Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
shkspr.mobi
Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
1–10 of 210 posts
Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
#2UI affordances have been going away for a long time. FlatUI was the first nearly universal obviously-user-hostile movement. It happened out of boredom and the slow intrusion of the contempt-for-the-audience attitude of art and architecture into web design.
Unfortunately, unlike art, we can't ignore architecture or UI design.
Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
#3I don't understand exactly what the writer is complaining about. The thesis of the page is never explicitly stated.
I see a complaint, "Hmmm. It didn't have the share destination that I wanted" yet the author never states what option they were looking for.
I would agree that, via the screenshot, the default options are all over the place and not prioritized well. However, the "Copy link" option is clearly visible. Being a website, I'm fundamentally unclear about what share option the writer could want beyond the ability to copy the url.
Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
#4I don't understand exactly what the writer is complaining about. The thesis of the page is never explicitly stated. I see a complaint, "Hmmm. It didn't have the share destination that I wanted" yet the author never states what option they were looking for. I would agree that, via the screenshot, the default options are all over the place and not prioritized well. However, the "Copy link" option is clearly visible. Be…
The actual share destination isn’t the point, it’s how it’s not obvious how to get to more destinations than are initially visible.
Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
#5For more of these daily annoyances: https://grumpy.website
The growing user hostility of UIs makes me want to stop developing software and even stop using computers. I started using computers because they made more sense to me than a lot of things. Now, I'm encountering these little moments of illogic and unreason every hour of the day.
It's not just beginners who need little cues. I'm deeply familiar with the APIs behind many of these monstrosities and yet I still find myself annoyed or momentarily confused by UIs that minimize, obscure, and hide in the name of Design.
Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
#6Not just on phones/tablets. If you have an application running in dark mode, and your Windows desktop is dark, you can't see the edge of the window to resize it. Also - with Windows 10 you don't grab the edge of the window, you grab the shadow. Which is not visible because shadows on dark desktops have no contrast.
Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
#7You should try teaching someone without tech literacy when to single left click vs double left click vs right click in Office for Windows.
Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
#8Not just on phones/tablets. If you have an application running in dark mode, and your Windows desktop is dark, you can't see the edge of the window to resize it. Also - with Windows 10 you don't grab the edge of the window, you grab the shadow. Which is not visible because shadows on dark desktops have no contrast.
Hip drop shadows and hip dark mode just don’t mix. Adding a dark mode after the fact is about as fun as writing tests for legacy code.
Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
#9I don't understand exactly what the writer is complaining about. The thesis of the page is never explicitly stated. I see a complaint, "Hmmm. It didn't have the share destination that I wanted" yet the author never states what option they were looking for. I would agree that, via the screenshot, the default options are all over the place and not prioritized well. However, the "Copy link" option is clearly visible. Be…
Author here. In this case, I wanted to share to Twitter. That would have resulted in the page title and URL being shared - so copy url wasn't a suitable.
But the actual destination is irrelevant. How was I (or any user unfamiliar with the interface) supposed to intuit that the panel was horizontally scrollable.
Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
#10The author links out to a writeup on Safari 15 which I found interesting: https://morrick.me/archives/9368
One of the main bizarre design choices was making the address bar shrink as you add more tabs. It made me wonder if these designs reflect the diminution of sites visited in a modern internet user's session. Seems like we are moving from a mode of research-and-explore to residing in one of a few home bases (reddit, twitter, etc) and everything else is reached via Google search -> first result. Since information delivery is now so heavily tailored to a person's filter bubble, there's not as much need to stray. I'd love to read more about something like this.