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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#181

Post by franga2000 »

MattGaiser wrote: post #88

I work on a project meant to sell a service and meant to manage the service being sold to the consumer. However, the button to actually buy the service is hidden by a scroll bar on all but the widest of screens. Unless you scroll the widget or have a 22 inch monitor, you will not see the purchase button. Why? The UI was designed in on a wide screen and we developers are just the implementers of the picture. UI is qui…

> UI is quite often taken from a drawing and little else

The way I've solved this these days when working with people who aren't familiar with responsive design (older/inexperienced designers or clients directly) is to print them an A3 page with outlines of a vertical phone and tablet and a horizontal desktop screen, vaguely to scale, and all including a "below the fold area", and tell them to draw on that. This almost always gives me enough information to implement a properly responsive design.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#182

Post by majewsky »

Firehawke wrote: post #85
red_admiral wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joel Spolsky has an old post somewhere where he says the reason the Palm Pilot failed but the iPhone succeeded at making mobile devices "a thing" is that desktop and mobile are two different things; the Palm tried to do a desktop interface on mobile. I'm ok with three-dot menus on mobile, especially for features like "settings" that I don't use all the time - Whatsapp's dots menu works for me. Using a dots/hamburger…

I'm generally not a hamburger menu fan, but I've come to accept it in Firefox/Chrome/Edge/etc because I rarely ever need to bring up the menu anyway so it conserves precious vertical space on a widescreen display. When I DO need to bring up the menu, I'm usually one to two clicks from where I need to go. When a hamburger menu encompasses the whole UI (metaphorically speaking) I'd definitely agree it's problematic-- a…

I think hamburgers work in browsers because they are just chrome for an actual application running inside the browser tab. Having a browser menu just above an application menu inside the browser tab is something I can actually see being problematic.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#184

Post by apocalypstyx »

101404 wrote: post #118
freedomben wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just hit the Escape key. You can also just start typing your password. I often type my password and press enter before the monitor is even awake.

...just to then realize that the computer was still logged in and the focus was on a chat window, and it was only the screen that had been in power saving mode. :-}

And this is why I bring my machine out of sleep by tapping the shift key.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#185

Post by [deleted] »

Animats wrote: post #10

Ubuntu got worse at 18.04. Logging in on desktop now requires "swiping up" with the mouse to get the password box. The "swiping" thing is to avoid problems with unwanted activation when the device is in your pocket. It's totally inappropriate to desktops. Then there's icon mania. I've recently converted from Blender 2.79 to Blender 2.82. Lots of new icons. They dim, they change color, they disappear as modes change,…

[deleted]

Re: The Decline of Usability

#187

Post by dredmorbius »

wwweston wrote: post #33
red_admiral wrote: post #12

It's not only that every app has a different style these days, but some of them change their style or add new features via auto-update every few weeks. Even office 365 (desktop version) does this. It's not just a usability nightmare, it's an accessibility one too (although the two go hand in hand most of the time). Imagine teaching some elderly neighbour how to write a word document, and after weeks of practice they…

If you think resume-driven development is bad for developers (and it is), consider the career incentives for UI and product people. If there's a "maintain" incentive, I'm not sure what it is. "Didn't change anything about functional and satisfactory interfaces" may be a real value-add in some cases, but it's not a sizzling narrative for selling yourself on the job market.

With apologies to Warren G. Bennis:

The UI/UX department of the future will have only two employees, a hipster and a dog. The hipster will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to bite the hipster if they change the UI/UX.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#188

Post by kristopolous »

majewsky wrote: post #158
kristopolous wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data driven ux seems to put all users in a single bucket. I will readily admit in collective number of clicks and screentime, 37 year old men with advanced degrees in computer science are a super small minority. But who is the majority then? Who spends the most time on say Reddit and YouTube? Children! Yes, people who we know are dramatically cognitively different than adults. Why does YouTube keep recommending video…

> here's how you could ask YouTube: "We have a few interfaces. Please tell us what you like to watch: [...] This proposal quickly falls apart because your categories are ill-defined based on your preconceptions. I watch a ton of lectures about video games on Youtube (e.g. speed run breakdowns or game lore theories). Do I choose the "Cartoons and video games" bucket or the "Lectures and tutorials" bucket?

yeah it was off the cuff. If you ask a 9 year old online if they're an adult, some will say "yes". I mean I guess it's their loss. Maybe a more direct approach is better.

"We've found adults and teens like different parts of youtube and use it differently. We want to make it the best for you. You can switch at any time, but tell us what best describes you:

* I'm an adult

* I'm not an adult.

"

youtube has this "for kids" app which came out after I first started pointing this difference in earnest around 2013, (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...) but it's not right and they clearly still cater their main interface to the habits of children who watch the same video hundreds of times - the insane repetition is a part of learning nuance and subtly in the context of content they don't have to actually pay attention to. It's all about learning the meta, super important. They know what happens, it's the silence in between they're excited about - that's the nature of play.

This app instead silos the kids into a playskool interface, great for people under 7 or so, but like our playground reform, we've made it completely unappealing for the 8-22 or so demographic (when I was a kid and there were ziplines into a bank of tires, you bet there were 20 year olds lining up to have a good time on those, we all have a need for play; freedom to err wrapped in relative safety).

Instead, it's data-driven UX for adults and data-driven UX for children - it's about separating the data, not a PTA-acceptable UX for overprotective parents.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#189

Post by Lammy »

olyjohn wrote: post #155
Lammy wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implementation may be bad but it seems like the same idea to me, “user must interact with UI before entering credentials”.

Except you don't have to. Just start typing your password.

Yes, that’s why it’s a bad implementation of a good idea.
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