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The end of the nice GTK button

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Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#611

Post by eyelidlessness »

phkahler wrote: post #538
eyelidlessness wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Accommodating disabled people is in no way an insult. 2. Being disabled is a normal fact of life, also not an insult. 3. Accessibility affordances are not only for disabled people. Lots of people who wouldn’t identify as disabled routinely and gladly use a wide variety of accessibility features. 4. Having difficulty identifying actionable elements like buttons isn’t about reading anyone’s mind, and it isn’t a univ…

1. Accommodating disabled people is in no way an insult. No, but treating non-disabled people as disabled could be. Just like offering help to some disabled people triggers them. I was going to respond to these numbered points in turn, but that'd be silly. My point is that having basic (previously standard) UI cues like buttons is important and stuffing that option anywhere is a poor choice. To put it under the acces…

> No, but treating non-disabled people as disabled could be. Just like offering help to some disabled people triggers them.

Putting this option in accessibility settings does no such thing. That assumption is what I take issue with, and what prompted all of my points above.

> My point is that having basic (previously standard) UI cues like buttons is important and stuffing that option anywhere is a poor choice.

I disagree. I often find designs with fewer borders and shapes easier to use—that is, more accessible to me—_because_ there’s less information for me to visually process to find what I’m looking for.

That said, I’d be perfectly fine if they inverted the default… or even just asked on first install/startup, with a note on where you can change it later if you change your mind.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#612

Post by michaelmrose »

harry8 wrote: post #211
azinman2 wrote: post #42

So basically the new GTK is iOS but without the professional designers behind it. What I cannot understand is how Canonical, Red Hat, or some rich SV person hasn’t thrown money at the problem and hired a big wig design firm or person to overhaul it all. Johnny Ive is now even available (if he’d take the project). But even going thru a site like dribbble there are so many amazing designers out there. To me it would be…

If you're Apple and you make your desktop more attractive and pleasant you drive sales and market share. If you're redhat and you resource that you drive market share, to Ubuntu, who I believe still have a policy of never paying for development except for Ubuntu things, eg their failed desktop nobody else would use, Mir, bzr, etc. Is that still the case? It would be a huge disincentive for other distros to contribute…

You may want to ask yourself why Red Hat despite having a lot more money and investing some of it in desktop Linux still has a fraction of the market share of Ubuntu. They are in a great position to dominate that market.

Instead we get a very rapid iteration with a 6 month release cycle that continually pulls in new tech prior to it actually being ready while it still has massive issues with end user experience including but certainly not limited to gnome 3, pulseaudio, gnome 3, wayland by default in 2016 which is now 6 years later supposedly almost fully ready for prime time.

My experience running Fedora for 7 years is that each release was a chance to play with new tech and fix new broken things. In place upgrades were also extremely dicey making a fresh install of the new version necessary every 6-9 months.

This is great for a toy less great great for something you intend to use. I'm sure current proponents say its great now but they literally have been saying the same thing forever.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#613

Post by michaelmrose »

marcosdumay wrote: post #191
flukus wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So basically the new GTK is iOS but without the professional designers behind it. Professional designers seem to be the ones creating these problems. Back when it was just programmers you could tell a button was a button, a tab was a tab and we didn't hide basic functionality behind a swipe gesture or long press that users were supposed to just know. Now everything is pretty but harder to use.

> you could tell a button was a button, a tab was a tab and we didn't hide basic functionality... Those conventions were created by usability experts after years of research. It wasn't simply programmers building them back then.

Arguably you have 4 camps.

1. Developers with a wide range of understanding of UI from negligible to acceptable.

2. UI experts who actually understand code.

3. UI "experts" in industry whose only skills are image editors.

4. Academics who did said research.

Seems like the entire problem is the ascendancy of Camp 3 which decision makers who being ignorant of technical matters themselves can't tell from camp 2.

Meanwhile everyone is ignoring camp 4.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#614

Post by chefandy »

sime2009 wrote: post #387
chefandy wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In many ways it is a victory of style over substance - UI's are now designed by the same crowd who designs high fashion, that is clothes not designed to be worn but to be gawked at. Oh? Where do the Gnome designers list their runway appearances on their site? https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/ I'm an art-school educated designer, decade+ full-time web developer for over a decade and regular FOSS contributor for about a…

The complaint about flat design isn't levelled only at FOSS, but at the whole industry. Your points may explain the situation in FOSS, but it doesn't explain the poor work being put out by the thousands of designers and UI/UX people working as professionals in industry. The failings of flat design are everywhere .

