Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

UX clichés

uxdesign.cc

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 172 posts

Re: UX clichés

#151

Post by kurtisc »

bsder wrote: post #136
flukus wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with the hamburger menu? It seems like a good compromise of quickly accessible functionality for little screen real estate. For desktop apps with plenty of screen real estate it's crazy (looking at you gnome) but on mobiles it's fine, especially when the alternatives seem to be some sort of hidden and undiscovered slide out menu or long button press.

The problem is that you have no idea what is under that menu. The hamburger menu becomes a default dumping ground substituting for an intelligently design UI.

I'm reading this on Firefox with a hamburger menu. It's a hard sell that someone else's supposed damaged discoverability is worth me giving up screen space to replace it with a menu bar for things that are rarely used. If they can't work out to click on it, they're not going to find much use from the things that are in it.

Re: UX clichés

#152

Post by kurtisc »

bsder wrote: post #114
iheartpotatoes wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a like-/counter-anecdote, I developed semiconductor CAD tools for 10 years, after spending 10 years using them. When they first started being developed with GUIs, GUI meant UI, and its oft-maligned sibling, UX, wasn't a term. In my learnings, Xt (XToolKit) started putting words and code behind the abstract patterns in the late 80's, but our tool usability suffered horribly as more and more (usually nonresizing) At…

> So much "It worked fine before, why did you change it?!?!?!?" Uhh... because a feature you use 80% of the time required 5x more clicks to get to than a feature you used 20% of the time? FML. Well, they're not wrong because every other CAD tool simply rearranged the UI for no reason. In addition, the problem with semiconductor CAD tools is that any feature which isn't used by everybody is effectively broken because…

>"CAUTION: this feature was used N times in the last 180 days by all users of the tool where N I doubt it would work, power users turn off tracking. Presumably you can't trust that the tracking will return only what they say it will (and not your internet history) but you can trust that opting to turn it off will turn it off.

Re: UX clichés

#153

Post by zbentley »

mosselman wrote: post #44
dvtrn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like forced satire. It could also be good old fashioned regular satire, too...

Could have been, yet isn’t. The first few were accurate and somewhat funny, but it quickly went downhill. Maybe developers aren’t the audience; we are more factual and concrete whereas designers are usually more driven by emotion. The quotes in the article are not very accurate and seem made up, but the general emotion of “designers be like” is evident. Maybe designers respond to that emotion rather than bother with…

> [developers] are more factual and concrete whereas designers are usually more driven by emotion.

I am so tired of this trope. Bad designers are influenced by emotion in unconstructive ways. So are bad engineers.

I'm also tired of the "emotion == bad when doing engineering stuff" trope. The ideal for developers or designers (or a whole lot of other fields, probably excluding nuclear-launch executors and munitions testers) isn't some emotionless data/spec-driven automaton: it's a responsible person who operates pragmatically and calculatedly when they have enough information, and whose feelings/emotions are constructive and lead to good outcomes when information is scarce or snap decisions need to be made.

Re: UX clichés

#154

Post by jasonhansel »

mikeash wrote: post #110
jasonhansel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could add an entire 10-page rant about people who insist on the Liskov substitution principle.

I never heard of the LSP being at all questionable. Can you elaborate?

Not without writing that 10-page rant....

Re: UX clichés

#155

Post by username444 »

pwthornton wrote: post #84
normalhuman wrote: post #52

I am not a designer nor a software engineer, nor a business person. I am just a (heavy) user of all sorts of software for a very long time. I am a competent coder, and I code for research and pleasure. I don't have a dog in this, let's say, professional race. Every time I spot "UX" in relation to something I use, I cringe. Not because I have anything against the idea of design, or good interfaces, or designing good i…

This is not true: "The human brain is incredibly plastic and adaptable. Unless the interface is truly absurd, most people can get used to it and never give it a second thought again." I've interviewed and observed enough users to know this is not true. There are a lot of interfaces that are suffer from issues with discoverability and understanding, and even when a user figures this stuff out one time (or is showed it…

Speaking of UX mistakes: don't assault me with an email subscription form on page load when I haven't read a single letter of your content.

Earn my trust before asking me to get into bed with you.

