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The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

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Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#311

Post by betenoire »

pmarreck wrote: post #159

Oh wow. This hits hard in the feels. Here's my personal submission for "UI problem that has existed for years on touch interfaces, plus a possible solution, but at this point I'm just shouting into the void": https://medium.com/@pmarreck/the-most-annoying-ui-problem-r3... In short, an interface should not be interactable until a few milliseconds after it has finished (re)rendering, or especially, while it is still in…

counterpoint, and I know it's not apples to apples, but have you ever used an old terminal app? Buffering the key strokes and then applying them _once_ the menu was ready was awesome. You could move so fast through an app

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#312

Post by sd9 »

throwanem wrote: post #309

I see what the author is trying to do with the title, which would be correctly punctuated as: 'The curse of knowing how; or, fixing everything.' (The full stop would be period-optional, but period-appropriate.)

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#313

Post by joseda-hg »

aidenn0 wrote: post #242
pmarreck wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that Android even has a notification history is huge. iOS does not!

TIL Android has a notification history. I've been using Android phones for over a decade and never new.

Starting from Android 11 (2020 ish), so not even that old

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#314

Post by asoneth »

pmarreck wrote: post #249
asoneth wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're curious to learn more, this is often referred to as "layout shift". There are black-hat designers who deliberately use it as a dark pattern -- you might notice a suspicious number of cases where the most common click target is replaced by a click target (or late-arriving popup) for submitting an email address or entering the sales funnel. But typically it's just bad design. In the latter case, you could qui…

I just found that URL independently! I just added it to my medium post. Why do we even show interactable elements when the final layout isn't completed yet?

> Why do we even show interactable elements when the final layout isn't completed yet?

Typically such a product either doesn't have sufficient UX attention, or it has black-hat UX folks.

Optimally toolkits and browsers should have handled this since they know the layout dependencies. If an element is still loading and it doesn't have fixed dimensions then all elements whose positions are dependent on that element should not be shown.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#315

Post by SAI_Peregrinus »

diggan wrote: post #167
jurgenaut23 wrote: post #164

> Burnout does not just come from overwork. It comes from overresponsibility. I don't _think_ it is accurate. I think burnout comes from putting energy into things that don't have meaning. Case in point, this article: as you realize that fixing everything is a never-ending game with marginal ROI, you end up burning out. If overresponsibility alone caused burn out, I think that every parent out there would be impacted…

> I think burnout comes from putting energy into things that don't have meaning. That'd mean that people who are burned out all did so because they did stuff that didn't have meaning? Ultimately, I think you can get burned out regardless of how meaningful it is or isn't. People working at hospitals (just as one example) have probably some of the most meaningful jobs, yet burn out frequently regardless. More likely th…

I think meaning can't be imposed externally. What society finds meaningful and what any individual finds meaningful can differ. And what an individual finds meaningful will vary over time. A meaningful activity, repeated often enough, can become routine and lose its meaning.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#316

Post by d4rkn0d3z »

rocqua wrote: post #254
rocqua wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what it says in the original post. It is also non-sensical. If the probability is 10% (p=0.1), and the number of systems is 11 (n=11), then you get 1/(1 - 11*0.1) which is -10.

I tried working this out, but I think the original was correct. The cases where the answer is negative correspond to a 'runaway scenario' where every change is expected to cause more than 1 extra change. So the answer is 'nonsensical' (because that is indeed where the formula for geometric series no longer works) but the true answer is infinity.

Correct!

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#317

Post by d4rkn0d3z »

rocqua wrote: post #240
d4rkn0d3z wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it says 1/(1-np).

That's what it says in the original post. It is also non-sensical. If the probability is 10% (p=0.1), and the number of systems is 11 (n=11), then you get 1/(1 - 11*0.1) which is -10.

Valid for n*p < 1, geometric series convergence, I should have mentioned.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#318

Post by jayd16 »

I think its easier to get past this when you decide to be a bit more humble and give a bit more respect to the decisions made. As long as you don't assume your immediate reaction is gospel because you feel like you're better than someone who actually spent time solving the problem, suddenly you can look at things as decisions they made that are different than yours.

Yes dumb, bad things exist. But often they are simply compromises. If you were to rewrite things you'd often just make different compromises.

In that light, there is no 'moral imperative' or some such thing. You can start to look at _why_ decisions were made and probably find subtlety you missed at first glance.

You might think this is foolish optimism and you know better but think about every refactor you've actually taken a part of instead of theorized and how much complexity shook out.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#319

Post by kmacdough »

pmarreck wrote: post #159

Oh wow. This hits hard in the feels. Here's my personal submission for "UI problem that has existed for years on touch interfaces, plus a possible solution, but at this point I'm just shouting into the void": https://medium.com/@pmarreck/the-most-annoying-ui-problem-r3... In short, an interface should not be interactable until a few milliseconds after it has finished (re)rendering, or especially, while it is still in…

I certainly agree in many cases like those you mention, particularly for unprompted popovers like notifications. For desktop professional software, on the other hand, I believe the value of swift muscle memory supercedes this. In this case, input should be buffered and applied to the state of the app after the previous input has been processed.

Open a tool window, subsequent keystrokes should be sent to that too window, even if it takes a second to show. The "new/modern" interface on my CNC is both show and doesn't properly buffer input, and its hugely painful.

EDIT: I realize you specified touch, which isn't "desktop", but my CNC control is touch based and the same applies.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#320

Post by js2 »

"You learn how to program. You learn how to fix things. But the hardest thing you’ll ever learn is when to leave them broken. And maybe that’s the most human skill of all."

Well, that's the serenity prayer, isn't it?

"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference."

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