First, I was addressing design in FOSS because:

a) there probably aren't many lead designers, creative directors and art directors on this developer-centric site b) interface choices for most commercial products are deliberately made by other people c) interface choices for most FOSS projects are made by developers

Second, I didn't directly address the criticism for the same reason I don't go into game forums and argue with the inevitable teen tech wizard lobbing glib, unsubstantiated technical criticism at the "stupid devs." Their peers might believe their saying that a "microservices architecture" caused low frame rates in the last release, but professional developers will roll their eyes hard enough to sprain an eyelid.

I won't waste my time with a point-by-point teardown, but if you're actually interested, here's the first half dozen unsubstantiated assumptions I've seen here about design/designers and the design process:

- 'Flat designs' are uniform enough to judge their value as a unit. - A bad flat design was bad because it was flat— not the hundreds of other problems a design can have. - Designers change things solely to suit their taste or follow trends - Designers don't commonly test or measure usability with quantifiable, auditable data - Bad usability is acceptable if it looks good. - How well you parse something is representative of how everybody else does regardless of their culture, age, experience with other objects, experience with computers, vision, disabilities, etc. - Skeuomorphism was the most effective form to convey those visual cues.

aaaand the list goes on. It's fine that many developers don't totally understand how design works because nobody expects you to be a subject matter expert in anything other than development. That said, confidently making sweeping judgements about design and designers when you don't understand some important fundamentals is just bad form.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#615

Post by chefandy »

xg15 wrote: post #402
chefandy wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In many ways it is a victory of style over substance - UI's are now designed by the same crowd who designs high fashion, that is clothes not designed to be worn but to be gawked at. Oh? Where do the Gnome designers list their runway appearances on their site? https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/ I'm an art-school educated designer, decade+ full-time web developer for over a decade and regular FOSS contributor for about a…

> UI design as a discipline fundamentally assumes the person designing the interface doesn't intuitively understand what's better or what's worse— they should investigate, check, and confirm their strategies. As a developer who always had an interest in UI design but has zero formal education in the field, I be really interested to know more about this. Could you maybe explain some of those strategies? My subjective…

Yay! UI design is cool. I really love helping people solve their problems with software and often find the intellectual work involved with crafting their interactions to be far more interesting than getting the best algorithm for something, implementing the most reliable architecture, etc.

What I believe you're noticing is the the adoption of ideas under the (poorly named, IMO) UX umbrella. UI design is either considered part of it, or close enough to get the UX/UI slash treatment. It's not quite there as an idea— people can't decide if UX people are the same or UX Researchers are different than UX Designers or if UX Designers just do wireframes and user flows or also design UIs or if that's left to Interaction designers, blah blah blah. The base ideas seem to be an amalgam of human factors engineering, graphic/media design communication theories, and quantitative marketing type work.

While there are hundreds of trillions of articles on the topic by people thirsty for medium claps, I think the most interesting jumping-off point might be an image search for ux design process and using the charts you see to guide an exploration. The Nielsen Norman group has a TON of stuff online about the topic. Not just design itself, but measuring the maturity of usability organizations, research techniques, best practices and data strategies... I mean all kinds of stuff.

I think a lot of the ideas are tremendously valuable but much of what's written about it feels a little bit too much like marketing material. The ideas are presented a bit too confidently considering how often they change, and too much has that LinkedIN magic bullet kind of vibe. Also, like tech, the industry is subject to spike trends (like tech saw with NoSQL databases) and pendulum swings (like centralization vs. decentralization of services, thin vs thick clients, etc.) For something a bit more structured, the former Lynda.com, now LinkedIn Learning has some really fantastic educational resources on modern design of nearly any stripe.

I'll swing back through if I can think of any specific resources worth checking out.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#616

Post by apatheticonion »

brimble wrote: post #569
inetknght wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In Gnome, from the lock screen, I simply start typing my password. As soon as I type the first letter of the password, the password prompt appears, and when I'm done I hit enter and it unlocks. Congratulations! You were able to recognize that it's a _login screen_ without seeing that there's a hidden password field. The first time I booted to Gnome I waited damn near ten minutes for it to tell me it's ready for my…

Miming mobile OS lock screens is one of the weirdest damn things about modern desktop trends. It's so obviously a bad idea. I can't even figure out what useful functionality anyone thought that would provide. It's a fucking desktop, there's plenty of room to stick notifications or the weather or whatever on the same screen as the login prompt, if that's what you want.

