361–370 of 417 posts
Are we really saying that there are lots of users who not only confuse the Amazon interface for a browser, but also enter URLs replete with https:// at the beginning?
It seems much more likely that Amazon includes their product URLs in their suggestion set.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and there is no obvious preexisting mental model shared by non-specialists Strong disagree. Looking at the URL bar in Firefox vs Chrome is a great example of how Chrome nailed an "obvious preexisting mental model shared by non-specialists". We can look at things like the design of door handles, and clearly see how the shape of the human hand influences the design. If we had tentacles, door handles probably would lo…
> If we had tentacles, door handles probably would look more different. I would love to see a virtual reality app that plays with different organism layouts, and solving the usability issues. There is a lot of great sci-fi that tries to consider how a world would be designed for non-humanoids, or mixed aliens, or the reverse archaeological problem of calculating how aliens look from what they have left behind. I am s…
The whole Wayfarers series is amazing in my opinion.
This is a good example of making the mistake of conflating implementation details and user interface design. Firefox always had two boxes: URL bar and search. One of the big changes Chrome made when it was born was to have the Omnibar, being of course one bar that does both. If you think about this as an engineer, Firefox's design decision makes sense. You don't want to accidentally leak things to a search engine. UR…
I am going to disagree since I believe that people should have a basic knowledge of the tools they are using. I am not saying that the bar should be particularly high, but being able to differentiate where something is and searching for something is a realistic expectation. That being said, I think developers have made some things more difficult to understand than they should be. While people understand what an addre…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> three-dimensionally I had actually never put it into words before now, but that makes a lot of sense, and it actually accurately describes how I see my screen. To me, the OS taskbar is "higher" (as in, closer to me) than the application window title bar, which in turn is higher than whatever controls are in the application itself (think Firefox back and forward buttons, URL bar, setting menu etc), which is itself h…
Well, user interfaces used to be styled to look 3D: https://pics.computerbase.de/5/7/4/1/0/1-1080.130195173.jpg https://i1.wp.com/www.thespinningdonut.com/wp-content/upload... Everything had bevels (XP) and/or shading (Vista) that evoked a 3D appearance. Buttons are extruded (and appear to physically move down when pushed), menus overlay each other, text boxes are "inset". Nowadays though... it is apparently a cardin…
As a side note I found it comical that they're using computer UI-styled buttons printed onto actual paper on a physical machine instead of "real" push buttons, but I guess it's a cost-saving thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's true. What I don't get is the reluctance to seek out learning opportunities. They won't watch a video, attend a class, read a book, none of that. It's like picking up a hobby if you're computer illiterate. They spend all the money on the device and expect what exactly? Yet if they bought a DSLR they would know it's a hobby and they need to learn a thing or two. They'd invest in learning like people do with any h…
It's a cliché at this point but they don't want a hobby, they just don't want to be an outcast from society (especially in the last year and a half)
Those closing lines are applicable to so many other things, I like it! - [Users/Drivers/Students] don't really understand [interfaces/traffic/life] - [Computers/infrastructure/schools] don't really understand [users/drivers/students] - [Big Data/City Planners/Education Dept.] assumes that [users/drivers/students] are behaving in semi-rational manner
The world is so poorly understood by everyone but in the end things are fine. Users don't fully understand UI but it doesn't matter because they make do. The majority manage to buy their product on Amazon just fine.
It is like the most meta description of how things are that I believe anyone has ever come up with!
This is a good example of making the mistake of conflating implementation details and user interface design. Firefox always had two boxes: URL bar and search. One of the big changes Chrome made when it was born was to have the Omnibar, being of course one bar that does both. If you think about this as an engineer, Firefox's design decision makes sense. You don't want to accidentally leak things to a search engine. UR…
I am going to disagree since I believe that people should have a basic knowledge of the tools they are using. I am not saying that the bar should be particularly high, but being able to differentiate where something is and searching for something is a realistic expectation. That being said, I think developers have made some things more difficult to understand than they should be. While people understand what an addre…
Like why is the domain big endian and the path small endian? Leads to endless confusion and has been a source of many fraud attacks.
On the other hand a post address is equally unnatural. Street name-> street Number-> Postcode is not in consecutive order of significance. Yet everybody handles such without problem.
A big factor is also unreadable query strings like ?q= instead of simple paths like /search/.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am going to disagree since I believe that people should have a basic knowledge of the tools they are using. I am not saying that the bar should be particularly high, but being able to differentiate where something is and searching for something is a realistic expectation. That being said, I think developers have made some things more difficult to understand than they should be. While people understand what an addre…
> I believe that people should have a basic knowledge of the tools they are using. I strongly disagree with this. Does anyone remember what connecting to Wifi looked like? I'm talking 15+ years ago. Here's how it would go: 1. Click a network 2. Choose an option from WEP, WPA, WPA-PSK, WPA2 and WPA-PSK 3. Be prompted with a either a password, a key selection or a box that generates a bunch of keys. Enter what you thin…
>But users don't care about any of that so there's no point in asking them. You're just forcing users to make decisions they don't care about, don't need to know it and aren't interested in. For what?
Because if it's not secure, and the lack of security results in someone stealing the user's password and wiping their account, the user will indeed care about it.
The user does in fact care about the consequences of the thing he "doesn't care" about; he's just incapable of connecting those. It's like a user not caring about whether there's gas in his car because he knows nothing about cars. He'll care about it when the car stops running.
This is a good example of making the mistake of conflating implementation details and user interface design. Firefox always had two boxes: URL bar and search. One of the big changes Chrome made when it was born was to have the Omnibar, being of course one bar that does both. If you think about this as an engineer, Firefox's design decision makes sense. You don't want to accidentally leak things to a search engine. UR…
I don't think this is correct at all. Google's decision was intentional to capture every request, even ones who are simply searching for a known domain. Users adapted to google's pattern and learned things the wrong way. This is only one example of the damage caused by very-low-friction, addictive interfaces. Users have increasingly lost the capability to navigate hierarchical interfaces and increasingly use web sear…
This is a good example of making the mistake of conflating implementation details and user interface design. Firefox always had two boxes: URL bar and search. One of the big changes Chrome made when it was born was to have the Omnibar, being of course one bar that does both. If you think about this as an engineer, Firefox's design decision makes sense. You don't want to accidentally leak things to a search engine. UR…
Firefox actually had both, you could always search with the "main" bar. That's why having two has been so infuriating over the years, if I ever had to use Firefox, I've removed the search bar immediately. However, one thing that Firefox failed to fix over dozens of versions have been one-word-searches, which Chrome handled correctly while Firefox tried to resolve that one word as a domain and didn't even fall back to…
For the single word searches, I've never noticed such a problem. It should try to resolve it first, in case it exists on your LAN, and falling back to search works fine for me.