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Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

shkspr.mobi

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Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#181

Post by mook »

gherkinnn wrote: post #17
recursivedoubts wrote: post #2

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.

I don’t think flat design is inherently hostile. The same way I don’t think heavy skeuomorphism is inherently patronising. We went from a violent explosion of visuals to ambiguous interactive elements. Both shite, both a pain to use, both bad design. Both can be avoided within their respective philosophy. As OP shows, iOS hinting at more content by partially showing the next item is a good example. You can very well…

Windows 3.1 in EGA mode was fine — it had no depth (can't afford that when you had 16 colours for the whole screen) but it was fine, because it had consistent button borders and things along those lines.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#182

Post by RedShift1 »

dejawu wrote: post #85
HKH2 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In another well-known OS, the pointer can be somewhere inside the corner, and you can press a meta key and click and drag the corner without being on it exactly. I used to miss that functionality quite a bit when using Windows, but I think I use window snapping more now.

I loved that too! I use AltDrag[0] to get that functionality in Windows. It's a bit old and you may have to tweak it a bit to make it work with HiDPI, but it's now become a must-install when I set up a new machine. [0] https://stefansundin.github.io/altdrag/

AltDrag is amazing. Plus it's becoming a necessity because the window bar is now getting filled with elements too, so you can't rely on being able to use it to drag windows around by clicking and holding on any spot in the bar.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#183

Post by stingraycharles »

wlesieutre wrote: post #129
stingraycharles wrote: post #128

> But there's evidence that Apple are slowly undoing their great usability work in the name of elegance. Tangent, but am I the only one who is really bothered by the update they made to the way you set a clock (eg for an alarm or appointment) a few years ago? It’s now only digits which I am supposed to scroll vertically, which is incredibly tedious; before, it was an actual analog clock I could drag around and it was…

Are you talking about the time input like when you create a new alarm? The new one is a text field that you can drag the little digit spinners, but primarily you just type in it. Being able to put times in with a proper numeric keypad is a big usability improvement IMO.

TIL you can actually just use the numeric keypad to type it in. I must be getting old.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#184

Post by biofox »

mook wrote: post #181
gherkinnn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think flat design is inherently hostile. The same way I don’t think heavy skeuomorphism is inherently patronising. We went from a violent explosion of visuals to ambiguous interactive elements. Both shite, both a pain to use, both bad design. Both can be avoided within their respective philosophy. As OP shows, iOS hinting at more content by partially showing the next item is a good example. You can very well…

Windows 3.1 in EGA mode was fine — it had no depth (can't afford that when you had 16 colours for the whole screen) but it was fine, because it had consistent button borders and things along those lines.

Consistency is key, I think. Part of the problem now is that every app tries to redesign the entire interface from scratch, meaning there are no general interaction principles that a user can rely on anymore. I hate it.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#185

Post by biofox »

cratermoon wrote: post #154
lozenge wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This light sometimes blinks green. Sometimes it blinks orange. What does it mean? Who knows.

What does everything need to have a little blue or red LED now? ... I am pretty strict about not letting any electronic devices into my bedroom because when I turn the lights out to go to sleep I don't want to see a constellation of LEDs, some blinking. The blue ones are the worst, for lots of reasons. My phone goes face down or in the nightstand drawer. I got a new window a/c unit a couple of years ago and it has LE…

I wish I could upvote you more than once. I have to stick electrical tape over all of the LEDs in my bedroom, otherwise they disturb my sleep.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#186

Post by seanwilson »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #177
seanwilson wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a more intuitive word for "affordances" or similar? I find its definition is always debated or confused in the comments so I prefer to avoid it where possible.

The affordances of an object are with respect to the observer-- the object affords opportunities to the observer. It's like "resonance", which is not in the object or the perceiver but describes the relationship. Signifiers are on or in the object.

In what settings do you find these words useful though? Where do they save time and increase clarity?

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#187

Post by bitwize »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #2

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.

Never thought I'd see the day when libXaw would be at the cutting edge of UI design again, but here we are.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#188

Post by PoignardAzur »

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?

The classical solution is to have a "content before ID_OF_LAST_ITEM_ON_PREVIOUS_PAGE" url, though there isn't really a way to do that and also display page numbers on the bottom.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#189

Post by patentatt »

jp57 wrote: post #52

> Apple are slowly undoing their great usability work in the name of elegance. Not slowly, or recently. The big removal of affordances happened with IOS 7, and Jony Ive's "flat" UI aesthetic. Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini, former Apple UI researchers and champions of UI affordances, wrote an essay[1] complaining about this problem in 2015. It seems like this era might be slowly _ending_ now that Ive is gone. [1] ht…

I kind of long for the old skeuomorphic look of IOS, something about the in-your-pocket form factor and the touch-centric interface made it really work.

Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?

#190

Post by foldr »

SilasX wrote: post #134
datavirtue wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.c…

>"For practice, I logged onto Yahoo! and had her search for cheesecake recipes," Widmar said. "She got totally confused by the fact that we were searching within a web site for other web sites. She kept typing her keyword searches into the Internet Explorer address bar, not into the Yahoo! search bar. Then, when she accidentally typed 'cheesecake' into the Explorer box, it actually worked, because there happened to be a web site called that, so that just confused her even more."

This part was pretty prophetic for 2002.

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