Honestly it's what annoys me most about Gnome. I daily drive Gnome 4x but for the love of god stop making design decisions for mobile users.

- Why is there a full screen app drawer?

- Why does the top bar do nothing and function like my Android top bar?

- Why are there no icons in my tray for my background apps (steam, slack, etc)?

- Where can I go to see my current running applications?

I would love to use a Linux distro on my phone, but not at the expense of my Desktop experience.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#617

Post by j1elo »

eterevsky wrote: post #352
j1elo wrote: post #156

> I feel like the designers of this new theme have never sit down with anyone who's not a "techie" to explain to them how to use a computer. The designers of this new "everything is flat and devoid of visual hinting" trends are maybe, at most, enthusiast, but not professional designers. I don't mean professional in the "hired for work" sense, but in the "really has the knowledge and has studied the psychology behind…

> nobody with solid background, experience, and/or scientific studies in their hands would in their right mind sketch the current shape of mindless "modern" UIs So... Since you are talking about scientific studies, could you please reference some studies that back you up and show that flat design is in some way inferior?

That flat design is worse is maybe not an universal truth, but no doubt it is a well known issue and concern has been shown everywhere. Quoting from my first link below, flat design has been widely criticized by HCI and usability experts.

This is one of those things that I'm willing to believe, without requiring a whole hands-on research, based on my subjective views, and on the fact that every time the topic arises, most devs seem to agree.

So we know that flat design is worse, or at least we have a very firm intuition. The only remaining thing is to quantify by how much. This paper seems to go into that direction:

* https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-22668-2_...

This article is very interesting and offers a list of references:

* https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/skeuom...

And last but not least, there is a whole website which is solely dedicated to collect papers on the topic of flat design:

* https://flatisbad.com/

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#618

Post by marcosdumay »

michaelmrose wrote: post #613
marcosdumay wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you could tell a button was a button, a tab was a tab and we didn't hide basic functionality... Those conventions were created by usability experts after years of research. It wasn't simply programmers building them back then.

Arguably you have 4 camps. 1. Developers with a wide range of understanding of UI from negligible to acceptable. 2. UI experts who actually understand code. 3. UI "experts" in industry whose only skills are image editors. 4. Academics who did said research. Seems like the entire problem is the ascendancy of Camp 3 which decision makers who being ignorant of technical matters themselves can't tell from camp 2. Meanwhi…

That's my impression too. Camp 2 is also a problem when they decide to improve things under heavy time constraints, but it's mostly camp 3 being the issue, and camp 4 being ignored.

Meanwhile, camp 1 mostly won't break anything by themselves (developers do usually learn enough UX for that), but also are unable to fix anything.

I'll just add that camp 4 didn't exist only in universities by the time those things got developed. But they almost only exist there now.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#619

Post by johnqian »

Spivak wrote: post #580
matsemann wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree on iOS. Give an iPhone to someone never having used one before, and I'm sure they won't even be able to unlock it. I almost cringe when I see UX people with iPhones. Yes, it's esthetically pleasing, but please don't take too much inspiration from the way things work.

Yes but on the flip side I don't give two shits about discoverability, I already know how to use my phone. Snapchat is actively terrible for discoverability but it's really efficient once you know. The best design for someone who is unfamiliar and the best design for the user that already knows how it works are always at odds with one another. Do you balance the game for new players or for diamond league?

Exactly this. Design is always a compromise between discoverability and post-discovery efficiency. Programming languages are the extreme case of the latter; literally everything requires a reference, but once you’ve got the reference memorized you’re invincible.

Re: The end of the nice GTK button

#620

Post by Timpy »

apatheticonion wrote: post #616
brimble wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miming mobile OS lock screens is one of the weirdest damn things about modern desktop trends. It's so obviously a bad idea. I can't even figure out what useful functionality anyone thought that would provide. It's a fucking desktop, there's plenty of room to stick notifications or the weather or whatever on the same screen as the login prompt, if that's what you want.

Honestly it's what annoys me most about Gnome. I daily drive Gnome 4x but for the love of god stop making design decisions for mobile users. - Why is there a full screen app drawer? - Why does the top bar do nothing and function like my Android top bar? - Why are there no icons in my tray for my background apps (steam, slack, etc)? - Where can I go to see my current running applications? I would love to use a Linux d…

These things made me move away from Gnome. In gnome3 occasionally the login screen would require me to click the screen and drag upwards to get the login prompt. Customizing any if these things was always a hacky workaround. I'm very happy with Mint Cinnamon right now.
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