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The Decline of Usability (2020)

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101–110 of 241 posts

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#101
post #61

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…

I have to admit that using a touchscreen laptop with a decent pen has made my university life a breeze. Ability to whip out a laptop and have all the notes, from all the years, searchable, with drawings just as good as when they were drawn and even better, because I can fix them and annotate them anytime... makes me feel like a terminator machine.

And it is the main reason I am stuck with Windows, despite also enjoying the 'normal' pc experience on linux much more than Windows bloat.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The issue is that the printer manufacturer needs to provide a printer driver for MacOS that gives MacOS access to that printer capability. (One could argue that Apple should write the driver, and they might for very popular devices.)

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#103

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#104

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 was with you, until you got to the slider switch part. Now I'm with you AND my blood is boiling. Nice to know it's not just me though - I find the ambiguous slider switches in way too many apps now!

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#105
post #61

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…

I've had touchscreen laptops for about 7years now. The only time that the touchscreen gets used is when somebody is showing me something, doesn't realize it's a touchscreen, and accidentally borks whatever we were looking at.

It's strange - I love to optimize my flow, but I just haven't yet hit a situation where my hands leaving keyboard and touching the screen is faster. (I'm a die-hard and proficient track point user,and my hands never leave keyboard, so maybe I'm a special weird case?)

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#106
post #54

I cannot prove it, but I think some of these UI and UX horrors are caused by the ever present need for software to change in order to demonstrate it is alive. Imagine you reach peak usability in $YourApp, in the year of our lord 2023. It's maybe not perfect , but there's no conceivable way your app's usability can improved past this point. Users are reasonable proficient, everything mostly clicks into place past the…

Completely agree: change for the sake of change. I held my breath for a while after Office 2007, hoping the Open/Libre Office developers wouldn't be tripping over themselves to implement the Ribbon, too. That they've held fast all these years is one small bright spot.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#107
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or what about the scrollbar hiding automatically so its really hard to manualy grab the scrollbar handle and scroll with your mouse. Specially in long lists super annoying.

There's a setting to always show the scrollbars.

Ah, yes, the "Beware of the Leopard" school of design. Everything is possible, nothing is forbidden, but the defaults are terrible and the controls are hidden as well as they could possibly hide them.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#109
post #54

I cannot prove it, but I think some of these UI and UX horrors are caused by the ever present need for software to change in order to demonstrate it is alive. Imagine you reach peak usability in $YourApp, in the year of our lord 2023. It's maybe not perfect , but there's no conceivable way your app's usability can improved past this point. Users are reasonable proficient, everything mostly clicks into place past the…

[deleted]

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#110

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…

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