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The Decline of Usability (2020)

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Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#171

Post by hjkl0 »

This is just a rant about some minor usability issues in a very small selection of applications used by the author, and mostly Gnome. There’s is nothing behind it.

The title is click-bait and the article is a waste of time.

There’s some very dubious claims, such as:

> There was a time (roughly between 1994 and 2012) when a reasonably computer-literate user could sit down in front of almost any operating system and quickly get to grips with the GUI, no matter what their home base was. Windows, MacOS, CDE, OpenStep, OS/2 and even outliers like Amiga, Atari and BeOS all had more in common than what set them apart.

Personally, having used many of these systems during those years, I completely disagree.

There is no further context or evidence to support this claim. It’s just “the premise”.

This is then contrasted with vague generalizations about the current situation:

> Today, it seems we're on another track completely. Despite being endlessly fawned over by an army of professionals, Usability, or as it used to be called, "User Friendliness", is steadily declining. During the last ten years or so, adhering to basic standard concepts seems to have fallen out of fashion

While there is no evidence for the claim that usability was better in the 90s, there are some examples to show that it’s worse now.

But these are more like pet-peeves, and there’s no evidence or theory to show why they’re good or bad, just more vague generalizations.

> Since Windows 2 (not 2000 - I'm really talking about Windows 2), users have been able to resize windows by dragging their top border and corners. Not so with Slack, anymore.

This is not the decline of usability. It’s the decline in respect for the reader.

There really was a time when a title faithfully represented the text that followed it, right? It must have been sometime around 1994.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#172

Post by aequitas »

Y-bar wrote: post #2

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…

> hiding things behind slow hover effects

I can’t for the life of me understand why it’s a good idea to hide the close button for notifications or virtual desktops behind a long mouseover on any spot that is not the actual location of where the close button pops up.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#173

Post by layer8 »

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.

Apple should have established long press for the purpose of context menus in iOS, from the start. When I got my first iPhone around 2009, I was rather surprised that this wasn’t a standard convention, like right-click on the desktop. It seemed so obvious that that’s how things should work. Instead we now have long press for random purposes.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#174

Post by layer8 »

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.

IMO it should behave like right-click (context menu) on the desktop, which generally doesn’t require an indication.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#175

Post by d33d33 »

_y5hn wrote: post #146
mk89 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best is that if you (junior or senior) bring this up, you're either shut down by management because you don't have the right expertise (how dare you, especially if you like me are mostly working in backend) or by the UX guy saying 1) it's a best practice, and 2) if they ran a research/survey, they found that it makes "almost no difference" - the major points are xyz (which is something really worse that requires…

Not just a front end problem. As a customer of facebook, netflix, hbo,prime, disney+ etc., it continually amazes that these expensive devs can't make the backend remember what I watched and not. Combined with an "engaging" front end that hides what I'm interested in and shifts the interface randomly, the experience is pretty low.

i think they do it on purpose just to give you the feeling of having a lot of content. Hate it, too.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#176

Post by mmphosis »

yawaramin wrote: post #88
ho_schi wrote: post #71

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 syst…

The separated window menu which is always attached to the top of the screen, is a usability win. It gives you much more leeway to move your mouse and hit the target you're aiming for. See: Fitt's Law.

I agree with you, except personal preferences get in the way. I would prefer the detached menu bar at the top of a monitor, others like the menu bar on every window, others want neither, or a hamburger menu, or a jumble of confusing tabs, or ...

Preferences are my preference. The interface can be switched around and modified, turned off, turned on, completely removed, installed again. Not just the menu bar, but all sorts of interfaces: windows/tabs > checkbox/radio/list/combo/popup-menus and at various levels: virtual system > system > application > document/file > paste/clipboard/shelf > view/drawer. For example, why can't we have different running Apps appearing as tabs within a single window? I think we could have much much richer interfaces.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#177

Post by paulryanrogers »

d33d33 wrote: post #175
_y5hn wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just a front end problem. As a customer of facebook, netflix, hbo,prime, disney+ etc., it continually amazes that these expensive devs can't make the backend remember what I watched and not. Combined with an "engaging" front end that hides what I'm interested in and shifts the interface randomly, the experience is pretty low.

i think they do it on purpose just to give you the feeling of having a lot of content. Hate it, too.

They intentionally change cover art for exactly this purpose

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#178

Post by sharts »

The problem is that UI/UX people are product and design people whose backgrounds were predominantly in art or similar. 99% of these folks have no background psychology, human factors, information science or the cognitive sciences.

What can be expected when you hire these people?

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#179

Post by toss1 »

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.

I'm not a UI/UX designer, and am equally frustrated by the failures described in the article and other comments.

One item I can bring to the table from the world of designing cockpits for racecars and airplanes is that the primary principle to follow is:

Reduce Driver/Pilot Workload.

Does whatever you are doing around the workspace increase or decrease the work that the driver or pilot must do? Can the status of [thing] be discovered (read/heard/felt) with minimum time and effort? Does [thing] create an otherwise unnecessary need to take even a quick glance at something? Is something in the way of taking an action, requiring an extra motion?

Of course, there are some things that maybe it IS desirable to add an extra bit of work, e.g., a switch that kills critical [thing] maybe should have a cover over it requiring to flip up the cover then hit the switch; an extra moment of thought.

This one principle translates well to software interfaces. Screw whether it "looks clean" or not — does it reduce or increase the user's workload? Even a tiny change can make a huge difference, because many actions are repeated.

I hope this helps

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#180

Post by raffraffraff »

One of my frequent hobby horses is the area of portable music players (formerly called Walkmans or MP3 players, currently "DAPs"). I simply don't understand who would want to buy any of the currently available players because they'll are so terrible to use. The good ones were killed off by a combination of streaming services and Android devices. There are no more light-weight, simple players with high capacity, physical buttons and good battery life. You know, the kind of thing you could put into your pocket take on your run without bruising yourself. The kind of thing that has a legible screen, sane menu layout, that can read tags from your files and let you simply drag playlists into them. I know that there are people out there who want the same thing, but manufacturers are instead releasing gigantic bricks with protruding knobs and weird edges, huge battery-draining touch screens, running some dreadful Android hack of an OS. "This one had TWO DACS!". Really! Well I'm not in a sound-proofed listening room with €10000 monitors, I'm on a bus with some IEMs. Reviews rarely discuss the most important aspects of a portable music device, and instead gush like wine critics about the ... I don't know, smell(?) or taste(?) of the music. I'm only half joking. The more prestigious the reviewer the more bollocks they write, and half the time I can't even find mention of the weight or size. Or when they do, they're plain wrong (eg: "The Shanling Q1 is a light weight portable device"... No it's f*cking not, it's an awful brick with a shitty OS, bad battery life, overly sensitive buttons. I don't care how well it sounds if I can't get playlists into it and don't want to use it because it's a heavy blob with a shitty interface.

13 years ago Rockbox on the Sansa Clip+ was great. If we could simply produce that with today's tech I'd take it in front of any of these ludicrous hulking house-bricks that cost an arm and a leg.

Am I off-topic?

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