131–140 of 173 posts
One golden rule that I learned is that interface elements should not move unexpectedly after the interface has been drawn. Google is particularly bad for buttons which move between you lifting your thumb and pressing the screen, but they're not alone.
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Hardware companies aren't known for their UX chops.
If you strictly mean pure software for "UX", then I agree. However, for electronics from the 80s and 90s, Japanese audio/visual hardware (especially Sony) was amazing for UX design. Albeit, the screen was limited to a small LED screen, but the combination of buttons and menus was impressively designed.
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To be clear - the conceptual space the software is built around isn't an implementation detail. It's the way you reach your goal; it necessarily imposes a burden on the user. A good conceptual space presses less heavily against the user, but you can't obscure the notion that there are containers in a file system but not a relational database.
There is always the discussion whether the UI should "hide the implementation details" (make the internal model, which differs from the conceptual model, invisible -- resulting in hard-to-understand behavior) or "make the implementation details visible" (change the conceptual model to be equal to the implementation model, and force the user to adapt to that). But the one option that is rarely used but yields the (IMH…
Interface is a translator between what user understands ("I press button, channel changes") and implementation detail ("rubber dome changing resistivity, ...causing IR signal to be sent", ...).
Although not really part of a UI's "design", performance is often overlooked as well. A poorly performing UI violates every single one of these design rules. My sony android smart TV looks amazing but the UI is so slow as to be unusable. An unstable UI that is always changing also violates most of these principles. Smart TVs seem to be exceptionally bad in this area too, with the home screen layout and app icons freq…
The single biggest cause of failure in UI design is isolation from the users and their requirements.
Everything else is coding.
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I still hate ribbons. MS Office UI peeked around versions 97-2003 or so. Everything in a menu, actions grouped / categorized so they were easier to discover. QUICKLY accessible by underlined keyboard combinations (alt+menu letter THEN item in menu letter) and with any actions that had a direct keyboard shortcut annotated. Everything easily discoverable. Ribbons, I've no idea how the categorize what's popular or not,…
Ribbons for Word used to have actual research behind them. Since then it's just cargo culting. Sadly, many images are broken, but the blog series "Why The New UI" survives on web archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn...
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> Commands should be left enabled, then an error message should be displayed when the command is clicked and the command is unavailable, and in this case explain why it is presently unavailable. An exception to this: premium (for-pay) features. There is a certain To-Do app that does this. Premium commands are visually indistinguishable from freemium commands, so they get clicked a lot and they interrupt the entire ex…
It's not an error, it's deliberate.
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Add a tooltip on disabled inputs.
Tooltips seem to have gone out of style in this touch-first world. Good UIs still use tooltips, you just have to click or drag when in touch mode. There's also the awkward problem of most native tooltips being plain-text-only, when text is not actually sufficient for every problem (such as international text). And emulated "tooltip" widgets are slow, buggy, etc.
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Hardware companies aren't known for their UX chops.
If you strictly mean pure software for "UX", then I agree. However, for electronics from the 80s and 90s, Japanese audio/visual hardware (especially Sony) was amazing for UX design. Albeit, the screen was limited to a small LED screen, but the combination of buttons and menus was impressively designed.
And they do it for like 20 functions.
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"unlabeled icons (often without even tooltips)" The worst software I worked with in this regard was CATIA V5. It had not only hundreds of little icons in the UI, but they were also used in the documentation. The manual regularly said things like "Todo X first click [], then [] and finally go to [] to do []." This is from the very first versions of V5, so many years ago, and hopefully has improved.
> ... first versions of V5 So "V5" is not "version five" of something? God.
That's not to say there hasn't been a version 6 at some point, but the most recent version is still 5.
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> 4chan for example has its mostly-unchanged now old-school interface, with its own quote/reply system, which some call an IQ barrier I doubt it would be an IQ barrier, considering the apparent intelligence of many of the posters there. I would rather call it a "normie filter" - the UI is so old-school ("ugly") that "normies", who usually dwell on fancy UI sites like Facebook, Reddit, etc., will consider it lame and…
4chan - smart people acting dumb HN - dumb people acting smart
A better analogy for Snapchat and UI design is fashion. Fashion is basically an invisible circle of inclusion. Clothing styles don't go out of fashion because they are old, they go out of fashion because people outside of the circle begin to wear them.
There are arguments here about about gatekeeping or whether changing UI conventions are good or bad. There is some parts of truth to all of this.
I would make an important distinction. UI/UX design can be quantitatively good or bad. It is measurable if UI sucks or not. That measurement can be, perhaps mistakenly, only taken by new users: how fast did they learn the UI? I would argue it's the advanced users which are more important: how much can an experienced user get done?
To make matters more difficult, most of the UI design we are experiencing is commercial. It is, in fact, not there to improve our output, it's there to make their owners more money. The move toward cloud software has really fucked up the UI/UX of stuff that worked for a long time, like Photoshop. New stuff is continually introduced breaking known workflows.
On the business side I was always very pro-active about building our tools and systems on open source software or at least in a way we could always easily migrate our data to something else. Now I'm in the process of doing it on the personal side. I have minimal interest in using new tools that aren't interoperable, that I can't control the UI/UX workflow. Even something like Signal, that should be open source, really falls flat on this one. Imagining using something (like Snapchat) where the UI is going to switch so they can increase their engagement and increase ad revenue is just horrible. Internet users don't deserve this and don't need it.
Edit: hn's UI is fantastic, and a major reason I'm still here many years later (I don't use reddit)