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Sanding UI

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: Sanding UI

#291

Post by madeofpalk »

bartread wrote: post #173
necovek wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea behind "agile" is to recognize when something isn't working and improve it. You obviously have a process that does not serve your customers' needs: work with your team to fix it. If you have SCRUM ceremonies, a retrospective is where you can raise it, but really, any time works (retrospectives are to purposely look at the past few weeks, but things you notice along the way, look to solve along the way).

Stop drinking the koolaid, will you? I didn't get into software development to spend my entire time focussed on fixing broken processes. I'd bet almost none of us did. I got into it because I like building software and, more than that, I like building high quality software. At the end of the day it comes down to this: I've worked a bunch of different places over 25 years. I've seen a lot of different processes but, c…

Fixing “agile” is not the point. Find a process (and iterate on it) that helps you ship good software. I think there’s a bunch of stuff in the agile toolbox that’s helpful. Pick and mix that works for you.

Maybe the business just doesn’t value shipping good software all that much - plenty don’t.

Re: Sanding UI

#292

Post by gwern »

someoneontenet wrote: post #26

Sounds like op is manually fuzz testing.

Yes, but the important thing is the evaluation function of what happens after random actions - his intuitive expectations and things ripping his skin. A web fuzzer can click around randomly like he does, but it can't know things like "clicking here ought to have set the button" or "this is twice as slow as it should be, why". It can detect things like crashes or segfaults or JS code throwing exceptions, but not those other things.

Re: Sanding UI

#293

Post by gwern »

paxcoder wrote: post #185

Might be a good idea to record clicks that have no associated action. If you could display all of such clicks visually, the problem might become obvious.

The problem with that is that users (1) often click at random or for stupid reasons (I was shocked when one user contacted me to complain about my site acting poorly when they clicked on random empty whitespace - they said they just did that compulsively as a habit, like fidgeting), and (2) users learn to not click on these sorts of papercuts via operant conditioning. Like the OP's example is something that his users would learn not to do, and so it would disappear from the statistics. It's not obvious to me that it would emerge out of the sea of misclicks and bots and random fidgeting clicks. Are you going to review a vast list of logged null clicks (and of course, lots of these papercuts will be for clicks that do have actions - the wrong action) regularly? Realistically, no. You probably aren't even reviewing your site's 404s or making sure all links work.

Re: Sanding UI

#294

Post by playingalong »

ibash wrote: post #260
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 g…

Yeah.

In some rare cases there's a direct feedback button in the product itself. Then usually you don't get the response, but at least your remarks are read by someone. Or at least that's the impression I get.

As a positive example - check out the new commit view page in GitHub which they are currently rolling out. There's a Feedback button which goes to a *public* discussion page with voting and comments. One can tell they are really into listening the feedback. And that's something. At least one of the miracles for free.

Re: Sanding UI

#295

Post by 8n4vidtmkvmk »

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?

I personally don't care much for abstract art, but if your goal is to produce an art piece, then sure, that's a purpose. I don't know if OP was going for "art" or just having fun with the tech. I wouldn't count it as art because it's very much a copy of an existing piece of software, not an original piece.

Re: Sanding UI

#296

Post by cal85 »

throwaway743 wrote: post #237
youssefarizk wrote: post #216

I'm always torn whether this is a good use of time or not. If you're an early stage startup, it feels like shipping features (that work) quickly is your biggest differentiator, not how nice your UI is. I guess this is true if you're doing something in a not so saturated field, but understand that if you're in a saturated space, you probably do need the design to be natural os as to set yourself apart.

It's not about how nice the UI is is, but rather how responsive it is and if it's providing your users with enough feedback. If it's not, it will lead to your users being confused and/or frustrated which will lead to them looking for an alternative tool. If you're product is the only one in town, then they're just left to deal with it until a competitor pops up with a better (whether real or perceived) UI.

Please elaborate a bit on real vs. perceived UI!

Re: Sanding UI

#297

Post by TimTheTinker »

ryandrake wrote: post #275
wruza wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, they used flexbox to nicely do… absolutely nothing useful beyond blogspam. Next up “how I made my ui responsive but then heroically stopped labels wrapping away from radio marks”. There’s a reason, even if accidental, why writing custom controls was sort of a black magic in traditional ui. And that reason is, most people are clueless about how fragile ui actually will be in their hands.

I guess what I learned from the article is how crazy it is that developers are still putting UIs together with text labels and padding and flexbox-this and align-that. What kind of stone age shit is this? Back in the '90s we were putting UIs together with controls already polished and perfected by the OS vendor, presumably backed by man-years of UX research from those companies. The controls themselves had styling, b…

The root cause here is that unlike native OS controls, most native web controls are primitive as heck.

So companies that don't want to look like Craigslist end up either using an off-the-shelf UI controls library (not a bad decision, in my opinion), or building their own.

Along with the second option, a new set of disciplines is emerging: the design system designer and engineer. Since companies have grown so accustomed to building their own bespoke design language (instead of using the one the OS ships with), it's doubtful that a well-designed set of modern, native web controls (that ship with browsers) would be able to compete with the notion of "having a bespoke design system".

Also, white-label libraries (like Radix UI) are increasingly appearing that handle all the implementation details and leave the appearance to be defined.

Re: Sanding UI

#298

Post by parasti »

christophilus wrote: post #62

I generally wrap my radios inside of the label for this reason. Is there a reason not to do that?

You can't style the label based on input state if you do that. If you instead order them like input + label, then you can style the label with selectors like input:checked + label.

Re: Sanding UI

#299

Post by two_handfuls »

qingcharles wrote: post #114
two_handfuls wrote: post #94

Meanwhile, some other UI uses square boxes for radio buttons. Or have a highlighted button but the enter key doesn't activate it. Or there are three different menus all behind a different symbol (ellipsis, hamburger, kebab). There is a lot of variance in quality. Those of you who polish your UI: you are appreciated. Truly.

Square or squircle seems to moving towards the standard for radio buttons now. Even Apple plays this game :(

File each as a bug, fight the good fight.

Re: Sanding UI

#300

Post by exe34 »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #295
exe34 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I personally don't care much for abstract art, but if your goal is to produce an art piece, then sure, that's a purpose. I don't know if OP was going for "art" or just having fun with the tech. I wouldn't count it as art because it's very much a copy of an existing piece of software, not an original piece.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replicas_of_Michelangelo%27s_D...
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