41–50 of 241 posts
> Despite being endlessly fawned over by an army of professionals, Usability, or as it used to be called, "User Friendliness", is steadily declining. En contraire. The more usability professionals you hire, the worse your usability gets. It seems every dev team nowadays has at least a part-time designer. They come up with new, fresh ideas all the time and, of course, want to see it implemented. If it were only the De…
He's right about Gnome for sure. I used to use Ubuntu 14.04-16.04 from 2014 to 2019 along with macOS all these years. Although macOS has a lot of problems, I returned to Ubuntu (22.04) since July in a new workplace, and it is horrible. This weird empty horizontal top panel and menus behind the hamburger button are just madness.
Gnome 4 just looks alien. They've abandoned every common desktop metaphor and replaced it with a scuffed android launcher.
Why have desktop UI’s gotten so bad lately? My theory is that before we had UX experts, they had to hire, like, actual graphics designers.
There's also the perverse incentive created by having dedicated UX people. At some point the UI is at a good point and doesn't need significant improvement, but the UX person needs to justify their existence, so changes happen just for the sake of making changes. To me, Discord's UI - especially on mobile - exemplifies this perfectly. They change the image upload process every few months, alternating between various…
A couple of instances come to mind. The first was with CarPlay. They went from list of thing (playlists, podcasts, etc.) that you click on to get to a new section to a home page with a row of useless tiles and a "view all" that is difficult to get to if using something like a scroll wheel in a BMW. Thankfully the feedback was so bad that they reversed the decision. They made the mistake of thinking that everyone with a touchscreen in their car uses it.
The second is everything related to podcasts. Podcasts and music need to be completely isolated from one another because the method of browsing and maintaining are completely different. To this day there is no way to simply view a list that has all episodes for podcasts you follow and sort by recently updated. There is a "new episodes" thing that exists but if you click on something and back out it gets removed from the list. This assumes it is even updated, because clicking into loads from cache rather than doing a refresh. The only safe way to get an updated list of episodes is by hard closing the app and then re-opening it.
The author mentions they reserve judgement about Mac OS because of lack of experience. But I would say the same decline is happening here. Especially Apple themselves seem infatuated with hiding things behind slow hover effects and way-too-subtle shades of grey. This is hurting discoverable portions of the interface, probably in the name of looking sleek, and once you have learned that something exists somewhere behi…
MacOS went downhill when Jonathan Ive decided to throw out all colors in favor of the 'content'. To this day I spend too much time deciphering blue-greyish icon shapes in the Finder's side bar.
He's right about Gnome for sure. I used to use Ubuntu 14.04-16.04 from 2014 to 2019 along with macOS all these years. Although macOS has a lot of problems, I returned to Ubuntu (22.04) since July in a new workplace, and it is horrible. This weird empty horizontal top panel and menus behind the hamburger button are just madness.
Why have desktop UI’s gotten so bad lately? My theory is that before we had UX experts, they had to hire, like, actual graphics designers.
I think a lot of it is the other way around: graphics design driven by branding rather than UX. I also think the death of native development has a lot to do with it. The web is now the UI layer of desktop, but that means there is no consistent design language across the system.
no AB test ever performed in the history of user research has correctly measured the intense hormonal rage pheromones released by power users when a button is moved for any reason
Why have desktop UI’s gotten so bad lately? My theory is that before we had UX experts, they had to hire, like, actual graphics designers.
I think a lot of it is the other way around: graphics design driven by branding rather than UX. I also think the death of native development has a lot to do with it. The web is now the UI layer of desktop, but that means there is no consistent design language across the system.
My guess is that this happened because real UI designers are harder to come by and cost more, while generalists are more common and cost less. I’ve not hired for these positions though so I don’t know for sure.
The author mentions they reserve judgement about Mac OS because of lack of experience. But I would say the same decline is happening here. Especially Apple themselves seem infatuated with hiding things behind slow hover effects and way-too-subtle shades of grey. This is hurting discoverable portions of the interface, probably in the name of looking sleek, and once you have learned that something exists somewhere behi…
> and way-too-subtle shades of grey MacOS went downhill when Jonathan Ive decided to throw out all colors in favor of the 'content'. To this day I spend too much time deciphering blue-greyish icon shapes in the Finder's side bar.
Though
> On the desktop, however, a scroll bar is very useful for determining your current position in the content without having to break away from what you're presently doing and reach for the mouse.
You don't need a scrollbar for that, a tiny brightly colored (currently non-existing) indicator would suffice.
Along with
> If you're accustomed to a title bar being for handling the window and nothing else, it's very easy to misclick and activate an application feature you didn't intend to.
These are just a bunch of poor design features before "the decline" since they nudge the poor user to hunt down small slivers of windows (horizontal/vertical bar, and seriously, those tiny arrows on the scroll bar?) when instead they could have most of the window's area to perform these functions with some, dare I say, Windows key?