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Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

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Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#131

Post by bluGill »

crazygringo wrote: post #115
jwr wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the issue is that modern interfaces are self-centered. Or rather, the designers are self-centered: they believe that the world revolves around them, and Their Magnificent Design is the One Thing that everyone will want to learn, appreciate and admire. In reality, their design is one more thing among the hundreds or thousands of things that a user manages, and should mostly serve to get other things done. It's…

That's extremely ungenerous, and no more true about designers than coders. Perhaps some designers start out have this immature attitude, but professional designers I've worked with are user-centered, not self-centered. That's just a professional prerequisite, and what you learn in design school as well. And in any case, you could just as easily say about programmers starting out that they too often believe "Their Mag…

Yeah, the lack seems to be the lack of qualified designers in the first place. Or maybe designers who are not givens enough time to do the job.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#132

Post by systemvoltage »

zorrolovsky wrote: post #126
systemvoltage wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried reading the footer to get the contact information for on https://grumpy.website but it keeps doom-scrolling and only visible for a fraction of a second. What an irony. I dream of a day when we go back to pagination. No, not just pagination numbers on the bottom of the page to flip through pages, but also the URL should reflect that and be able to share the 7th page with someone using a link.

For some experiences, content needs to be updated in page 1 (google is a good example). How would you then share page 7? that requirement could only be met if content was static (no updates) or the ordering of results was old to new. Am I missing something?

That's true. Pagination makes sense when it is static and not chronological, thanks for pointing that out. But, the problem still exists that I cannot get to the footer where there seems to be some contact information of the author :-)

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#133

Post by sroussey »

andai wrote: post #86
tesseract wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horizontal lines (or sometimes an array of dots) are sometimes used as a "grip" icon to represent reorderable list rows.

I know, I've used them in my own designs. It just sounded like he saw a hamburger menu now for the first time 5 weeks ago! Or maybe it is some kind of joke?

We have found that people are afraid to mess things up, and don’t know what three lines means, so never click them. A lot more than you would think.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#134

Post by SilasX »

datavirtue wrote: post #102
logbiscuitswave wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you’re being serious or not, but these stories seem awfully apocryphal to me. I can’t imagine anybody - not even a total novice - running away from their computer upon seeing a cartoony image of a bomb. It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time.

Nope. I too have seen users freak out about illegal operations.

And cookies:

>>Almost every time, however, something unexpected would occur, causing her to panic and call her daughter for help.

>>"It could be almost anything," Widmar said. "She goes apeshit whenever a pop-up window comes up. And one time, she paged me because she got a message about accepting cookies. She was all freaked out because now she thought she was being charged for actual cookies."

https://www.theonion.com/getting-mom-onto-internet-a-sisyphe...

Yes, a satire article, but representative of how people reacted to such cryptic browser messages.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#135

Post by yen223 »

webwielder2 wrote: post #91

It’s very funny to me that people think “the past” was a UX wonderland.

It's like how no matter when you're born, the best music was always the ones from your teenage years (when your taste in music was being formed). And how music sucks these days because kids don't know to make good music (and not because musical tastes has changed around you and you don't like that)

Same thing with UI I guess.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#136

Post by specialist »

logbiscuitswave wrote: post #92
DonHopkins wrote: post #60

The original Mac would pop up a dialog with a threatening icon of a bomb with a lit fuse, whenever it crashed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon) >The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) had a crash which the system decided was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box in Windows 9x th…

Not sure if you’re being serious or not, but these stories seem awfully apocryphal to me. I can’t imagine anybody - not even a total novice - running away from their computer upon seeing a cartoony image of a bomb. It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time.

As a kid I pulled a lot of pranks. There's always a moment of plausibility. I recently heard this described as defaulting to truth. A hard wired trait which allows most of humanity to coexist.

I once changed one buddy's autoexec.bat to prompt something like "illegal software detected, press [enter] to begin scan" and then repeatedly pipe a directory listing to null (causing the harddrive to make noises). He leaped up and unplugged his computer.

Retelling that story now, I feel just a bit of remorse.

--

Oh, another example, probably apocryphal.

At the dawn of cinema, audiences were said to recoil the first time they saw a disembodied head, like when you cutaway for a close up.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#137

Post by mjhagen »

pram wrote: post #100
logbiscuitswave wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you’re being serious or not, but these stories seem awfully apocryphal to me. I can’t imagine anybody - not even a total novice - running away from their computer upon seeing a cartoony image of a bomb. It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time.

It seems kinda hyperbolic, but then again the death chime on Power Macs scared the hell out of me as a kid.

They still scare me!

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#138

Post by notriddle »

systemvoltage wrote: post #112
todfox wrote: post #5

For more of these daily annoyances: https://grumpy.website The growing user hostility of UIs makes me want to stop developing software and even stop using computers. I started using computers because they made more sense to me than a lot of things. Now, I'm encountering these little moments of illogic and unreason every hour of the day. It's not just beginners who need little cues. I'm deeply familiar with the APIs b…

I tried reading the footer to get the contact information for on https://grumpy.website but it keeps doom-scrolling and only visible for a fraction of a second. What an irony. I dream of a day when we go back to pagination. No, not just pagination numbers on the bottom of the page to flip through pages, but also the URL should reflect that and be able to share the 7th page with someone using a link.

I hate it when people share page numbers like that with me, because many sites have things that are either "ranked" somehow, or in reverse-chronological order, which means that the contents of page 3 are constantly changing.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#140

Post by OJFord »

Wow, I did not realise that was a horizontal slider either. (I've used Android since the G1, so certainly since whenever that was introduced. I've seen it a lot, just never scrolled it, because I didn't know it did.)

Another book I'd recommend to anyone interested in this sort of thing js Spence's Information Visualisation: Design for Interaction. I also had the pleasure of the author's course at university, apart from anything else it was an excellent sort of 'something a bit different to think about', that I often recall when I'm frustrated by things (as in the submission), and perhaps more often should when working on frontendy things.

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