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The Decline of Usability (2020)

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Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#161

Post by ProxCoques »

cuddlecake wrote: post #143
ProxCoques wrote: post #120

UX 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 i…

As a frontend dev, what are good resources to learn about principles and heuristics that I can apply in my work? I have some knowledge, albeit very primitive, that I picked up from an HCI introduction and some good designers, but nothing too technical / formal yet.

It's more about trying to work out what motivates people to do things while using some reasonably simple tools like the N/N web heuristics to guide you. More a way of thinking straight about what qualifies as a good design under a certain condition, and what hypotheses to research and test out of that. So it's contextual. It may seem like there should be a more logical formula, but there's really not a lot of technical/formal things (along the lines of, say, accounting or structural engineering) that lead you to the best approach. My frustration is not that people don't necessarily know about these things (although I bet if I mentioned Bruce Tog to anyone at work they'd give me a blank stare), but that they can't marshal them in their work.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#162

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

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…

Eh, Apple's ideas are not to be taken as gospel. This is the company that fielded UI that's as bad (or worse) than everything we're complaining about here, decades earlier.

For example: secret alternate menus. You can actually press modifier keys on the Mac while a menu's open and sometimes you get totally different menus. These are not indicated anywhere. So theoretically every menu on a Mac may have... let me do the math here... eight sets of contents using Control, Option, Shift and all combos of those. So according to Apple, you should open every menu and mash every combo of modifier key to see what's in each... and memorize them.

Another Apple menu defect is to start every entry with the same word:

VIEW

Show meters

Show clips

Show this

Hide that

Hide the sense

Show WTF the point is

This makes the first word of every entry nearly useless, and massively degrades the usability of the View menu. You have to sit there and parse the first part of every line, which only has two options... both of which are four characters, BTW, and thus visually the same size.

You don't do this; you use CHECKMARKS, which we learned decades ago. Some Mac apps do this, but many Apple ones still have this asinine convention of "show" and "hide" repeated over and over.

VIEW

• Meters

• Clips

  This
• That

• The sense

  WTF the point is
But that brings us to another classic Mac menu defect: The misuse of the Window menu. This menu is supposed to show names of open windows in an MDI-type situation. But Mac apps often bury View options in the Window menu, apparently expecting the user to guess that whatever they're looking for has been implemented as a window. Why would I go into the Window menu to activate audio meters, for example?

And most of the time, whatever the option is has NOT been implemented as a window.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#163

Post by pseudalopex »

codeptualize wrote: post #145
pseudalopex wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These things were studied in decades past. Did you demand research and stats when Microsoft made it impossible to tell which window is focused? What benefits were claimed?

My whole point is that usability is not about small details but the ability to complete a task. The big picture. I don't use windows, I don't like it, but if [it being impossible to tell which window is focussed] doesn't impede people accomplishing the things they need to do, it's probably a cosmetic, at best a minor usability problem.

Usability is the ease of completing tasks. Not ability.

You seem very invested in dismissing constructive criticism. And you demanded research but provided none.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#164

Post by yawaramin »

codeptualize wrote: post #136
yawaramin wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 so…

The article states that usability is declining, the arguments to back that up are: things are somewhat inconsistent and I don't like [some UI patterns]. My point is that the claim is wrong, and the arguments don't support it and have little to do with usability. This follows from a misconception that usability, UI, and user experience are the same thing, which is really showing a lack of understanding of what they ac…

If you insist on nitpicking with a specific definition, you can of course dismiss the points in the OP. But if you try to understand what it's saying on its own terms–it's obviously talking about UI/UX and using the term 'usability' in a colloquial way. All the examples given in there are examples of bad UI/UX. Your point that it's possible to do things now that weren't back in the day, is just completely off on a different tangent than the actual thesis of the OP. I don't even know what to say except that it's a strawman.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#165

Post by mdaniel »

euroderf wrote: post #155
scioto wrote: post #17

When iOS introduced the long press, that pretty much did it for me: I couldn't tell what user interface element did what when I pressed on it, so I tried tapping everything. And now we have to long-press on things to make them do other things. I can't spend time tapping then long-pressing on elements to do what I think or hope the app can do.

