The Decline of Usability
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The Decline of Usability
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Re: The Decline of Usability
#2I'm typically a person who would agree with an article like this; I think we _lost_ something with the modern age, even if we gained a lot. (especially in terms of developer "velocity" (I hate that word)).
However, I really feel like context is important. Computers today have a context given to them over time, users don't need so much hand-holding these days because the expected paradigms are ever so subtly changed. New entrants to computers understand these new paradigms innately because they are already surrounded by the new context.
It's only when we look back we think how much usability has suffered.
Language is a good example of what I mean. Travel back 100 years and the linquistical choices that are made would not only be slightly alien to us, ours would be absolutely muddy to them.
I think you can make a case that a lot of the new paradigms like electron do not promote usage of native UI styles and accessibility.
But the Title bar being an overloaded UI element in todays context is generally ok I think.
Re: The Decline of Usability
#3While some are egregious usability disasters, like hiding the scroll bar, others points are just a sign of times moving on, like the ≡ for menu.
Re: The Decline of Usability
#4I had some reflexive reaction of wanting to disagree because there are also a lot of things that got better. But inconsistency? Hell yes. It feels like every company tries to run their own experiment, getting more and more erratic, and apparently all getting great feedback from their users (not sure if all the feedback systems are broken or something else is going on). Of course, Microsoft who in recent years started following the "roll a die for what UI-style we use today" paradigm is one of the worst offenders.
Re: The Decline of Usability
#5While some are egregious usability disasters, like hiding the scroll bar, others points are just a sign of times moving on, like the ≡ for menu.
> others points are just a sign of times moving on, like the ≡ for menu
The article addresses this at the end. In software, the "times" do not move on like an unsteerable force. We (users and designers) decide how the times should move on. For non-mobile, the ≡ for menu seems like a step backwards and we shouldn't accept it without complaint.
Applying mobile patterns which are suboptimal on the desktop seems like a UX antipattern to me. I think a huge part of the problem is that software -- both free and nonfree -- needs to show "change" in order to signal it's still alive and maintained, but change for change's sake can be a bad thing, especially if you already had a pretty good (or consistent) UI.
Re: The Decline of Usability
#6Little of what he says is a problem on MacOS fwiw. I can resize my Slack by dragging anywhere on the toolbar, for example.
Re: The Decline of Usability
#7While some are egregious usability disasters, like hiding the scroll bar, others points are just a sign of times moving on, like the ≡ for menu.
"Hamburger menus" are and will forever be, in my mind, a lazy design for "catch all" stuff. (On Apple's platforms, it's three dots, but it's the same thing.)
Re: The Decline of Usability
#8While some are egregious usability disasters, like hiding the scroll bar, others points are just a sign of times moving on, like the ≡ for menu.
> others points are just a sign of times moving on, like the ≡ for menu The article addresses this at the end. In software, the "times" do not move on like an unsteerable force. We (users and designers) decide how the times should move on. For non-mobile, the ≡ for menu seems like a step backwards and we shouldn't accept it without complaint. Applying mobile patterns which are suboptimal on the desktop seems like a U…
> change for change's sake can be a bad thing, especially if you already had a pretty good (or consistent) UI.
I run Trinity Desktop on Linux for exactly this reason: it's basically what KDE 3 looked like 10 or 15 years ago. I run it so I don't have to re-learn all my workflows every time somebody comes up with some new eye candy.
Re: The Decline of Usability
#9I'm typically a person who would agree with an article like this; I think we _lost_ something with the modern age, even if we gained a lot. (especially in terms of developer "velocity" (I hate that word)). However, I really feel like context is important. Computers today have a context given to them over time, users don't need so much hand-holding these days because the expected paradigms are ever so subtly changed.…
Agreed.
Personally I’ve given up on mouse GUIs
Why?
Photoshop pros use macros
Unix pros use text editing macros
Why teach new users single point and click methods of computing when the pros think it’s a waste of time
It’s from an era when computers couldn’t multi task and were largely business focused data entry terminals
Photo manipulation can be automated from a terminal and results displayed in real-time now
Why care about file menus? That’s just a set of keyboard macros unrealized.
The desktop metaphor is finally dying. Let it
Re: The Decline of Usability
#10Ubuntu got worse at 18.04. Logging in on desktop now requires "swiping up" with the mouse to get the password box. The "swiping" thing is to avoid problems with unwanted activation when the device is in your pocket. It's totally inappropriate to desktops.
Then there's icon mania. I've recently converted from Blender 2.79 to Blender 2.82. Lots of new icons. They dim, they change color, they disappear as modes change, and there are at least seven toolbars of icons. Some are resizable. Many icons were moved as part of a redesign of rendering. You can't Google an icon. "Where did ??? go" is a big part of using Blender 2.82. Blender fanboys argue for using keyboard shortcuts instead. The keyboard shortcut guide is 13 pages.
Recently I was using "The Gimp", the GNU replacement for Photoshop, and I couldn't find most of the icons in the toolbar. Turns out that if the toolbar is in the main window (which is optional), and it's too tall to fit, you can't get at the remaining icons. You have to resize the toolbar to give it more space. Can't scroll. There's no visual indication of overflow. It just looks like half the icons are missing.
(I have no idea what's happening in Windows 10 land. I have one remaining Windows machine, running Windows 7.)