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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#311

Post by lmm »

hiram112 wrote: post #279
kristopolous wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 potenti…

Good designers don't work for free. It's kind of strange that programmers have a culture of working for free (or at least of employers agreeing to open-source contributions), but we do, so gnarly algorithms get open-sourced all the time.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#312

Post by omniscient_oce »

pcurve wrote: post #245

We have army of ux professionals these days. But I think engineers do better UX than most so called ux professionals and I say this as a ux professional myself. we've invented a colossal industry with good intent in the beginning, but over past 10 years, I've seen it degenerate into desperation for relevancy by constantly introducing new things. (things aren't much better in SE) Can we get back to just doing things?…

I don't get these fake persona things I see in portfolios and on Behance and stuff. Are these a legit thing or just something that is taught in school so students do and put on their portfolio but isn't used in practice. I get the basic idea behind it but a lot of the time it comes off as quite pretentious, or filler work.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#313

Post by wott »

pcurve wrote: post #245

We have army of ux professionals these days. But I think engineers do better UX than most so called ux professionals and I say this as a ux professional myself. we've invented a colossal industry with good intent in the beginning, but over past 10 years, I've seen it degenerate into desperation for relevancy by constantly introducing new things. (things aren't much better in SE) Can we get back to just doing things?…

No, it's the same with urbanism for example.

If I look at what was built in my country before, say, WW2, it all makes sense, even if we just consider private housing development: numerous streets around small blocks, which guarantee many communication options and no concentration of traffic on single exits, streets on the outside of the blocks, so that it can be used by outsiders too, and so that it allows future extension without compromising any communication. This could be made simply for working-class neighbourhoods or company towns, and yet it was well designed, and has aged well.

But in the last 40-50 years we have had gazillions of educated, graduate, certified, professional urbanists and architects, and those have produced all those closed or almost closed subdivisions, which are bad to almost everything related to communication by any mean (foot, bike, but also by car, because it unbalances the traffic between places), and forbid any kind of evolution (extension, inclusion, change of destination).

The same also have validated the opposite: totally un-organised subdivisions, which produce the exact same result: for each group of 2 or 3 lots, you have a lane to the main road, perpendicular to it, and of course making a dead end on their side. With the additional penalty of blocking the vision for anyone going along the road, by a never-ending streak of artificialisation. Example: https://www.google.fr/maps/@43.4593112,1.3756329,1321m/data=...

And they kept on doing that despite the evidence that it has almost no pro and plenty of terrible cons (otherwise said, it is utterly stupid shit). And they keep on doing it everyday, still.

------------

In my opinion, those situations have a degree of similarity: the advent of a horde of graduate professionals, who do worse than what has already been done, despite having been exposed to more experiences and more results of those decades of experiences, and having studied them.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#314

Post by MattGaiser »

agumonkey wrote: post #106
ardy42 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rapid iteration was a potential source of improvements (never going wrong since you can always adjust next week vs potential big fail every N years) and that it would yield better understanding of users by throwing every possible solutions at them. > It will have to pop and rebalance itself because it leads to fatigue and false sense of progress. Totally agree, it's ended up turning into a stream of pointless side-…

It's doubly odd because as many (I suppose) I firmly believed that faster pace and smaller changes would lead to global improvements (same goes for ajax web..). I think we just blew some social limit. People prefer stability, stability allows for more complex but riskier constructions, society enjoys the working ones even better. I like the notion of seasonality these days.

> faster pace and smaller changes would lead to global improvements

They need to account for how that changes behavior.

It is like Agile development. Sure, adaptability is good. But it has led non-technicals to treat change as free so they now feel ok writing specs on the fly in meetings, creating half baked tickets, or changing a button's color every 5 minutes. By making change seemingly cheap, demand for it soared.

Smaller changes at a faster pace mean that no thought is being put into them and they are probably being viewed by fewer people before being deployed. In large companies that have a lot of people, that can easily mean that one developer has no idea what others are doing.

