Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

That’s it, we’re quitting

design.canonical.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 137 posts

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#41

Post by run4yourlives »

ams6110 wrote: post #33
mycroftiv wrote: post #12

I get so frustrated reading blog posts by user interface designers. They almost invariably consist of reasoning I disagree and conclusions I disagree with in support of user interface decisions that make my experience as a user worse. Ubuntu Unity is pretty much an anthology of user interface decisions that are exactly wrong by my perception, and "lets get rid of quit" is just another one. Of all the actions in any m…

rearranging the furniture in the middle of the night so people trip over the couch when they are walking to the bathroom Exactly how I felt about the "new" Microsoft Office UI and the straw that broke the camels back on my continued use of that software.

It's funny, because from my perspective as a casual office user, I actually thought the menus made things a little easier to use, even if I needed to "re-learn" where things were.

My wife however, much more of a "power" office user, has completely sworn off of them. This is a person that knew pretty much where every menu item on word and excel was by memory. Her experience has been destroyed, so much that I needed to re-install 2003 on all the machines that she would use.

Most certainly tripping on couches.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#42

Post by sixtofour »

ajdecon wrote: post #37

I'm happy that Canonical is thinking about usability, but has any of this actually been backed up by any kind of experiment? I see one link on Google to a study done on Thunderbird (sadly down, as it's the same blog), and a bunch of blogspam related to it, but very little evidence that the recent radical changes they are making have undergone any usability testing. If you're trying to help users, shouldn't you study…

I've been subconsciously watching this minimization trend go by. The latest instance I've seen is in FF4, where the forward/backward button has lost its little dropdown indicator. Now you have to know it's there, and use a right click to get the list of sites.

Not being a UI/UX/UXB guy, I have to wonder if there's some magazine they or their managers all read, that had an article advocating minimalizing, 'cause there sure seems to be a bandwagon rolling through town.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#43

Post by epochwolf »

run4yourlives wrote: post #41
ams6110 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rearranging the furniture in the middle of the night so people trip over the couch when they are walking to the bathroom Exactly how I felt about the "new" Microsoft Office UI and the straw that broke the camels back on my continued use of that software.

It's funny, because from my perspective as a casual office user, I actually thought the menus made things a little easier to use, even if I needed to "re-learn" where things were. My wife however, much more of a "power" office user, has completely sworn off of them. This is a person that knew pretty much where every menu item on word and excel was by memory. Her experience has been destroyed, so much that I needed to…

As a casual user, it's made Word usable when I need to use it.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#44

Post by SkyMarshal »

shareme wrote: post #32
lukeschlather wrote: post #14

Getting rid of quit/close requires the user to learn entirely new metaphors every time they use a program in order to know how to get a program to stop taking up resources. In a system with effectively limitless resources this is fine, but in lower specced systems, not so much. Also "effectively limitless" means equivalent to the specs of the worst system the designers use, which will likely skew things. Where I'm si…

ahem, in mobile we do not have quit..nothing broke not even the mobile users :)

Actually, on my Android phone I'm constantly using a third party task killer to stop services and apps running in the background that I thought I 'quit' by backing out of them. I also use the quit option on apps that have it.

I don't entirely trust Android to manage battery life as efficiently as possible yet, especially when iPhone still does it so much better, and when every time I check the services running on the phone, there seem to be tons I had never even started in the first place.

I consider that at least partly a UI/UX issue.

(On a side note, that's my only complaint about Android so far, using 2.3, otherwise it's great.)

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#45

Post by joe_the_user »

bmelton wrote: post #36
mycroftiv wrote: post #12

I get so frustrated reading blog posts by user interface designers. They almost invariably consist of reasoning I disagree and conclusions I disagree with in support of user interface decisions that make my experience as a user worse. Ubuntu Unity is pretty much an anthology of user interface decisions that are exactly wrong by my perception, and "lets get rid of quit" is just another one. Of all the actions in any m…

I don't know that I'd necessarily attribute it to the Canonical team, but the best UI designers make decisions that don't sound right out loud, but actually work quite well in the product. That's often the very point of UI, is in studying behaviors and responding to them in ways that aren't obvious, and that often sound wrong on their face. Apple, in particular, are considered a paragon of UI excellence, yet many of…

Recently, meaning in OS X, I've felt like the Apple UI has degenerated through the use of "easy looking" UI elements that remove every "confusing" element to the point of preventing the user from doing anything.

