Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Decline of Usability (2020)

datagubbe.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 241 posts

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#71

Post by ho_schi »

Apple?

The people which removed the menu from the window and keep it separate to tease all users? Maximized windows and full-screen are itself a pain. I cannot use MacOS. Finder is especially bad.

The partially weird idea of GNOME (Hamburger-Menu) is also a copy of CSD-Style. Putting that aside GNOME did some really good things (keyboard-centric usage, dash and overview instead of a desktop, no desktop-icons and system-tray). Evolution does a great job in this regard, they use menu-bar and CSD-menu at same time (configurable). And Evolution doesn’t follow the strict GNOME release cycle, which has some bad side-effects (Epipany and WebKitGtk should also do that).

PS: GNOME has copied a lot of bad ideas from MacOS and killed at same time a lot of bad patterns from Windows (e.g. desktop metapher).

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#72

Post by alistairSH »

mceachen wrote: post #56
alistairSH wrote: post #52

Even worse, the trend away from good UX is leaking from software to hardware. Who at Kia thought this was a good idea? Three steps to open the door. Requires two hands. Good luck if you’re an amputee, have arthritis, can’t see the door unlock touch zone, or just can’t figure it out. https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=50&v=Rv5so7szIMM Then there’s Elon’s obsession with that stupid F1-style steering wheel. And V…

FWIW, those door handles are a copy of the Tesla Model 3 door handles (along with their usability issues). It’s very similar to everyone copying Apple’s auto-hiding scroll bars—usability be damned.

I thought the Tesla version popped out automatically. The Kia version requires the user to push the forward edge to manually pop the back edge out.

1. Unlock with barely visible touch zone.

2. Push forward edge, which flips out back edge/main handle

3. Grab and pull main handle.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#73

Post by _a_a_a_ »

m3047 wrote: post #67
li2uR3ce wrote: post #32

Despite the gutting of desktop usability for the sake of being mobile compatible, many environments still have zero presence on mobile. Can I PLEASE have my fucking scrollbar back now? I once spent a lot of my time and the time and the time of a developer trying to find a setting because there was no indication that a window had more content (a checkbox) to scroll down to. Something that would have been obvious befor…

I feel you. There is nothing today quite like _Inside Macintosh Volume I_ laying out out in drawings and prose (!) what the elements of a UI are, what they do, and how they work... almost like people had never seen a UI before. People must have had to think about it, they wrote a book for F sake. /s They devote ink and paper to declaring that modes are to be avoided, and why. The do's and don'ts of UI on page 70 are…

Today is your lucky day. Have a new word; Procrustean.

"forcing strict conformity through disregard of individual differences or special circumstances"

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/procrustean

"In Greek mythology, Procrustes ... was a rogue smith and bandit from Attica who attacked [read: killed] people by stretching them or cutting off their legs, so as to force them to fit the size of an iron bed."

"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes"

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#75

Post by yawaramin »

estebarb wrote: post #21
matthew_stone wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been possible to print double-sided since at least Lion/2008…

Only if you have a printer that supports it. Otherwise you have to do it by hand https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/how-to-print-dou...

If the hardware itself doesn't support it, how would the software?

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#76

Post by brazzy »

grishka wrote: post #61
li2uR3ce wrote: post #32

Despite the gutting of desktop usability for the sake of being mobile compatible, many environments still have zero presence on mobile. Can I PLEASE have my fucking scrollbar back now? I once spent a lot of my time and the time and the time of a developer trying to find a setting because there was no indication that a window had more content (a checkbox) to scroll down to. Something that would have been obvious befor…

Microsoft in particular seems hellbent on putting touchscreens in everything. They REALLY want to make it happen but seemingly no one is having it. There's ONE person I know who owns a touchscreen laptop and genuinely touches its screen on purpose. On your scrolling complaint — well, there's this desktop-specific thing that OP doesn't mention but that becomes very apparent once you start looking for it in old-school…

But then you need fixed window sizes, which is pretty damn annoying as well.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#77

Post by atoav »

hkpack wrote: post #70

"Inmates are running asylum" [1] - is one of my favourite books, was written in 2004, which describes how bad most of the interfaces are and the reasons behind it. Design solves problems which are not always obvious to the actual users. Using computers was always frustrating experience, but it improved dramatically over the last two decades for sure. I don't know how anyone couldn't see that. [1] https://www.amazon.c…

> but now UI is better than ever

Now the question is, for whom? Users are not a uniform block.

I suspect: For those unwilling to learn the tools they use on a regular basis.

Because for those who are willing to put in the work, most general purpose software got worse, in terms of how many layers of menus you have to click through, how well default shortcuts are thought out, etc.

This is the old poweruser vs one-time user tension. Granted, good design can resolve that tension in a way that makes both classes of user happy, but that costs development time and research.

In doubt today's software company often priorizes habing an "intuitive UI" over making it efficient. The first onboarded user counts more than rhe one using the thing a hundred times a day. That is a design decision and it is made for economic reasons. However if the typical web startup designed a supermarket cash register we would still be waiting in the line because the animations take their time, the multi step process takes more clicks, etc.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#78

Post by kazinator »

The decline in usability ("enshittification") is due to a readily evident change in incentives behind the software.

You're no longer selling a shrink-wrapped application in a competitive market, where you compete on usability.

You're giving it away, while figuring out how to extract value out of the user in other ways.

Online services that have captive users (e.g. the one and only government site you have to use for some service) don't have any incentive to improve their user experience. But that is not new. There was no previous version of that which had a better user experience; the previous version was an obstinate bureaucracy driven by paper pushing in the backrop of rigid protocols. What you see is just the computerization of that.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#79

Post by CoastalCoder »

li2uR3ce wrote: post #32

Despite the gutting of desktop usability for the sake of being mobile compatible, many environments still have zero presence on mobile. Can I PLEASE have my fucking scrollbar back now? I once spent a lot of my time and the time and the time of a developer trying to find a setting because there was no indication that a window had more content (a checkbox) to scroll down to. Something that would have been obvious befor…

This feels like a modern rewrite of "Falling Down" :)

* That's not a criticism. I agree with your take on it.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#80

Post by dgb23 »

bee_rider wrote: post #26

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.

My theory is that UI has the exact same problem as programming:

We don't know what we're doing.

- Corporate interests lead to enshitification and chasing after local maxima.

- We never learn from the past, new blood comes in faster than seniority can deal with.

- Trends and fashion give us comfort and a superficial feeling of (faux) improvement.

- Preferring change over stability.

- Vague methodologies and adages that sound good, instead of dry, actionable quality metrics.

- Proliferation of bureaucracy and marketing.

- Productization instead of standardization leads to a lack of foundations that can be relied upon.

Post reply on HN