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

201–210 of 241 posts

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#201

Post by ProxCoques »

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…

> the primary principle to follow

Yes. I spend a lot of effort with people at all levels trying to get them to agree on what, fundamentally, the system should achieve for the user. Sometimes it's speed, sometimes entertainment, trust or some other outcome. But that principle needs to be expressed and agreed by those executing the design, if only to prioritise features. I'm always astonished that they seldom want to talk about that, as if it's mindlessly theoretical or something.

> 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.

As an aside, in the digital world a better pattern is usually to have an undo (probably executed as a delayed trigger allowing you to undo it for a time). This allows you to be confident in using the system in the knowledge that if you do something you don't intend, you can just take it back. Not a thing for cars or planes though, I admit.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#202

Post by ProxCoques »

incongruity wrote: post #160
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 someone who works as a service designer and design strategist, I agree, 100%. I’ve seen a general decline in rigor in the field. Many are back to making things “pretty” with poorly done research (if that) asking small-minded questions rather than thinking about context, ecosystem and systemic effects of their design decisions.

I recently took part in a panel discussion about design strategy. I kept on being dragged into discussions about project management and process. In the end, I just gave up trying to explain and they all triumphantly celebrated a "good design strategy" as being how you intend to build the thing. The question of why, or on what basis, just seemed irrelevant.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#203

Post by t0suj4 »

tiffanyg wrote: post #193
d33d33 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yup, it's another great example of the sort of "late stage" problems you run into with capitalism, professionalization of business management (MBA degrees), and fundamentally just about any system w/ rules and "(semi-)autonomous agents" trying to maximize (or at least perform well [enough]) the value of some metric / function. Here, profit &/ even staying in business. Capitalism and other features of the system curre…

Almost every company internally works as command economy. I doubt that it can scale any more than that.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#204

Post by nvm0n2 »

antod wrote: post #195
Ensorceled wrote: post #127

The past decade or so, I've found myself in a constant battle with UI/UX team members. A big part of the battle seems to be a shift from power/tool user to consumer design paradigms. 20 years ago, most software was tools for professionals, now most software (on a usage level at least) is consumer software (literally consumers of video, social media etc.) Designers can't seem to switch modes and keep trying to apply "…

I think what happened was that a lot of UIs were really bad in the 90s. A bunch of books were research and written pointing out the problems, people made an effort to fix them, and UX became a skillset. But it seemed like the trends that were intended to fix the original problems just kept getting followed and amplified with nobody really noticing they had overshot. Or based on some comments here, new designers witho…

UX was often pretty poor in the 90s too. There's some rose tinted glasses here. This was the era in which app theming was a huge fad. Relatively few companies attempted to create consistent and usability tested approaches to their UI, and when they did, it was always operating system companies that were writing their own UI toolkits and lots of little bundled applets. They wanted these to be consistent, and they wanted to understand how to make things like file or hardware management easy.

This then dovetailed with some other trends: the software industry was moving to GUIs very fast, competitive advantage often came from how quickly you could release a Windows port back then, and the industry was relatively poor. Many big name software firms were like 20 devs and a few admin assistant types at most. So they all used the built-in APIs because that was the only way to actually get a decent GUI to market fast enough, and it outsourced all the thinking and design leadership to successful companies. If you tried to reinvent all that stuff, not only would you arrive late to the GUI party but your app would probably not fit on floppy disks anymore.

Towards the end of the 90s the internet started getting good, but OS makers were also getting fat and lazy. They dropped the ball on internet distribution and connectivity, then dropped it on managed code as well. People started writing these new fangled "DHTML Web Apps" along with Java applets to obtain a solution, and also perhaps one day to escape from the Microsoft hegemony. But the web was extremely under-designed. It barely had GUI widgets at all, let alone the large usability tested sets of UX conventions that Windows and macOS had. Java had those widgets but it came from a server company that was just aping whatever the desktop companies had done, they didn't really "get" it and their tech back then wasn't good enough to make it fly. For a while people tried to emulate desktop widgets in JS and DHTML but the results always felt second class.

But the combination of easy distribution, a mainframe style app model, open standards and free-beer end user clients was more valuable to people than the classical Windows/Mac OS offering. Not to everyone by any means, and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth as developers started abandoning native apps. But distribution dominates everything and OS vendors didn't respond, so, we got the web.