It also requires that meaningful feedback be received about them. A friend of mine has a startup and they are endlessly making small tweaks to where things are located. They aren't checking in any meaningful way how that is changing things but rather just guessing based on weekly user numbers.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#315

Post by aspenmayer »

majewsky wrote: post #174
mmphosis wrote: post #59

There was a time (roughly between 1982 and 1993) when very few could sit down in front of a GUI. I do feel like I am returning to that time. Here are some interfaces I could do without, except that I can't: → The command line. In 2020, I need to do a lot of things at a command line because there is no other way. For example, starting and stopping sshd needs to be a checkbox. → Tabs. Tabs. and more layers of Tabs: boo…

> starting and stopping sshd needs to be a checkbox That's how you get something like this: https://www.jensroesner.com/wgetgui/

It’s funny you mention that, because if you keep scrolling to the section “for the haters,” you’ll find a pretty close approximation of my views, and a worthy response to those who scorn another’s preferences because they are against their own, when they aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s okay to have more than one way. It seems like some kind of appeal to correctness or directness or purity of task completion that I don’t understand, but which is very common in computers and software especially.

A poor craftsman blames their tools as the saying goes. A worse one curses their tools. A good craftsman appreciates the shortcomings and limitations of their tools and adapts their tool usage, tool choice, and their very tools themselves if need be. What kind of craftsman criticizes the tools another chooses on matters upon which reasonable people could disagree? Is such a tool unreasonable, or is it the craftsman who criticizes another exercising a preference and doing their own thing their own way?

Not every tool is for every job, nor is every tool for every tool user. Preferences are normal and vary. So should expectations. There’s always another tool. Try not to be the tool but rather the tool user.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#316

Post by abnry »

anewguy9000 wrote: post #306
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,…

windows 10 is the same, there is lag between when the screen with the input box appears and when it accepts input. so if you start typing too quickly, fail. and don't get me started on their auto update policy (i agree with automatic updates; i do not agree with them forcefully hijacking my computer with no means to stop it. its actually what brought me back to linux as my dd. no regrets!)

In Ubuntu 19 I can just type my password and hit enter to log in. In windows 10, I have to hit any key before typing my password and hitting enter to log in.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#317

Post by Redoubts »

buovjaga wrote: post #113
Stierlitz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ubuntu got worse at 18.04 .. Give Lubuntu a try. https://lubuntu.net/

The official site is https://lubuntu.me/ btw.

Are they really mixing themes like this?

https://lubuntu.me/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/video.png

from the front page

Re: The Decline of Usability

#318

Post by pfranz »

lmm wrote: post #309
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.

> 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. On the contrary, the clock needs to be super obvious precisely because it's a pain to set. Otherwise you wouldn't notice until your recordings were messed up.

I think context is key. It's only necessary if you have a scheduled recording. So it should only be obvious if you're setting up a scheduled recording or have one queued up. In those cases it should force your or alert you in an obvious manner that the time is not set.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#319

Post by pfranz »

XorNot wrote: post #257
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.

The problem was everyone did it once, and then lost power at some point and it went into "minor task not ever important enough to be worth taking the time. If they'd included a backup battery to retain the clock, I suspect it'd been less of a thing.

I still think that's part of the bad UI =) That setup was bad unless you included a battery or time was likely to set itself.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#320

Post by noahadavis »

pragmatic wrote: post #290

The designers took over. They finally gained power and with it, unfortunately, users lost out. In my unified theory of organizations, the organization is eventually taken over by the employees/"servants" and instead of serving the constituents it becomes about serving themselves. Think Congress, teacher's unions, USPS, IT depts. In programming it's resume driven development, playing with new toys constantly instead o…

This kind of finger pointing is really not useful or constructive. Who do you think designed the interfaces that the author of the article prefers? Do you think he'd agree that designers —a whole class of professionals with a large diversity in skill and experience—are the fundamental problem? It's like saying that the developers took over in response to an article complaining about buggy software.
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