71–80 of 89 posts
Reading this makes me feel like we have not learned any lessons at all in software engineering and UI design since the 1980s.
There were lots of very in-depth UI studies in the 90s, which were implemented in the second half of the 90s and early 00s. Then someone let “designers” in the door and it was all thrown out.
Same, but for dates. There's ; it's literally a solved problem ffs. Forcing to scroll through years, months and days in your remarkably creative date selection widget is extremely user hostile.
My pet peeve is in the "create a report" section of InvestEngine (useful for doing reports aligned to tax year). If you try to type a date at all, the year always ends up as 000n and no amount of typing numbers will get it to accept a 4 digit year (or even a 2 digit year starting 20). The only way to undo this state is to click today and then page through the years and months using the arrows on their stupid date wid…
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Actually programmers use the symbols far more frequently than the numbers. The number row on Programmer Dvorak is, from left-to-right, & [ { } ( = * ) + ] ! # Looks really weird at first glance! but if you try it out, [square brackets] and (parens) are symmetrical fingers on opposing hands. By hand, [] is the ring fingers (2,0 on a qwerty). {} is (3,4 on the left-hand) and () is 5,8 aka your pointing fingers, left ha…
> Plus, the numbers are also split by hand! > From middle-going-out: > Left hand: 91357 Right hand: 02468 What is the advantage of this order vs. numerical order? If I'm reading your post correctly the numbers are arranged 7531902468 on the keyboard, with maybe a space in the middle? Is there some mathematical property where odd and even numbers are more likely to alternate than for odds or evens to be found side by…
tl;dr: right hand even,, left hand odd,,, increasing from index to pinky. "Look ma, no eyes!"
I've always found it weird when a form admonishes you for writing spaces or dashes in e.g. a phone number or credit card number. Hey, implementation, you're a computer! Strip them out automatically on the backend if you don't like them!
> Hey, implementation, you're a computer! Strip them out automatically on the backend if you don't like them! This is one of my most hated categories of pet peeves, software that does something in a way that causes a human to have to expend effort every time they use it which could easily be fixed by one-time effort on the developer's part, but the developer is either uninterested or hostile to the idea of fixing it.…
Yes, exactly! It's like devloper doesn't understand that automating thibgs like this is the point of computers.
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We had a discussion about this one not too long ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45887957 Unfortunately, with the mobile OS's datepickers being so bad from a usability perspective, it's a long way from being a solved problem. Typing the date directly into a single textbox is great for some of us but not for others, so an alternative has to be provided. Yes, some date selection widgets can be poorly designed…
I just tested on all the devices I have at hand and they let me pick or type, and the picker is usable. Is this an iPhone problem? Because it sounds like an iPhone problem.
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My pet peeve is in the "create a report" section of InvestEngine (useful for doing reports aligned to tax year). If you try to type a date at all, the year always ends up as 000n and no amount of typing numbers will get it to accept a 4 digit year (or even a 2 digit year starting 20). The only way to undo this state is to click today and then page through the years and months using the arrows on their stupid date wid…
Is this a browser app? Have you tried greasemonkey/tampermonkey?
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I'd understand a developer in e.g. America not being aware of it, but to one in Switzerland, France is right next door. A developer working on something as important as their government login system should be well aware of different keyboard layouts surrounding, and leaking into, their country.
Yes, I understand where France is relative to Switzerland. But the basic fact remains that not one of the developers or testers or stakeholders encountered this, and it was so rare apparently the very first person to encounter it -- given that it was literally a blocking issue, and not just some transient issue -- is the linked article. Is it a regrettable bug that made a poor assumption that breaks in special cases?…
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> Plus, the numbers are also split by hand! > From middle-going-out: > Left hand: 91357 Right hand: 02468 What is the advantage of this order vs. numerical order? If I'm reading your post correctly the numbers are arranged 7531902468 on the keyboard, with maybe a space in the middle? Is there some mathematical property where odd and even numbers are more likely to alternate than for odds or evens to be found side by…
Very simply: if it's an even number, it's your left hand. If it's an odd number, it's your right hand. If you want to type a number like 2,467,333 you can do it without looking for the numbers. On qwerty I tend to "lose my footing" when it comes to typing numbers out. But if it's a 2 on programmer-dvorak, it's right hand, index finger. 2468 is each of your four digits, in order. and 1357 is the other hand's digits. H…
You don't need a special keyboard layout for that. Any layout at all has the same feature.
> On qwerty I tend to "lose my footing" when it comes to typing numbers out.
Why not use the numpad?
I've always found it weird when a form admonishes you for writing spaces or dashes in e.g. a phone number or credit card number. Hey, implementation, you're a computer! Strip them out automatically on the backend if you don't like them!
Especially in the UK, bank sort codes are typically presented to the user as e.g. 04-00-04 by every banking app or website, but whenever you have to enter them (e.g. to pay someone else) they usually require you to not enter the dashes. Some of the most annoying sites limit the input to 6 characters but don't strip out the dashes, so you'd end up with 04-00- and then it complains. And then there are the ones that imp…
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First off: I’m not really well-versed in terms of UX design, so these next guesses are as good as anyone’s: - Six boxes communicate “== six digits, != password” (try to imagine the least tech-savvy user) - Some people might not be able to quickly hold six digits in their head at once (especially seems to be the case with older people, from my experience), so seeing “I’ve already got two/three/four” visually is potent…
I think people were entering the SMS short code the digits were sent from instead of the digits so they wanted to make it clearer that it was 6 digits they want you to look for.