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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#271

Post by adenverd »

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,…

GIMP's UI/UX has been garbage since long before 18.04. Not contradicting anything you're saying, just noting that it might not be the representative example you're looking for.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#272

Post by [deleted] »

wbl wrote: post #228
EEMac wrote: post #222

Part of this is because the sensors are winning. Sensors (about 70% of the population) use an application by mapping: a click here does this . Based on literature and my experience with my husband, maps are made separately for each application no matter what the similarities are. Most computer programmers are intuitives: we want things to work the same way in one application as they work in another. That makes it eas…

Please explain dd then.

[deleted]

Re: The Decline of Usability

#274

Post by _jal »

swiley wrote: post #202
zrm wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Anecdote: The first time this happened, I had no idea why it wasn't working and naturally started clicking on things and pressing buttons to try to get it to do the thing. I thereby discove…

I don't care how "user friendly" you think you are, not being able to log in is an absolute fail. Even getty has a better user interface, imagine that: regression all the way back in to the 70s. This is why I don't touch GUIs from the major binary distros or gnome3 with a 10 foot pole. If I can avoid it I don't ever install anything from those projects.

Gnome and KDE are both worse than useless - They poison other, useful projects.

There is never going to be a unified GUI for Linux; that requires a dictator. KDE tried to provide the carrot of development-ease, Gnome tried to generate some reality distortion, but nobody cared. Carrots don't work. As far as I'm concerned, the experiment is over and it is time to embrace the chaos.

Now, this is easy for me to say, I'm mostly a command-line person anyway, and have spent most of my working life dealing with horrible UI. But it does have a lot of implications for Linux that I think a lot of people are not ready to accept.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#275

Post by Jtsummers »

kristopolous wrote: post #269
pfranz wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they couldn't make it easier to set I think the clock should have been less prominent. It's necessary if you're doing a scheduled recording. It's too bad time sync over power lines didn't catch on widely (or broadcast over the radio). It would still be saving everyone from changing their digital clocks during DST.

Time codes inside of analog terrestrial NTSC sounds really easy and obvious. Given that nobody did it, it would appear that even though legally people like Mr. Rogers were making the case for time-shift programming, the industry must have assumed it was a minor use case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Data_Services

Autoclock setting was done for VCRs. It just happened much later than the case in question.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#276

Post by dleslie »

KerrickStaley wrote: post #237
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,…

On the GNOME login screen you can press [Enter] or [Space], or click (on the latest GNOME, 3.34) or swipe up (on the previous versions) to get to the password entry box, or you can just start typing your password. It's extremely easy and discoverable (because there are so many options, nearly anything you do will take you to the password box). I really don't think there's an issue with it. This is with stock GNOME (o…

So what you're saying is that there's no way to discover it by visual inspection alone; and so my elderly family members could never discover it for fear of breaking something by pressing the wrong button. That's bad UI.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#277

Post by markus_zhang »

oftenwrong wrote: post #32

It is quite sad how often I end up having to help older relatives with their computers on account of unintuitive UI. One memorable, recent example was my mother, who could not figure out how to get her GMail sidebar to un-collapse itself. Here's a screenshot of a collapsed sidebar: https://storage.googleapis.com/support-forums-api/attachment... and a screenshot of an un-collapsed sidebar: https://techcrunch.com/wp-co…

YouTube does that too, but on smaller screens. Still confused me to death in the first couple of times.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#278

Post by dleslie »

coopsmgoops wrote: post #207
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,…

At the Ubuntu log in screen just start typing your password and it will automatically scroll up.

Yes, let's train users to type their passwords in with no visual indicator of where it's being input, and only faith that it will go well. Great idea. /s

Re: The Decline of Usability

#279

Post by hiram112 »

kristopolous wrote: post #57
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,…

Gimp is a great example. If you look up screenshots from the late 90s of gimp 1.0 you think "Hey wow, that looks pretty great! I know where the buttons are, I can quickly scan them and it's clear what they do! It isn't a grey on grey tiny soup, they are distinct and clear, this is great. When is this version shipping? It fixes everything!" Apparently almost everyone agrees but somehow we're still going the wrong way,…

GIMP has had no much powerful functionality while at the same time having an absolute awful UI going on 15 years or more now.

And it still hasn't been fixed.

I'm not a big believer in conspiracies, but if there's one I'd not dismiss out of hand, it's that Adobe or some other company has been ensuring that GIMP has never been improved or become a viable replacement for some PS users.

There is obviously a large potential market for a lower cost option for light users of Photoshop who don't want a monthly subscription to Creative Cloud.

Maybe they secretly paid off open source devs to obfuscate the code so much that any potential volunteers would have too much trouble finding a way to re-architect the UI without years of unpaid work.

When I see so many great improvements to complex software released to the community on GitHub, along with the potential for some startup to fork GIMP, fix its UI, and charge some sort of support fee like a lot of companies do with OSS, I just find it very strange that GIMP's UI is still in such bad shape, after two decades oconatant complaining by users.

It wouldn't surprise if Microsoft did or does something similar with the OpenOffice code base. So many compatibility and usability problems that just seem to langusish for decades, while you'd think some company could find a way to make money fixing some of the biggest issues keeping light users of Office 365 who don't want to pay subscriptions.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#280

Post by dleslie »

EEMac wrote: post #222

Part of this is because the sensors are winning. Sensors (about 70% of the population) use an application by mapping: a click here does this . Based on literature and my experience with my husband, maps are made separately for each application no matter what the similarities are. Most computer programmers are intuitives: we want things to work the same way in one application as they work in another. That makes it eas…

Not all programmers are intuitives; there are a great many who are sensors who lack a mental model of how their device operates or how the software they're interfacing with at a DSL or API level operates.

They have a mental map of commands and structures for everything they make, and make "new" things by following examples of new maps. Ie, copying code from SO.

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