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

181–190 of 241 posts

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#181

Post by p_l »

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.

It was a win on original Mac with tiny screen.

On 4k 27", when not scaling to make it look like 1080p, the menu is nowhere close to what I am working on, and often had to move over multiple other applications.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#183

Post by sillywalk »

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…

Somebody whose name I can't remember said something like Apple Designs a UI that people want to buy - it looks cool in the apple store - not use.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#184

Post by sillywalk »

shrimp_emoji wrote: post #123
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…

Sounds like the syndrome plaguing GNOME. :)

I've always assumed that GNOME developers don't actually use GNOME.

edit - (Not to disparage a ton of work by a ton of people )

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#185

Post by crooked-v »

_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.

Netflix used to work like that, once upon a time. They intentionally changed it.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#186

Post by ShadowBanThis01 »

mdaniel wrote: post #168
ShadowBanThis01 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Oh yeah! I turned that off so fast that I forgot about it. You're absolutely right. I remember deriding that as the Fisher-Price UI.

And I hated, HATED the "my this' and "my that" fad that dominated the early '00s. Yeah, I know it's MY computer, because it's on MY desk full of MY documents. So goddamned infantile.

Sadly, I've seen some resurgence of the "my" BS lately.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#187

Post by easeout »

sharts wrote: post #178

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?

Like any other kind of employee, you the stakeholder are responsible to get them trained in the role you delegate to them, or to evaluate that they meet your needs before hire. Designers I know do art for fun, but at work they design to solve business problems. They have a lot to say about this topic. In any case it isn't due to some character flaw on their part.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#188

Post by grishka »

toss1 wrote: post #179
cuddlecake wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 [thi…

Also, frequently needed actions should be doable mindlessly. With hotkeys, for example. The example from the world of physical UIs would be that one Tesla car that does everything — including shifting gears and adjusting AC — through a huge touchscreen. You need to actually take your eyes off the road and dashboard to operate it because you can't do it without receiving visual feedback. If it had a physical lever for gears and knobs for the AC, you would've been able to control these things using just your muscle memory.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#189

Post by grishka »

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.

iOS didn't introduce it. Windows Mobile definitely had it before 2007. Not sure about Palm OS though.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#190

Post by thfuran »

dgb23 wrote: post #170
wredue wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 p…

>UI elements without text are the worst offender.

Those are only second worst. What's worst is when there's also no border or any other indication that it's interactable rather than just an icon. Actually, that's only second worst: I've seen radio buttons used for multiselection. That goes beyond merely unhelpful to outright trickery.

Post reply on HN