151–160 of 210 posts
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…
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…
Oh yes, and I know of a real-life case of this. A friend of mine contacted me about that message when her browser crashed. She made it clear to me she was not on a porn site when it happened. Programmers for so long just didn't think about non-technical users, and lots of them still neglect to consider that was seems obvious to someone steeped in jargon and software conventions is completely meaningless to laypeople.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Revell (Japanese) model kit instructions: We will show you every necessary step clearly and precisely using line drawn actions to provide as much accessibility to all people as possible. Only for very complicated concerns will we use language. Windows 95 UI: It might be fuggly, but you know where the bodies are buried. IKEA: We will show you how to assemble this sawdust into a crappy bookcase that doesn't sit square…
This light sometimes blinks green. Sometimes it blinks orange. What does it mean? Who knows.
UI affordances have been going away for a long time. FlatUI was the first nearly universal obviously-user-hostile movement. It happened out of boredom and the slow intrusion of the contempt-for-the-audience attitude of art and architecture into web design. Unfortunately, unlike art, we can't ignore architecture or UI design.
Revell (Japanese) model kit instructions: We will show you every necessary step clearly and precisely using line drawn actions to provide as much accessibility to all people as possible. Only for very complicated concerns will we use language. Windows 95 UI: It might be fuggly, but you know where the bodies are buried. IKEA: We will show you how to assemble this sawdust into a crappy bookcase that doesn't sit square…
A friend of mine posted on her Instagram about a cabinet where she thought the drawer slides were messed up and she couldn't fit the drawers. I looked and just kind of guessed, "is it upside down?". Yep, that was the problem. Apparently the instructions or parts were unclear enough that it was possible to put the feet on the wrong end or something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's crazy is that at one point the new wave of designers was hailed as digital native designers replacing the bad old print-trained designers. They'd save us from treating the screen like paper, unlocking the true potential of these interfaces. The worst sins of the print-designer era may have been pretty bad, but I'd say the average actually got a lot worse when the new crowd took over. First for the Web, then fo…
The idea of grounding UX in physical analogues, in my view, is incredibly important. No matter how much we interact with digital screens, we still walk on ground, pick things up with our hands, etc. Just because we can do anything in a digital experience doesn’t mean we should. Skeuomorphism may have gone too far, but the pendulum seemed to swing back too far.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21353920
Here it is, I knew I'd seen a nearly identical story before.
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…
Whereas the Amiga would just instruct you to meditate on the error code:
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.
Seems like old fashioned computer literate people are becoming the new computer illiterate. Perhaps kids learn these things socially from each other? I recently discovered the iPhone Notes app has an undo capability. There's no indication of it on any of the screens but you have to shake the phone . Shake to undo? Is that common now? How do you learn this stuff?
Apple's gestures have always been in that category for me though, including touch screen and touch pad gestures, though people used to them seem to love them. Meanwhile I'm just there like "So, how many fingers do I need to see my wifi toggle?"