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Sanding UI

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: Sanding UI

#111

Post by duckmysick »

hipadev23 wrote: post #89
timzaman wrote: post #82

Decent analogy. I wonder how many techies have ever used a belt sander. Or have one. I think very, very few.

Your assumption is quite wrong. https://www.zainrizvi.io/blog/why-software-engineers-like-wo...

What does this suppose to prove? The OP said "very few" not none. Of course there will be a few anecdotes of overlap.

A better way would be to compare the size of Stack Exchange boards at https://stackexchange.com/sites . It's not perfect but it's as good as it can get. Stack Overflow has 26 million users. Woodworking has 17 thousand. A fraction.

Further still, not every woodworker will use a belt sander. It's used for a specific purpose (large flat surfaces) and it's not a beginner's tool. So the fraction gets smaller. I'd say the assumption stands.

Re: Sanding UI

#112

Post by duckmysick »

xyst wrote: post #80

I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there? You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have. But anybody that has used Amazon.com or AWS, GCP, or even Azure would beg to differ. Personally, off the top of my head. The most polished UI/UX has to be “mcmaster.com”. I can find anything I need in what seems like a couple minutes. Compare this to big box stores l…

Linear (of linear.app) has a highly polished UI. In fact they had a dedicated period for fixing just usability issues:

https://linear.app/changelog/2022-12-01-polishing-season-202...

https://web.archive.org/web/20231003205004/https://linear.ap...

Re: Sanding UI

#113

Post by qingcharles »

donatj wrote: post #93
xyst wrote: post #80

I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there? You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have. But anybody that has used Amazon.com or AWS, GCP, or even Azure would beg to differ. Personally, off the top of my head. The most polished UI/UX has to be “mcmaster.com”. I can find anything I need in what seems like a couple minutes. Compare this to big box stores l…

I can name multiple Facebook features that have been broken for months. Temporary profile pictures most annoyingly of all. They stopped working close to a year ago. They simply never change back. No one's sanding anything there.

If you look at the HTML output of FB, IIRC it is about 100 levels deep that cause me physical pain.

Re: Sanding UI

#114

Post by qingcharles »

two_handfuls wrote: post #94

Meanwhile, some other UI uses square boxes for radio buttons. Or have a highlighted button but the enter key doesn't activate it. Or there are three different menus all behind a different symbol (ellipsis, hamburger, kebab). There is a lot of variance in quality. Those of you who polish your UI: you are appreciated. Truly.

Square or squircle seems to moving towards the standard for radio buttons now. Even Apple plays this game :(

Re: Sanding UI

#115

Post by dpkirchner »

donatj wrote: post #93
xyst wrote: post #80

I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there? You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have. But anybody that has used Amazon.com or AWS, GCP, or even Azure would beg to differ. Personally, off the top of my head. The most polished UI/UX has to be “mcmaster.com”. I can find anything I need in what seems like a couple minutes. Compare this to big box stores l…

I can name multiple Facebook features that have been broken for months. Temporary profile pictures most annoyingly of all. They stopped working close to a year ago. They simply never change back. No one's sanding anything there.

The "feeds" screen in the app has been throwing errors for at least a year ("Feed isn't available right now"). I only try to use the screen because a while back it was the only way to view content in the correct order.

Re: Sanding UI

#116

Post by masklinn »

ccakes wrote: post #91
xyst wrote: post #80

I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there? You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have. But anybody that has used Amazon.com or AWS, GCP, or even Azure would beg to differ. Personally, off the top of my head. The most polished UI/UX has to be “mcmaster.com”. I can find anything I need in what seems like a couple minutes. Compare this to big box stores l…

imo GitHub has to be up there. I think some of the recent changes to search and making the code view more IDE-like are steps backward from a “polish” perspective, but still useful features

Couldn’t disagree more. GitHub has jank from the api to the ui.

Re: Sanding UI

#117

Post by arendtio »

xyst wrote: post #80

I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there? You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have. But anybody that has used Amazon.com or AWS, GCP, or even Azure would beg to differ. Personally, off the top of my head. The most polished UI/UX has to be “mcmaster.com”. I can find anything I need in what seems like a couple minutes. Compare this to big box stores l…

15 years ago, one would have said google.com

But I think asking for a UI toolkit/framework is more helpful. Otherwise, you optimize for straightforward use cases, like entering a search box.

Re: Sanding UI

#118

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

xyst wrote: post #80

I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there? You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have. But anybody that has used Amazon.com or AWS, GCP, or even Azure would beg to differ. Personally, off the top of my head. The most polished UI/UX has to be “mcmaster.com”. I can find anything I need in what seems like a couple minutes. Compare this to big box stores l…

FastMail has one of the best-feeling web apps I've ever used. It's incredibly snappy and I never encountered any bugs while using it. They raised the bar for what I thought a web app could achieve.

Re: Sanding UI

#119

Post by arendtio »

kmoser wrote: post #18

My beliefs in the same vein: - If you think you've found all the bugs, look again. - If you think you've just fixed a bug, test again. - If you think your program is done, you're wrong.

While I agree with the first two, the third is a problem. Yes, you can always extend your program, but should you? The more code and functionality you include, the harder it becomes to maintain.

Finding the point where your software is so round or complete that you can call it done is somewhat of an art. You can undoubtedly add stuff beyond that point, but I won't improve the software in the long term.

Re: Sanding UI

#120

Post by robin_reala »

ccakes wrote: post #91
xyst wrote: post #80

I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there? You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have. But anybody that has used Amazon.com or AWS, GCP, or even Azure would beg to differ. Personally, off the top of my head. The most polished UI/UX has to be “mcmaster.com”. I can find anything I need in what seems like a couple minutes. Compare this to big box stores l…

imo GitHub has to be up there. I think some of the recent changes to search and making the code view more IDE-like are steps backward from a “polish” perspective, but still useful features

GitHub specifically has the issue mentioned in this blog post! It annoyed me so much I had to file it with them three years ago, and it’s still not fixed: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/7506
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