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Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

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Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#141

Post by OJFord »

andai wrote: post #79
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…

This is hilarious, but I'm puzzled by his reaction to a hamburger menu: > Oh-oh. Drag-n-drop icon used for a dropdown menu - May 8, 2021 https://grumpy.website/post/0V_dyk3EP

You're only puzzled because of its ubiquity, and your accustom to it. Nothing about it inherently says 'opens a menu from the side'.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#142

Post by makeitdouble »

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…

That’s one of the most interesting point to me:

Revell must have super clear, most hand holdy instructions possible, for a process that is long and finicky and they assume people will patiently go all the way anyway.

And that’s not just model kits, other Japanese company take the same approach. Finicky and painfully long but clearly explained.

In comparison IKEA spent decades to make shorter, clearer to assemble furnitures, so they can get by with less explaination.

Current day IKEA furniture is way sturdier, easier and faster to deal with than any other flatpack company I’ve seen, Japanese companies included (and I went through a bunch recently…)

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#143

Post by tomjakubowski »

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?

I don't think I'd seen a hamburger menu rendered on a list, for each item, before. Normally a "hamburger menu" appears once, probably at the top of the page, in some kind of navigation bar. In that context, that icon definitely reads "drag to re-order list item" to me.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#144

Post by yen223 »

bluGill wrote: post #131
crazygringo wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's extremely ungenerous, and no more true about designers than coders. Perhaps some designers start out have this immature attitude, but professional designers I've worked with are user-centered, not self-centered. That's just a professional prerequisite, and what you learn in design school as well. And in any case, you could just as easily say about programmers starting out that they too often believe "Their Mag…

Yeah, the lack seems to be the lack of qualified designers in the first place. Or maybe designers who are not givens enough time to do the job.

A lot of times, the approach that the designer took is the right one, and the approach the engineer proposed is flawed when tested with real people.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#145

Post by amatecha »

logbiscuitswave wrote: post #92
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…

Not sure if you’re being serious or not, but these stories seem awfully apocryphal to me. I can’t imagine anybody - not even a total novice - running away from their computer upon seeing a cartoony image of a bomb. It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time.

Yeah, nah, it's not an exaggeration. Even as a kid the first time I saw "illegal opeation" on a Windows machine I thought it meant something actually unlawful had occurred.

In the early 90's there was a prank Extension for Mac OS called "Radiation" and a partner application called "Trigger". Trigger would allow you to pop up a system alert dialog box over the Appletalk network on whichever machine had the Radiation extension installed, allowing some nice pranking opportunities. The default message was "The radiation shield on your Macintosh has failed. Please step back five feet." … It worked, and some people would literally jump away from their desk when they saw this message! Ahh, the good old days hahaha :)

(If you're still skeptical, I can probably dig up a copy of this software since I surely have it on an old disk somewhere, but of course I can't prove people moved away from the computer -- there's only my anecdote to go by here haha)

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#146

Post by amatecha »

specialist wrote: post #136
logbiscuitswave wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you’re being serious or not, but these stories seem awfully apocryphal to me. I can’t imagine anybody - not even a total novice - running away from their computer upon seeing a cartoony image of a bomb. It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time.

As a kid I pulled a lot of pranks. There's always a moment of plausibility. I recently heard this described as defaulting to truth. A hard wired trait which allows most of humanity to coexist. I once changed one buddy's autoexec.bat to prompt something like "illegal software detected, press [enter] to begin scan" and then repeatedly pipe a directory listing to null (causing the harddrive to make noises). He leaped up…

Ahhh yeah, a friend of mine made a boot floppy that echoed something like "Erasing C:\ ..." and maybe listing out filenames (hard to remember). I think he set some option so it wouldn't listen to keyboard input so you couldn't interrupt it? He found it absolutely hilarious, though I never got to see the prank in action, haha

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#147

Post by exporectomy »

Seems like old fashioned computer literate people are becoming the new computer illiterate. Perhaps kids learn these things socially from each other?

I recently discovered the iPhone Notes app has an undo capability. There's no indication of it on any of the screens but you have to shake the phone. Shake to undo? Is that common now? How do you learn this stuff?

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#148

Post by amatecha »

datavirtue wrote: post #102
logbiscuitswave wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you’re being serious or not, but these stories seem awfully apocryphal to me. I can’t imagine anybody - not even a total novice - running away from their computer upon seeing a cartoony image of a bomb. It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time.

Nope. I too have seen users freak out about illegal operations.

When I was a young kid, my family visited another family for a party at their house. I was trying to play SimCity or something on their computer, and the family's son, a bit younger than me, was there with me. Some error was coming up and I was trying to make it retry, but the computer kept beeping. The son was like "you're hurting it!" and got really upset that I was making the computer beep. I mean, I was a bit older and had a real laugh, but he was genuinely concerned for the well-being of the computer! IIRC he even ran to his parents because I was "hurting" the computer hahah

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#149

Post by amatecha »

webwielder2 wrote: post #91

It’s very funny to me that people think “the past” was a UX wonderland.

I mean… in the 90's, software didn't harass me to update every 15 minutes or pop up extraneous notifications that are irrelevant to my interests. Interactions were, in general, far more discoverable. You could come to rely on simple, consistent design cues to understand how something might work. A whole new piece of software was instantly usable because it adhered to the expected interface guidelines[0] defined for the OS.

In recent years, a lot of this has gone out the window and each dev house seems to invent their own paradigms and complete UI toolkits, so while there are similarities, they are few. The cohesive, simple nature of software UI is generally a thing of the past, that most of us who experienced it are quite nostalgic for.

Generally speaking, most application UX problems were "solved" ~30 years ago, and every time someone tries to reinvent the wheel, they miss subtle, important aspects of those earlier solutions. Like the importance of consistency across time, and "principle of least surprise", and things like that. I can really go on and on ad nauseam about this because it's a huge pet peeve of mine. I cannot stand having to relearn major aspects of how to use the same software, the same OS, every 6mo because some company decided it's time to completely overhaul their design/UI, for Reasons™.

[0] http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf

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