281–290 of 490 posts
I disapprove that. While jokes there indeed packs some hilarity and/or creativity, the title implies its real world UI misdesign, not just stuff made for giggles.
Seriously, we have tons of terrible UI solutions actually deployed and used. It might be much less funny to find them and make a gallery, tho.
I think the worst UI is simply the Teams one, because it presents as an app volume control but then simply controls the global device volume . Fuck off, you are not the only app running. But that comes second to the microphone gain control, which Teams similarly exerts unilateral control over - only this time through an automated algorithm that for some microphone types just ends up muting them entirely. It's wild, y…
Teams is the reference for bad UI. Paste a code block. Select a word in the code block. Copy and you get the whole block copied not the selected word. I could write a page of the issues like this. Maybe it would not be so bad if you only used Teams but when you use slack at the same time it is like someone is wacking you in the back of the head every few minutes.
Interactions still feel like your mouse pointer is moving through molasses. Notifications are misbehaved trash. Video calls make your CPU beg for mercy (useful if you want to fry eggs on your laptop though). Switching between multiple organisations is still miserable (although at least now you get notifications for other orgs instead of them just getting lost in the aether, never to be seen).
The funny thing is, none of these problems exist on the mobile apps, which are actually quite well-behaved. I guess that's because they have to use system APIs.
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One of the teens in the house has discovered you can say “Hey Alexa shut the fuck up”. I’m afraid the joyless Siri just ignores you when you say that.
I would like the Alexa team to reward politeness. Like if you say "Alexa, please mute", you could unlock a new voice or a funny joke or something.
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Just in case an MS engineer is reading these Teams gripes… On Mac, Teams does not honor system-level Do not Disturb. So when I turn off notifications during a presentation at work and my friend sends me snarky comments about our boss…
Teams’ notifications on Mac are an ongoing debacle. Because they are Microsoft’s own implementation, rather than using the system API, not only do they not respect DND, they also helpfully get lost behind other notifications that come in from properly designed applications. According to the Microsoft admin updates I’m subscribed to, native notifications on Mac have been in a beta channel for months, with a full rollo…
Car manufacturers are easily the winners here. If your car’s audio system doesn’t have a simple knob you can grab and twist, well, that just sucks.
If you parallel park daily you'll probably experience this every time: You jump in the car, start it and put it in reverse. The music will start playing after a couple of seconds at the level that you had during your noisy commute. You now have the choice to put your car in neutral, change the volume and then go back to reverse and exit your parking spot OR try to navigate out of your parking spot with music blasting.
> in the world I disapprove that. While jokes there indeed packs some hilarity and/or creativity, the title implies its real world UI misdesign, not just stuff made for giggles. Seriously, we have tons of terrible UI solutions actually deployed and used. It might be much less funny to find them and make a gallery, tho.
Nearly all volume controls suck because by and large the software world is ignorant of the fact that loudness scales logarithmically. 99.9% of volume controls scale the output linearly.
I wanted something more convenient than the Denon app for changing inputs and volume on my Denon A/V receiver, poked around a bit and found that the receiver has an HTTP API that the app uses, and decided to make a simple web page that could use that API. I could then add that to favorites in Safari and then control the receiver from the browser.
Here it is: https://imgur.com/a/ExkhOgO
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I think the success of Teams was a surprise to MS. It was ingenious to copy slack and push it on enterprise users though.
It's no surprise, that was classic MS strategy. Sell the thing everyone actually needs (Office, because they smothered the competition), but bundle it with something sticky which will also hoover up data about your workers - no need for the product to be any good, execs in charge of purchasing won't have to suffer with it for a fraction of the time employees spend. Oh also, I happen to have $200k of Azure credits her…
- Apple is the designer: I want to make everything beautiful and perfect. Sometimes that pesky messiness of reality gets in the way, but if that's the case, it's reality which should change.
- Google is the engineer: Yeah cool this project sounds good, let's replace that old technology with this new thing that will be so much better! We'll release the prototype in a month, and six months from now we'll have the whole thing done. Hmmm 4 months later, some of those details that took years to refine in the old version are actually pretty tricky, and these weird users like actually want to keep them... Yeah details are hard, let's put this project on back burner because now I'm excited about new project!
- Microsoft is the MBA: Products don't matter! They're just interchangeable widgets the grunts working below me have to concern themselves with. The important thing is what I can sell to upper management with my power-point presentation. We're data-driven, so as long as my KPI's improve, that means I have made the morally correct decision. If I can leverage or trick users into using the product the way I want, it means I'm good at my job!