With the web most of the old Xerox PARC desktop idioms died due to lack of proper browser support. Menu bars, context menus, files, folders, customizable toolbars, multiple windows ... none of these worked properly on the web. So people learned to make UI within those constraints. Then mobile came along and with it, a new generation of native app idioms. OS leadership was re-established and people started following that, but at the cost of it being inappropriate for productivity apps.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#205

Post by didntcheck »

pcurve wrote: post #3
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…

Agreed about discoverability issues. Everything is hidden. Hiding power user features is one thing, but you can't hide the basic stuff. IMHO UI usability hasn't been Apple's strong suit for a long time. In fact, as someone who has to use both Mac and PC, MacOS is just as terrible in many ways in not worse. What they do well device integration usability across their ecosystem.

Yeah. I first started using MacOS seriously for a job a few years ago, and I was amazed at how poor the discoverability was, especially given its reputation. Important functions were hidden behind arcane modifier combinations or only available via "intuitive" gestures that you'd never work out on your own. I don't think this was just a case of unfamiliarity - as a usually-Linux user I've been unfamiliar with Windows functions before, but still managed to work them out without resorting to Google, even in the post-8 era

And the window management as a whole seems like a case of form over function, with no way to see what windows are actually open, or switch between several of the same application, without multi-step processes (Expose/MC or cmd-tab cycling)

And also the menu bar is a massive violation of the "controls should be obviously linked to the area they affect" principle, but it seems we're stuck with this space-saving measure from 40 years ago since it's now part of the brand identity

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#206

Post by didntcheck »

twarge wrote: post #138
bradley13 wrote: post #9

All true. It goes even farther: hiding the file structure, and even the concept of files. Ask a nontechnical Windows or Mac user where their files are stored - they have no idea. Ask if they are in the cloud - no idea. Worse - just as with UIs - there is no consistency where different apps store their data. We also shouldn't forget the idiocy of hiding file-extensions. To add insult to injury Windows lies to non-Engl…

It’s all about files. That we have a photos app with a custom database is an obvious failure of the OS file system. Why didn’t the BeOS approach work?

Yeah, people keep complaining that apps are hiding the concept of a hierarchical FS from the user, but honestly I can understand why they do it. The hierarchical model just isn't a very good model for almost any nontrivial (i.e. 1-dimensional) logical model of data. For all we rightly complain about how much time is spent reinventing CRUD programs that simply list your files in a relational interface, few people seem to ask why we keep feeling the need to do that

Proper use of file attributes could help a lot, but while almost all modern OSes and FSes support them, AFAIK only MacOS makes much non-system use of them, and they have poor portability across systems. Even copying a file can lose them if the utility is not aware of them

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#207

Post by premysl »

grishka wrote: post #83
brazzy wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then you need fixed window sizes, which is pretty damn annoying as well.

That same Microsoft solved that nicely in win32 by using "DLUs", or "dialog units", for layouts. These scale with the font.

DLUs solve the wrong problem.

You actually want autolayout, so that different languages only need translations and otherwise don't need almost any extra work.

Linux has, I think, proved, that fixed window sizes are needless.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#208

Post by helboi4 »

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…

Honestly, yes. There is an insane amount of computer literacy that is required to use a lot of programs. You have a to understand symbols that have actually no clear meaning apart from the instinct that you get from constantly using a computer. Things that disappear suddenly like the scroll bars are totally baffling and disorienting for older users. I mean, even as a technical user I am confused as to why so often you have to dig so hard to find basic settings or why there is always seemingly 3 different ways to get to settings for something on windows. And yeah, there should be no reason that every day to day program should not be able to run on a machine from several years ago at this point.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#209

Post by hermitcrab »

User interface design definately seems to increasingly favour aesthetics over usability. Form over function. It is very frustrating. For example the Chrome browser on Windows is hard to move around because there is almost no title bar to drag once you have a few tabs open. That seems such a basic thing to get wrong.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#210

Post by interestica »

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…

> I'm not a UI/UX designer,

> One item I can bring to the table from the world of designing cockpits for racecars and airplanes

Sounds like you are most definitely a UI/UX designer. Those are interfaces. Those are experiences.

Post reply on HN