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Sanding UI

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: Sanding UI

#251

Post by exe34 »

JimDabell wrote: post #224
exe34 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it's not agile, it's the environment that led to agile/scrum being adopted: not that it leads to better products, but that it gives management more control over every decision of how time is spent. essentially they can arbitrarily reduce the time/budget you have, and hire standard code monkeys, etc, to get something made. I think in a company like Steve Job's Apple, where it needs to look perfect (within…

> I agree that it's not agile, it's the environment that led to agile/scrum being adopted: not that it leads to better products, but that it gives management more control over every decision of how time is spent. essentially they can arbitrarily reduce the time/budget you have, and hire standard code monkeys, etc, to get something made. This is the exact opposite of agile. Direct from the Agile Manifesto: > Build pro…

may I refer you to Karl Marx? Communism is perfect, it's just been implemented wrong.

Re: Sanding UI

#252

Post by kizer »

remus wrote: post #211

I think being a big user of whatever you're building is incredibly useful for finding these kinds of issues. If you're a big user as well as a dev then you will often stumble on these little things before a user does, and you are also perfectly placed to fix these issues before users can stumble on them. I suspect this is why small teams with strong ownership can be so effective. If you feel ownership of a thing then…

Also why companies dogfood and have internal betas for products (when this is possible; i.e., you’re not making something for enterprises or other kinds of customers). The sense of ownership you’re talking about may not be as direct but stake in success of the product is there.

Re: Sanding UI

#253

Post by Ciantic »

dmix wrote: post #79
ddtaylor wrote: post #29

The goto tactic for this specific ` ` problem is: Foo

Bootstrap moved from in 4.0 to + in 5.0 for radios/checkboxes [1]. I was curious about why but my guess is that it adds some simplicity for theming when repositioning/padding either the label or input. [1] https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.3/forms/checks-radios/

Incidentally Bootstrap 5.3 seems to have the same problem as the article describes. There is a gap which doesn't do anything if clicked, right between the radio button and the label.

Re: Sanding UI

#254

Post by kizer »

userbinator wrote: post #121
xyst wrote: post #80

I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there? You would think FAANG would have a half decent UI and UX with the amount of money they have. But anybody that has used Amazon.com or AWS, GCP, or even Azure would beg to differ. Personally, off the top of my head. The most polished UI/UX has to be “mcmaster.com”. I can find anything I need in what seems like a couple minutes. Compare this to big box stores l…

I wonder what’s the most polished or “sanded” UI out there? Windows 2000. Everything newer has been slowly downhill.

There is SO much bloat in all the “modern” UI “culture”. Reinventing things over and over again. Creating entire frameworks for tiny, simple things. And the worst part of web UIs is that (though there have been efforts to address this) there is low regularity between the experiences especially compared to native UI apps where you are purposely restricted to a set of controls which look and behave the same across all apps that use them.

Re: Sanding UI

#255

Post by Sardtok »

I was on a site the other day, a hotel or flight website. I think it was a review form. There were checkboxes, where the checkbox wasn't clickable, only the labels. I was sure the whole thing was frozen, but happened to find some other UI controls were responding. So I tried the labels.

I've come across the reverse scenario quite a few times, where the label isn't clickable, but this variant was new to me.

Re: Sanding UI

#256

Post by kmoser »

arendtio wrote: post #119
kmoser wrote: post #18

My beliefs in the same vein: - If you think you've found all the bugs, look again. - If you think you've just fixed a bug, test again. - If you think your program is done, you're wrong.

While I agree with the first two, the third is a problem. Yes, you can always extend your program, but should you? The more code and functionality you include, the harder it becomes to maintain. Finding the point where your software is so round or complete that you can call it done is somewhat of an art. You can undoubtedly add stuff beyond that point, but I won't improve the software in the long term.

The third one isn't meant to imply that you should keep adding needlessly, or that you should necessarily add more functionality (yes, this is how feature creep starts). It's meant to indicate that software is never truly finished: there is always something to fix or improve upon (e.g. refactor).

It's perfectly fine if you make the conscious choice to not make those fixes or improvements, usually for time/budget reasons, but the point is that you should be aware of those possibilities, and that those are the points to revisit if and when you have the resources to do so.

Re: Sanding UI

#257

Post by toast0 »

exe34 wrote: post #161
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but you can make free apps for a wider audience. Or even just useful apps for yourself. Can do what pleases you though. I sometimes work on intentionally useless apps just to try things out, but the idea is always to carry those ideas over to some app that has some purpose.

do you think makers of abstract art should do something more useful? how about people in marketing? landlords?

All of those things are useful.

With no abstract artists, art museums will have bare walls (which is fine, if the wall is the one they gave to me... but nobody wants to look at a bare wall and pretend its art for a whole museum!)

Marketting seems useless sometimes, but when Pepsi spent their marketting budget on community projects, they lost a ton of sales. My local ice rink has no marketting and nobody in the county knows it exists, even people who would like to do ice skating or ice hockey; a smidge of marketting would be super useful; other rinks in neighboring counties have doubled or more the number of kids playing hockey in the past few years since we got a local NHL team, but ours struggles to get a single full team at most age groups.

Landlords are not well liked on HN, but seems to me having a place to live on a month to month basis was pretty handy before I had the ability to make a long term commitment to a single place. I know some people buy a place to live for college, but an off campus rental seemed a lot more sensible to me. And similar when moving for work if you're not sure you'll be there long term, or you want out of a hotel before you're sure of what neighborhoods you like.

Re: Sanding UI

#258

Post by dumbo-octopus »

acka wrote: post #69
dumbo-octopus wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Parent link says NVDA, VoiceOver, and JAWS all support the implicit way. That’s the industry standard suite to support, they’re all free and available across all platforms. If some company makes a shoddy half baked solution for sale (looking at you, Dragon), and they don’t understand basic HTML that has been standardized for years, that’s not my problem. The same way I don’t only use the subset of web technologies th…

JAWS isn't free[1]. Using the trial version for accessibility testing goes against its EULA[2]. [1] https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/ [2] https://webaim.org/blog/jaws-license-not-developer-friendly/

Ah, I got it mixed with Orca. NVDA is the thing to target in Windows.

Re: Sanding UI

#259

Post by marcosdumay »

emsimot wrote: post #159
marcosdumay wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, the only reason to use the label's `for` is when you want to place it in a different place from the widget.

It also helps with accessibility, screen readers etc

Not compared to including the widget inside the label.

Re: Sanding UI

#260

Post by ibash »

aetherspawn wrote: post #83

This is so lost in Agile. Engineers should get the time to “sand” their products, but we just don’t. If QA doesn’t make a ticket for the space between, it’ll never get fixed. The customer probably notices this kind of a thing but it’s a miracle if the customer bothers to report it, and another miracle if it eventually turns into a ticket, and another miracle if someone prioritises it enough to spend time fixing it. […

> The customer probably notices this kind of a thing but it’s a miracle if the customer bothers to report it, and another miracle if it eventually turns into a ticket, and another miracle if someone prioritises it enough to spend time fixing it.

I report a lot of bugs. But it seems like a lot of customer support people view their jobs as “protect engineers from bug reports and deflect responsibility”.

That’s if you get a response at all.

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