361–370 of 944 posts
Whenever I read a piece like this or another UX blog, it just becomes so obvious how little we care about a11y. “Good” (as in accessible) design is pretty boring and decluttered compared to most modern expectations of web apps. I read Adam Silver’s book on forms and came away realizing that we’re doing it entirely wrong from an a11y standpoint but that’s just not a priority.
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The ironic thing about icons losing their color and detail is that it happened right as high DPI displays began to become commonplace in consumer hardware. We have these amazing screens with barely visible pixels and excellent color reproduction being wasted on rendering monochrome lines.
Forget Gtk or Qt, we may as well link against libXaw. It's a perfect match for the detail in "modern" UIs.
It's not just scrollbars. It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background, it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. It's the overloading of the title bar with so much shit like search boxes and extraneous buttons that a user has almost no place to grip to move the wind…
“Morons” is the right word. I don’t like to gratuitously shit on people doing their jobs. But what the hell? I can’t move a window anymore without clicking around like an idiot to figure out what’s part of the title bar and what’s a button. Every time I start “New Teams,” it asks me if I want to go back to Old Teams. If I open a PDF in New Teams from the file browser, it’s not obvious how to close the PDF without los…
It's not just scrollbars. It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background, it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. It's the overloading of the title bar with so much shit like search boxes and extraneous buttons that a user has almost no place to grip to move the wind…
Sadly Tunderbird devs drank their coolaid, as evident in the latest release.
The author sees half the problem and offers the worse half of a solution. A scrollbar is not only a control, it's also an indicator . It shows where your viewport is relative to the bigger view, e.g. a long list. Hiding scrollbars, like some [redacted] GUIs like macOS do, is just acutely impolite, much like making buttons indistinguishable from text, or putting light grey text on a light grey background. A solution e…
> scroll wheels on a mouse But that breaks down if you have to scroll a very long way.
[0]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chromium-wheel-smo..., https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yass-we
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It's more, there's no attempt to structure information anymore. All the settings menus are a nightmare of lists upon lists and each app has a completely random layout for it's menu-ing, often with links to external sites, for what could be set locally. It is geniunely confusing to try and understand the designers intent. I can never tell if I missed a setting, or if it was never meant to exist in this menu at all. Th…
This was one of the biggest powers of Mac OS X, before Electron became big. Not many companies and people developed for Mac OS X, but the ones that did pretty strongly adhered to Apple’s design guidelines, partially because it just made dev live easier and partially because your application would stick out like a sore thumb if you didn’t. At least the global menu still lives on macOS. I’m sad Gnome 3 didn’t pilfer it…
When I first had to use one for work I thought it was buggy and defective and losing data. Turns out it was just hiding it because scrollbars were entirely hidden and disabled by default. They also hid a lot of other stuff. What kind of idiot created that design guideline?
Then there's the fact that the editing keys don't work at all consistently or correctly (and sometimes just don't work at all).
And nowadays they like to hide functionality behind obscure multi-finger touchpad gestures.
Their 'magic' mouse was a magic louse, that didn't work very well, ate batteries like they thought they were in a hotdog eating contest, and just randomly did stuff you didn't want based on where your finger happened to touch them.
I hope someday they hire a designer that has used a computer before and can upgrade their UI/UX standards to at least the Windows 95 level.
It's not just scrollbars. It's the elimination of window borders. Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window in the background, it's nearly impossible to click and hold on anything along the edge to resize the window. It's the overloading of the title bar with so much shit like search boxes and extraneous buttons that a user has almost no place to grip to move the wind…
Like:
> Aside from not being able to differentiate one window from another similarly colored window
What? When has that ever happened to anyone?
I use Postman and Chrome daily and I have no idea what you think is so unusable about them?
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I am coming to the opinion that Windows XP was the maximum usable interface, and we should have stopped there [0]. But then, I might just be old and telling the kids to get off my lawn. [0] this is definitely true for Windows. All subsequent versions of Windows have had worse UX.
I thought Windows 7 was pretty good. Vista eliminated the Fisher Priceness of XP but added a whole bunch of glowing and reflective stuff, which Windows 7 toned down dramatically. I don’t remember if Win 7 still allowed you to have the classic start menu, but I do believe I was ok with what it did have.
It's Windows 8 that wrecked things, by making the two-way correspondence between the start menu and a folder of icons basically void.
My pet peeve is Azure Log Analytics. The query results window has a completely non-standard scrollbar setup, even compared to the rest of Azure. The default result set shows 100% useless columns, all of which have the same constant values repeated for each row. E.g.: "subcription id", "location", etc... The useful values are invariably off-to-the-right somewhere, so you have to scroll horizontally. Which you can. Wit…
All of azure’s a web UI is a disaster. Breadcrumbs that aren’t really breadcrumbs. “X” that sometimes means back and sometimes means several steps back. … and the browser back button sometimes does what you expect, and sometimes not. “X” stacked directly under one of the aforementioned “X”s, which means close, but the other “X” is back, all on a flat ui with the same background and no border. And yeah, the log analyt…
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I love not having window borders waste screen estate, and solve the grabbing issue by having the windows key + left mouse button bound to moving windows and windows key + right mouse button to resize. I can "grab" the window anywhere, with no need to hit borders or a title bar (which I also don't have...)
Is it as easy as that? Upvote assuming you were being sarcastic.
Although I want to add the "Windows Key + Left/Right Mouse Button" bindings are incredibly convenient and should be supported by every OS by default imho. The area you have to hit with the mouse cursor to resize a window turns from "a few pixels in the window corner" to "the entire damn window no matter if there's a button or not".