Not only can I not find files when Finder doesn't use folders but my parents and my friends who actually have Macs can't find files either.

It seems to me the Mac doesn't win by real usability but by looking beautiful on first glance, having a reputation for usability and having a strong following of folks who will teach people who otherwise struggle with the interface.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#46

Post by raintrees »

ams6110 wrote: post #33
mycroftiv wrote: post #12

I get so frustrated reading blog posts by user interface designers. They almost invariably consist of reasoning I disagree and conclusions I disagree with in support of user interface decisions that make my experience as a user worse. Ubuntu Unity is pretty much an anthology of user interface decisions that are exactly wrong by my perception, and "lets get rid of quit" is just another one. Of all the actions in any m…

rearranging the furniture in the middle of the night so people trip over the couch when they are walking to the bathroom Exactly how I felt about the "new" Microsoft Office UI and the straw that broke the camels back on my continued use of that software.

It would seem that existing users' knowledge of menu/button layout was sacrificed for new users' organizational benefits.

From a "never having used Office before" point of view, it is more logical now. From my power user's point of view, the first 30 hours of usage had an additional 5-10 hours (wag) of "okay, where would they have moved THAT feature to?"

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#47

Post by Tangaroa »

marshray wrote: post #29

A document you 'close', an application you 'exit' or 'quit'. The document-centric people have been trying to do away with applications since the the beginning of GUIs. It reality, the document metaphor works great for a few things that resemble documents. But documents are as much an artifact of the paper-handling wold as processess login sessions are to the electronic world. Are they really more fundamental than, sa…

Efforts to implement the stapler model include "Cut and Paste" and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). Microsoft thought you ought to be able to staple anything to anything, like a terminal in the middle of your word document or a clock on your spreadsheet, for no reason other than just because you can. It didn't work because app developers needed to do too much work to support it, so few programs other than Microsoft's own office software were built to link items together like that.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#48

Post by cookiecaper »

joe_the_user wrote: post #45
bmelton wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know that I'd necessarily attribute it to the Canonical team, but the best UI designers make decisions that don't sound right out loud, but actually work quite well in the product. That's often the very point of UI, is in studying behaviors and responding to them in ways that aren't obvious, and that often sound wrong on their face. Apple, in particular, are considered a paragon of UI excellence, yet many of…

Recently, meaning in OS X, I've felt like the Apple UI has degenerated through the use of "easy looking" UI elements that remove every "confusing" element to the point of preventing the user from doing anything. Not only can I not find files when Finder doesn't use folders but my parents and my friends who actually have Macs can't find files either. It seems to me the Mac doesn't win by real usability but by looking…

I agree, generally. I find Mac the most irritating platform to use -- the shortcuts are all different because Apple has a silly insistence of using Super where they should use Ctrl, and common shortcuts are supplanted by the OS, leaving apps to have to find new ones. The Dock is a slow method of switching and Sup+~ shortcut to switch to a windows is more annoying than a straight Alt+Tab. Sup+H and your window goes away; this has confused a lot of people I know, and it annoys me a lot when I try to look at history.

I really see no serious UI benefit in Apple's products. It seems roughly equivalent to me, and it uses the same paradigms as other conventional systems, it just does it in a shinier way, and it seems cool just because Apple does it, just like everything MTV does seems cool to a teenager.

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#49

Post by mgkimsal »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #35
mgkimsal wrote: post #20

"A few behemoth applications, such as LibreOffice and Gimp, still keep “Quit” separate from “Close” for the original reason — to save you from having to wait for the application to relaunch after closing its only document. But that is fixable, and all other applications have become fast enough that they don’t need it any more. After all, they’re running on hardware that is hundreds of times faster than it was in 1984…

I have SSD's. In RAID-0 striping mode. You still notice it.

That's a bit depressing to hear. The SSD perf I've seen on laptops seemed great, but I suspect that in conjunction with slower memory, we'll still see issues. :/

Re: That’s it, we’re quitting

#50

Post by viraptor »

So if I understand it correctly: First they threw away the rhythmbox tray icon and made it quit on "X" in order "not to clutter the tray". Then they reverted to their own meta-trayicon and made even more applications fold to tray on "X". Now they want to remove "quit" completely and make "X" a "maybe quit, maybe close, you don't need to know the answer"?

I'd really like it if they started publishing their research / references / discussions. Right now it seems like they just do what they want and wait to see if it works or not.

Post reply on HN