Re: UX clichés

#156

Post by chiefalchemist »

werber wrote: post #65
chiefalchemist wrote: post #43

I'm feeling that cliches is not the right word. To call something cliche generally means it's over-used, tired, boring, etc. But the article itself is not saying that. Perhaps maxims or truths, would be better?

For what it's worth, I hear most of those things so often in my job (ui dev who works very closely with uxers) that I'd consider them very specific cliches

Yes, to you they might be cliches. But the way they are presented - to n00bs - the wouldn't really be cliches.

Re: UX clichés

#157

Post by pavel_lishin »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #71
zoul wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UX for laptops/desktops was solved in the early 2000. In the early 2000, my music library was a few dozens GBs played back using mpeg123 or something. Nowadays it’s a Google Play Music subscription. Things have moved to the cloud, a lot. That’s a huge change in how computers work, requiring some serious UX changes. I too hate gratuitous UI changes, but things need to keep evolving.

Spotify and Google Play Music are a kind of worse version of UI of Foobar2000, with much limited features. There was a huge UX regression coming with the move to the cloud. I'm all for things evolving, but it's better if they don't devolve .

> There was a huge UX regression coming with the move to the cloud.

Maybe in terms of the things you can click and knobs you can twiddle, but moving my music into Google Play and off (e.g.) iTunes means that I can very trivially put music on my mobile device (using either that device, or the computer) that is almost instantly accessible offline, and easy to listen to.

That twin gain - ease of sync and offline availability - completely blew Winamp and iTunes so far out of the water that they're in orbit, as far as I'm concerned.

(There are things I miss; multiple genres for a given song/album. Organizing by folder and playlist. Visualizations. Sometimes Google Play will forcibly replace my uploaded files with the wrong version - I still have a few songs that are "censored", and it grates me whenever I hear them.)

Re: UX clichés

#158

Post by D-Coder »

normalhuman wrote: post #52

I am not a designer nor a software engineer, nor a business person. I am just a (heavy) user of all sorts of software for a very long time. I am a competent coder, and I code for research and pleasure. I don't have a dog in this, let's say, professional race. Every time I spot "UX" in relation to something I use, I cringe. Not because I have anything against the idea of design, or good interfaces, or designing good i…

> DON'T FUCKING CHANGE THE INTERFACE > > Unless there is a very good reason, and I bet there isn't. > > I bought my first MacBook in 2007.

Apple changed one of the most common operations: double-clicking a folder to open it now (a) opens in the parent folder's window, and (b) rearranges the folder contents which I have carefully arranged for my own particular use of that particular folder ARRRRGGGGG.

They could at least have put an option somewhere for "Open folders the old way," but didn't.

Cmd-double-click does it the old way... unlike double-clicking on any other thing in the UI.

Re: UX clichés

#159

Post by [deleted] »

DonHopkins wrote: post #104
justcodebruh wrote: post #12

while we’re on the topic of UI/UX does HN have any recommendations for primers on the subject?

How about this anti-primer: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm Interface Hall of Shame - QuickTime 4.0 Player - Amid much fanfare, Apple recently released a beta version of the QuickTime 4.0 Player. Intended to showcase the technological improvements of the QuickTime 4.0 multimedia technology, the QuickTime 4.0 Player sports a completely redesigned user interface. The new interface represents an almost violent dep…

[deleted]

Re: UX clichés

#160

Post by qplex »

DonHopkins wrote: post #104
justcodebruh wrote: post #12

while we’re on the topic of UI/UX does HN have any recommendations for primers on the subject?

How about this anti-primer: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm Interface Hall of Shame - QuickTime 4.0 Player - Amid much fanfare, Apple recently released a beta version of the QuickTime 4.0 Player. Intended to showcase the technological improvements of the QuickTime 4.0 multimedia technology, the QuickTime 4.0 Player sports a completely redesigned user interface. The new interface represents an almost violent dep…

Ahh. I remember being forced to install Quicktime 4.0 because I wanted to watch Star Wars: The Phantom Menace trailer.

Another proprietary menace back then was RealMedia and RealPlayer.

Some time later the .dll codec blobs for both QuickTime and RealMedia were horribly hacked to run under mplayer (and Linux) by the mplayerhq.hu people.

It was pretty cool feat back then.

Post reply on HN