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

211–220 of 241 posts

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#211

Post by funcDropShadow »

didntcheck wrote: post #205
pcurve wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> And also the menu bar is a massive violation of the "controls should be obviously linked to the area they affect" principle,

On other hand a menu bar at the corner of the screen has an infinite size if you are using a mouse, a trackball or a touchpad. But it's size is finite if you are using a touch display. Let me explain what I mean with infinite size. You can overshoot arbitrarily far when using the mouse and you would still be inside the menu, since top of the menu is the screen corner.

While writing this, I've noticed that in a maximized Firefox under Gnome this isn't true anymore. There is at list one line of pixels above menu. When you click on them nothing happens. Therefore I cannot overshoot anymore. Another failure of modern UIs.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#212

Post by joenot443 »

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…

> 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.

That's wild. We _had_ to read Design of Everyday Things as part of an HCI course in my Software Engineering curriculum. You couldn't get your degree without having some working knowledge of affordances and signifiers. I was under the impression, at the time, that we were dipping our toes into a world which UI/UX designers were intimately familiar with. Perhaps not.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#213

Post by lylejantzi3rd »

ProxCoques wrote: post #161
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.

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 technic…

I think it's funny you don't see a connection between "Most designers I work with don't have the vocabulary or knowledge about what makes something "usable" in the wider sense" and your inability to answer the question "how do I improve the usability of my work (in the wider sense)." Maybe that's a place to start.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#214

Post by xnx »

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…

We've got some innovation from having everyone invent their own user interfaces for every app, but it's been a very high cost to pay vs standard OS GUIs.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#215

Post by Ensorceled »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #204
antod wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 want…

> UX was often pretty poor in the 90s too. There's some rose tinted glasses here.

Agreed. The thing that is new to me though is PMs and UX/UI designers pushing for things that are so obviously out of whack with what the actual users are asking for AND that it isn't being driven from external forces. Literally no one is asking for all this white space, it's coming from the team responsible for designing the app.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#216

Post by pfraze »

nvm0n2 wrote: post #204
antod wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 want…

This tracks, thanks for a really interesting take.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#217

Post by sfc32 »

The strangest thing is that despite all the years of UX research, many websites today are covered in pop-ups all over the content, often containing flashing video, which has not been requested by the user.

Then there is is the massive "cookie acceptance" buttons on every page. All on major, mainstream sites.

The web is really becoming unusable due to UX problems.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#218

Post by numpad0 »

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 "…

> removing visible tools with 3-dot menus in the name of "cleaner" or "more intuitive" user interface

It just came to me what this truly means: professional designers tasked with designing aesthetics of man-machine interfaces inherently develops allergic fear response through overexposure to user interface elements such as buttons and scrollbars. It is annoying and too obvious to them that EACH and every BUTTONS and SCROLLBARS tell them ALL the TIME on screen CONSTANTLY what COULD be DONE but are NOT being DONE, at some point enough is enough, to them personally, so they must remove all.

I wonder at what point the UI trends would return to necessary amounts of skeuomorphism required for average users, not designers - apparently the web link paradigm is just too difficult for older and/or less experienced users, so sooner or later it'll start showing on data no one can get around.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#219

Post by thfuran »

eternityforest wrote: post #194
Condition1952 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Operating systems such as Windows, OSX, and Linux -- inevitability -- contain much complexity. Operating systems should be modular, allowing the user to reduce as much bloating complexity as possible and needed. I do not need unstoppable “gamed” and “studentd” services on my computer. The sealed system implemented by Apple has actually meant the overthrow of the root user by the corporation. Now I can’t reduce compl…

If the sealed system makes performance or security problems, it's a bad design, I'd rather it be optimized rather than modularized. Modular systems have more possibilities, which means some of those possibilities might not work, and then you might find yourself unable to use an app without reconfiguring in a way that breaks some other app. They are great for tinkerers and specialized applications, but for people who…

>The commercial OSes aren't perfect, but they are popular with consumers for a reason.

I don't think it's clear that those reasons have much to do with any property of the OSes though.

Re: The Decline of Usability (2020)

#220

Post by sgu999 »

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 "…

Thanks for putting into words exactly how so many of us been feeling for the past few years. Last week Slack's UI changed, again, I lost precious time having to find the buttons I'm used to, again. It's not better or worse from my point of view, it's just different and that's very annoying.

> This seems to be a common personality trait in PMs and/or UX people.

They also are paid to do a job, and their job is to change the UI/UX... if you were paid to maintain a piece of software that would be pretty much done, you'd likely spend your time refactoring and fixing minor issues. Except not everything we do is visible to the user.

Post reply on HN