Slightly off topic, but possibly my biggest annoyance with web design is trying to find where the designer hid the Logout link. This, on a web site designed with endless negative space. I swear for a while the site of either my electric or gas utility literally didn't have one. I'd eventually just shrug and close the tab.
The Decline of Usability (2020)
111–120 of 241 posts
Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How often do you lose work because of crashes or not enough undo steps? Crashes and too few undo steps are not a UI/UX problem, they are a software quality/hardware limitations (enough memory or storage to hold all those steps) problem. Software reliability has definitely gotten better in many aspects, as long-lived software applications and operating systems have been through the crucible of time and learned from…
>are not a UI/UX problem Never said UI, but they are absolute usability & user experience problems. Arguably the most important ones! This is exactly what I mean by missing the big picture. What do you think has more impact on completing a task and the experience of completing that task? A working maybe slightly inconsistent toolbar, or the thing crashing and loosing your work? > The article actually says the same th…
> This is exactly what I mean by missing the big picture.
The point you are making is a different one than the one that the OP is making. Just because you are making a specific (different) point, doesn't make the OP's point invalid.
> Great example of something that you couldn't do and now can, times are truly great right now.
Again a different point. Of course we now have a proliferation of different and powerful software. The point I am making is about the UI/UX of the software, not about the fact that they make something possible that wasn't before.
Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm a UI/UX layperson by any measure, but as an avid vim user, I actually wish modes were everywhere and I could use every app with the keyboard alone
The way Microsoft office handles this is pretty wonderful. Alt reveals the keyboard shortcuts and they work in a very intuitive way. All pretty discoverable once you learn the one "alt" key trick.
(Side note, for mouse-work, They're now starting to f** with their ribbon a bit and the hidden/simplified version is just terrible, but they haven't forced that upon us yet.)
To handle the lack of vim modes in other apps, I just use a keyboard with my own custom QMK firmware that makes my keyboard have modes. That works well enough for 90% of what I'd be doing in VIM.
Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)
#114I 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…
The stages of decline from user-centred design to abuser-centred design:
-1- The Beginning. We want people to like our product. We will care and listen. We will dedicate resources to usability. Happy customers make us happy.
-2- The Middle. Usability is hard. Building ergonomics and affordance is not as easy as we thought. And then there is Internationalisation (I10N). We had to learn most of this ourselves because no one teaches these domains. Contractors are expensive.
-3- The Decline. We want to develop more features. Hire more programmers. Sack the usability team -- whatever we needed to accomplish is achieved. (Sack the documentation team too. Software developers are engineers... they can write FAQs!)
-4- The Bottom of the Barrel. We threw features galore at our customers in a series of brilliant sprints, yet our customers are unhappy. What's wrong with them?
Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)
#115There is a misconception that consistency == usability. It's an important part of usability but there is a lot more to it. Tunnel vision on consistency (or anything really) doesn't lead to good outcomes. The big picture is what matters: can someone do what they need to do? Articles like these also have lots of opinions, no research and stats, nor have decent explanations of how much impact these "problems" actually h…
> Articles like these also have lots of opinions, no research and stats,
Oh you’re in the data driven club. I bet you even A/B test. Good luck with that.
Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
From my perspective as a dev, this is what happened: UI designers who had been trained on usability, who had a good grip on what was/wasn’t feasible technically, and knew to take content variability into account were almost wholesale replaced with more generalist print/graphic designers who were great at pumping out pretty branded PSDs, but not so great at producing usable UIs. My guess is that this happened because…
It can also just be a result of oversupply of certain college degrees. Back in the late 90s to early 2000s there was a big trend of graphic design degrees at universities probably far in excess of available jobs for that specialty. I knew a bunch of these and many went into web design, and now I’m sure are doing UI design now that the web engine is the de facto standard UI engine everywhere but mobile. (Even on mobile it has an increasing presence.)
Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)
#117Slightly off topic, but possibly my biggest annoyance with web design is trying to find where the designer hid the Logout link. This, on a web site designed with endless negative space. I swear for a while the site of either my electric or gas utility literally didn't have one. I'd eventually just shrug and close the tab.
If they could hide the close button they would.
Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somewhat related: As someone who likes working on a single screen I typically like to open things in full-screen mode by default. MacOS plays a sluggish animation when switching between screens. You can't turn it off, you can just switch between two similarly slow ones. I can't imagine a good reason for this. What is their model of a user and how did they derive "slow animation when switching windows is good" from th…
> MacOS plays a sluggish animation when switching between screens... Perhaps: System Settings... Accessibility > Display: Reduce Motion
That just switches from one slow animation to another.
Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. For me personally macOS (or OS X back then) usability peaked at around ~Snow Leopard and it's been _mostly_ though not entirely downhill from there on. Hard to pick a 'worst offender', the System Settings panel in Ventura may be a good example, it is a literal struggle every single time I need to change something, typically as a result of some setting mysteriously changing itself back to what I do not want.
From just a UI point of view, my preference is MacOS 8 — and I don't mean Mountain Lion, I mean Classic. The rest of the OS would be a nightmare today for so many reasons; but the UI was fantastic.
I loved MacOS 8 as well. It was a nice improvement from the System 7.6.
The only thing I didn't like about MacOS was occasional system lock-up and application crashes due to real multi-threading. Back then, when your Mac crashed, it crashed hard... like your cursor didn't move. ;-)
Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)
#120UX designer here who has done nothing but design web, mobile and related UI since about 2000, mostly working for or at large consumer brands (and now thinking of retiring).
I'd definitely agree with the idea that change for change's sake is responsible for a lot of usability problems.
But a bigger problem is the near extinction of any professional discussion or capable analysis of design by the people who are doing it.
Most designers I work with don't have the vocabulary or knowledge about what makes something "usable" in the wider sense, let alone the ability to actually solve subtle interaction design or information display problems. With no knowledge or interest in basic heuristics, they literally don't know where to start. So they just live in Figma playing with colours, shapes and effects, pausing only to show some variations of the same UI for "user testing". It's become a wilfully ignorant, "non-technical" cult of innovation that's completely lost sight of its original purpose.
To say I'm ashamed of my profession is no exaggeration. We've failed so badly.