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Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

shkspr.mobi

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Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#121

Post by failwhaleshark »

kps wrote: post #89
failwhaleshark wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flat design is the definition of art because it creates something without the intention of usability. Functionality that is hidden isn't usable by definition. It always annoyed me in early Mac UX that there wasn't a specific affordance for additional interactive behavior. Option this, Ctrl that. Yes, they can be discovered socially and informationally, but that goes against intuitiveness.

The original Mac or Lisa was good in some ways, but it also problems with faux minimalism. In particular, Jobs insisted on a single-button mouse for 'simplicity', but that required inventing the entirely undiscoverable double click, which had to be taught, and still causes confusion today.

Yes. I agree. Also, the insistence on a "single task at a time" notion when real work required context switching.

Simplicity goes too far on the balance of, and in search for, advancement of design. Form + Function. Not an industrial beige box bucket of parts and not a confusing 2001 monolith, but something in the middle.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#122

Post by jacobkg »

DonHopkins wrote: post #60

The original Mac would pop up a dialog with a threatening icon of a bomb with a lit fuse, whenever it crashed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon) >The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) had a crash which the system decided was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box in Windows 9x th…

That reminds me that our Mac (circa 1992) had a menu option to “Erase Hard Disk”. My Dad would routinely remind us to never click this option and (unfortunately?) we never tried it.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#123

Post by lozenge »

failwhaleshark wrote: post #69
recursivedoubts wrote: post #2

UI 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.

Revell (Japanese) model kit instructions: We will show you every necessary step clearly and precisely using line drawn actions to provide as much accessibility to all people as possible. Only for very complicated concerns will we use language. Windows 95 UI: It might be fuggly, but you know where the bodies are buried. IKEA: We will show you how to assemble this sawdust into a crappy bookcase that doesn't sit square…

This light sometimes blinks green. Sometimes it blinks orange. What does it mean? Who knows.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#124

Post by prox »

todfox wrote: post #5

For 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 b…

I post this everytime, but for the love of UX, even if your the most hardcore code/terminal junkie… and never see a user near your program…read the book called About Face : Essentials of Interaction Design!

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#125

Post by failwhaleshark »

lozenge wrote: post #123
failwhaleshark wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Revell (Japanese) model kit instructions: We will show you every necessary step clearly and precisely using line drawn actions to provide as much accessibility to all people as possible. Only for very complicated concerns will we use language. Windows 95 UI: It might be fuggly, but you know where the bodies are buried. IKEA: We will show you how to assemble this sawdust into a crappy bookcase that doesn't sit square…

This light sometimes blinks green. Sometimes it blinks orange. What does it mean? Who knows.

It's either an Ethernet port light or one of those cryptic things from AliExpress without a manual.

----

There was once someone who knew.

It did have a useful purpose at one point for expert users, technicians, and engineers.

A large group came along chanting "What does it mean?" louder and louder until it was a thunderous war-cry.

The one who knew was trying to shout the answer but he was whispering in a tornado.

Then, someone else said loudly: "I don't understand. Let's just get rid of it."

Most everyone said: "Yeah! It's useless!"

No one listened and now that that understanding is lost like the Antikythera mechanism and Damascus steel to the sands of time.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#126

Post by zorrolovsky »

systemvoltage wrote: post #112
todfox wrote: post #5

For 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 b…

I tried reading the footer to get the contact information for on https://grumpy.website but it keeps doom-scrolling and only visible for a fraction of a second. What an irony. I dream of a day when we go back to pagination. No, not just pagination numbers on the bottom of the page to flip through pages, but also the URL should reflect that and be able to share the 7th page with someone using a link.

For some experiences, content needs to be updated in page 1 (google is a good example). How would you then share page 7? that requirement could only be met if content was static (no updates) or the ordering of results was old to new. Am I missing something?

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#127

Post by tacotacotaco »

andai wrote: post #86
tesseract wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horizontal lines (or sometimes an array of dots) are sometimes used as a "grip" icon to represent reorderable list rows.

I know, I've used them in my own designs. It just sounded like he saw a hamburger menu now for the first time 5 weeks ago! Or maybe it is some kind of joke?

Everyone sees the hamburger icon for the first time. It certainly isn't obvious what it means. You need to decide what is more important, that your site look contemporary or that your users can find the information/product/service they are looking for.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/hamburger-menus/

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#128

Post by stingraycharles »

> But there's evidence that Apple are slowly undoing their great usability work in the name of elegance.

Tangent, but am I the only one who is really bothered by the update they made to the way you set a clock (eg for an alarm or appointment) a few years ago? It’s now only digits which I am supposed to scroll vertically, which is incredibly tedious; before, it was an actual analog clock I could drag around and it was awesome.

To this day I still don’t understand why they did this, it seemed to serve no purpose to get rid of the old UX.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#129

Post by wlesieutre »

stingraycharles wrote: post #128

> But there's evidence that Apple are slowly undoing their great usability work in the name of elegance. Tangent, but am I the only one who is really bothered by the update they made to the way you set a clock (eg for an alarm or appointment) a few years ago? It’s now only digits which I am supposed to scroll vertically, which is incredibly tedious; before, it was an actual analog clock I could drag around and it was…

Are you talking about the time input like when you create a new alarm? The new one is a text field that you can drag the little digit spinners, but primarily you just type in it.

Being able to put times in with a proper numeric keypad is a big usability improvement IMO.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#130

Post by saurik »

gherkinnn wrote: post #8
chiph wrote: post #6

Not 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.

I would expect windows in dark mode to I guess have a subtle lighting behind them (as people sometimes do to objects in physical space).
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