up buttons makes UIs more usable.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#607

Post by jhhh »

nc30 wrote: post #517
jhhh wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In ublock origin add a line in "My Filters" for:

www.google.com##[id^=ed_]

I only created this today so I'm unsure if the ids change over time or if people get different ids for sections but it's been solid so far.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#608

Post by iib »

zrm wrote: post #139
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" 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…

You can just start typing the password and it will input it correctly, the Enter is not actually needed (at least on 19.10)

Re: The Decline of Usability

#609

Post by giantrobot »

anthk wrote: post #288
btrettel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This would be one place where free software could really shine - you could convert a lot of people with "every application works the same, and we promise we won't change the UI more than once every two years unless we really have to. This is one reason I use Xfce. My brother once told me that my computer has looked basically the same since I used Gnome 2, and he's right. I'm not entirely immune. After switching ful…

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

This makes me soooo happy. Now if I can just find a GNOME 1.0 total conversion. For whatever reason I always liked my 48px tall Panel and the hodgepodge of icon styles. I've managed to get XFCE's panel sort of looking like GNOME 1 but it doesn't quite behave the same.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#610

Post by ryandrake »

Ma8ee wrote: post #508
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.

I’ve been actively using computers since CP/M. On windows, that I use daily, just random click and press and shake the mouse until I get a password prompt to login. Since there is slight delay until something happens after each action I’ve never been patient enough to figure out what exactly it is that works.

The period between wake-up-from-sleep and getting a usable desktop has been a UX nightmare for a long time. There are so many awful things and question marks that happen in the flow:

1. What do you need to do to invoke a wakeup? Press a key? Are there any keys that don't wake the machine? Move the mouse? Click a mouse button?

2. Multiple monitors: During the wakeup sequence, you first have one display turn on, then you think you can log in but surprise! Another display turns on, and the main display briefly flickers off. For some reason, after 25+ years, display driver writers still can't figure out how to turn a second display on without blanking and horsing around with the first display.

3. Once the displays are on, some systems require some kind of extra input to actually get a login prompt to display. Is it a mouse click? A drag? Keyboard action? Who knows?

4. Some systems allow you to type your password as soon as the computer wakes. But there is some random delay between when you invoke wakeup and when it can accept input. What this usually means is I start typing my password, the computer only recognizes the last N characters and rejects it, I wait, then type it again.

These are some irritating bugs that affect everyone who uses a PC every time they log in. Yet OS vendors choose to spend their development time making more hamburger menus and adding Angry Birds to the Start menu.

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