A UI convention for "long-press-able" might be a start.

May I vote for ellipsis overlaid on one corner of the element?

  -------...-
  | Primary |
  -----------
unobtrusive, "..." indicates more was omitted in every context I can think of, and it can be any number of colors because it's so visually distinct (err, of course, except for the same color as the background, but if someone was that evil, we're right back where we started from in the "I dunno, guess" realm)

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#166

Post by sannysanoff »

It happened to me to be part of a project where design was made by a young female friend of mine. After reviewing it (lots of gray semitones, including dark gray text on black, and subtle difference between active and not active elements), I asked her "but..... why?". She honestly answered that she perfectly differentiates one from another. Later I learned that grown men have drastically different color perception than younger women.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#167

Post by the_af »

grishka wrote: post #89
the_af wrote: 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…

Yes, it's that as well. Imagine you've already designed everything that needs designed across all your products, but you still employ an entire department of graphic designers that need something to do . You wouldn't just fire them, right? That's how all those UI redesigns happen. I've seen it myself. "We need to change it because it's been a while since we last changed it." The omnipresence of high-speed always-on i…

I'm sympathetic to developers trying not to get fired -- I'm a developer myself! But from the user's side it's often ridiculous.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#168

Post by mdaniel »

ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #152
SoftTalker wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have always felt that the pinnacle of Windows usability was Windows 2000 Professional. Clean, mostly intuitive, few gratuitous animations. It's been downhill ever since.

I didn't have any problem with XP. I can't recall a single major irritant in its UI.

Did you leave the cartoon UI enabled? Because I recall XP not being a terrible release once one put back the "yes, I'm a professional, less crayola, please" UI elements

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#169

Post by zootboy »

wredue wrote: post #142
dgb23 wrote: post #58

Earlier 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…

People absolutely LOVE slow animations for general OS use. Personally, I want for what I asked to happen to actually happen when I press a button, but I am far and away the minority. What’s even worse, is that developers today have taken this “people love animations” stance and decided “hey, we can get away with utterly shit tier performance by just making an animation!” And so 15 second page loads are now the norm b…

My new favorite punching bag for this is Discourse. It's literally just a forum. Some text and maybe a few images. Nothing crazy. But their "new and improved" system has a stupid lazy-load design that takes 7 _seconds_ to load. The root document https transfer completes in 500 ms. What the flying fuck is going on in that remaining 6500 ms?

And it's not just the first time. Every time you refresh the page, 7 seconds. And they have the audacity to call this towering pile of javascript nonsense "simple": https://www.discourse.org/about

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#170

Post by dgb23 »

wredue wrote: post #142
dgb23 wrote: post #58

Earlier 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…

People absolutely LOVE slow animations for general OS use. Personally, I want for what I asked to happen to actually happen when I press a button, but I am far and away the minority. What’s even worse, is that developers today have taken this “people love animations” stance and decided “hey, we can get away with utterly shit tier performance by just making an animation!” And so 15 second page loads are now the norm b…

Every application developer or UI designer should be forced to sit next to a non-technical person for a couple of hours who uses a slow machine (partly because it's infested by programs and services that they absolutely don't need), while browsing the web or using common applications.

It breaks my heart how much precious time and nerves of these users we're wasting.

They use outdated devices, that still should work perfectly fine, but are grinded down by extremely slow programs.

They don't understand many of the fancy UI patterns _at all_. UI elements without text are the worst offender. Animations and hover effects routinely and reliably get in their way.

They get confused all the time because their UI changes: "I could always click the frobniz here, but now it's gone and everything looks different."

Their system is basically stuck in "dark patterns".

Their internet connections are often relatively slow and unreliable, but common software assume that it's always available going full blast.

To do even basic tasks, they are nudged into registering to this or that, when often a simpler, less invasive solution exists.

They spend ungodly amounts of time navigating stuff, while getting distracted by notifications, misleading information and so on. Often giving up in complete frustration.

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