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Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance

hadermann.be

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Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance

#11

Post by nathan-muir »

kylebrown wrote: post #6
nathan-muir wrote: post #3

The Design of everyday things [1] (Found on Coding Horror's recommended reading [2]) was crucial in understanding how people intuitively interact with the world around them - including your web application - based on the visual cue's you provide. While this article provides some metaphorical fish - I found the Design of everyday things helps you become a fisherman. EDIT: Swapped the order of references. [1] http://ww…

Your reference [1] confused me because most of the books I saw were about code and design patterns, or books by Tufte. I also didn't realize what DoET meant, on first glance.

Fair enough. I've reworded that part.

Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance

#13

Post by navait »

userbinator wrote: post #9

I agree with some of the points (like ambiguous icons and vague error messages), but not all of them. ‘If you are an X, then you have to fill in Y and Z. If you are not an X, please only fill in Z, unless Z=1, then you should fill Y too.’ This could be simplified considerably: "Fill in Z. If you are X or Z=1, fill in Y." Although I'm not surprised that refactoring boolean expressions is something that a lot of people…

Literacy and user interfaces are not related. Literacy is a tool people use to record and transmit information, which in turn allows people to learn and improve themselves. Software is meant to accomplish a task, the UI being the way you explain to the computer

I don't care much about the process of how paper and bindings are made, I just want to be able to read my book. Most users prefer the software just do what they wanted it to do with minimal cognitive load. Users that can use the software spend less time calling support, and more time happily using the application. If we made software smarter, what benefit would gain vs dumbing it down?

Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance

#18

Post by kylebrown »

DanBC wrote: post #10

EDIT: disabled zoom? It's weird to me that Google fails, hard, on so many ui things. Here's one example from the Gmail app on iOS, from the feedback screen. http://imgur.com/a/koKRb The [done] button is where the [return] button usually is; and it's directly over the [send] button. So if you don't notice that return is now done, and tap it twice to get a new paragraph, you just sent your unfinished feedback. I blame…

> EDIT: disabled zoom?

Hah, the OP article does disable zoom. Disabled zoom is one of the frustrating things lately about iOS apps. Every time I try to show someone older than me something in a Skype chat, or (speaking of google) in a hangouts chat on the iPad... they cant read it - "Hang on... let me find my glasses."

Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance

#19

Post by TimFogarty »

userbinator wrote: post #9

I agree with some of the points (like ambiguous icons and vague error messages), but not all of them. ‘If you are an X, then you have to fill in Y and Z. If you are not an X, please only fill in Z, unless Z=1, then you should fill Y too.’ This could be simplified considerably: "Fill in Z. If you are X or Z=1, fill in Y." Although I'm not surprised that refactoring boolean expressions is something that a lot of people…

Yes I'm shocked by how UIs dealing with very precise things sometimes use imprecise dating like "tomorrow".

On the DHL website, if I am ordering a collection for a certain time, I have to choose if I want it for "tomorrow". If it's 23:00 BST from where I am accessing the website and I'm ordering the collection from a country in EEST, am I ordering the collection for one or two days from now?

This kind of sloppy UI from a company that does logistics (which is supposedly quite a precise thing) is utterly unacceptable.

The DHL website is a cornucopia of bad UI patterns.

Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance

#20

Post by kazinator »

Recent stupidity: UI asked for postal code (knowing the address being entered was Canadian.) Without thinking, the user (not me) put it in as L6A 3Z3. When the form was submitted, it was rejected with the field flagged in Red. the error message said like "please enter the Canadian postal code in the correct format, AnAnAn with no spaces." (AnAnAn? Cryptic to non-coders; the user was baffled.)

Postal codes are written with the space:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Canada

If you're already validating the format, how much effort would it take to recognize and accept the common variant which has the space in it? A [ ]? in the regex, and a strip spaces function call.

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