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Sanding UI

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: Sanding UI

#341

Post by Aeolun »

kizer wrote: post #252
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.

We’re and enterprise making things for enterprises. You better believe the SSO part is well tested xD

Re: Sanding UI

#342

Post by Aeolun »

corytheboyd wrote: post #302
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FastMail has one of the best-feeling web apps I've ever used. It's incredibly snappy and I never encountered any bugs while using it. They raised the bar for what I thought a web app could achieve.

Agree! Only bummer is when I want to create calendar events and reference email details, or vice versa. On desktop it’s easy enough to have two tabs, but on mobile, it’s a pain. I get why it is the way it is, but we are talking about exceptional UX here, and I think there is room for improvement.

How exactly do you imagine displaying those things at the same time on a mobile screen? While I agree it would be exceptional, I also think we shouldn’t expect the impossible.

Re: Sanding UI

#343

Post by Aeolun »

robin_reala wrote: post #120
ccakes wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imo GitHub has to be up there. I think some of the recent changes to search and making the code view more IDE-like are steps backward from a “polish” perspective, but still useful features

GitHub specifically has the issue mentioned in this blog post! It annoyed me so much I had to file it with them three years ago, and it’s still not fixed: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/7506

I have to love that someone enthusiastically announced there was going to be a fix.

Like, nobody, including the original issue author is actually enthusiastic about the fix. It’s just one less papercut.

I’m sure if these things were actually seen by devs they’d add a two line change to a random PR and it would be done in a few minutes.

Re: Sanding UI

#344

Post by Aeolun »

robin_reala wrote: post #217
melchizedek6809 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I agree with the conclusion of that article, according to it, only 2 screen readers don't support nested labels, I couldn't find statistics on how prevalent these are, but there are a lot of alternative screen readers one could use which might support nested labels since they're not mentioned there (I've mainly heard of JAWS, which isn't mentioned there), so it doesn't seem to be an inherent limitation of as…

VoiceControl and Naturally Speaking aren’t screen readers: they’re voice command software. They’re designed for people with mobility problems, not vision problems. There’s no inherent limitation here that couldn’t be solved by bug fixes, but they’re the two major pieces of assistive tech in that sector so can’t be dismissed without dismissing people who need that functionality.

That feels somehow like building your website for IE6 because some people still use them.

Re: Sanding UI

#345

Post by corytheboyd »

Aeolun wrote: post #342
corytheboyd wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree! Only bummer is when I want to create calendar events and reference email details, or vice versa. On desktop it’s easy enough to have two tabs, but on mobile, it’s a pain. I get why it is the way it is, but we are talking about exceptional UX here, and I think there is room for improvement.

How exactly do you imagine displaying those things at the same time on a mobile screen? While I agree it would be exceptional, I also think we shouldn’t expect the impossible.

I don’t know but there is my use case, I would expect a product and design team to figure it out as best they see fit. Or throw it out.

Maybe auto-suggestions as you type into certain fields? You’re typing into the location field of a new event and received a hotel booking receipt email in the last 2 hours, perhaps the address of that hotel could be a smart auto-suggestion? Things like that.

Re: Sanding UI

#346

Post by dspillett »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #277
ibash wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In my experience, it can make a huge difference if the developers are allowed to talk directly to the users of their product. The users tell them which parts of the product hurt them most, and the developers find a way to fix that. If instead the communication is something like "the end users give information to their manager, their manager gives information to our analyst, our analyst gives information to our manage…

> In my experience, it can make a huge difference if the developers are allowed to talk directly to the users of their product.

Yes. But also HELL NO.

Back when we were a small company and I did a bit of everything, from infrastructure management to support, on top of actually doing dev work, taking to them was the bit I dreaded most at times!

I do occasionally interact with our customers' technology/security teams as part of my remit is dealing with ingesting this party data and pushing information (or making it available to be pulled) the other way. That can be irritating enough, you would not believe the amount of people working in that area that don't properly understand SFTP and, for instance, get thoroughly confused by key based auth.

Re: Sanding UI

#347

Post by sutra_on »

itronitron wrote: post #330
sutra_on wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked in companies that are committed to Agile and companies that have a completely custom planning and development process. I don't understand your argument. What process in Agile dictates shipping subpar UI? Build, test, file bugs, resolve bug. You can do this within any framework. Or, better, develop a high quality UI component library instead of asking a junior engineer to write CSS for correct checkbox handli…

Particularly with Scrum, people get hung up on the 'rules' of the 'process'. For example, following the rules of Scrum, if a developer finds a bug, decides to fix it, and wants to commit the fix such that it can be tested and closed out then that bug needs to first be assigned to the current sprint before the developer can touch it. It's extremely constraining and antagonistic towards shipping good software.

In my experience, unnecessary processes can creep in into any org, regardless of the planning framework used. Agile or no Agile, over-planning cripples teams.

Re: Sanding UI

#348

Post by Boxxed »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #118
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…

FastMail has one of the best-feeling web apps I've ever used. It's incredibly snappy and I never encountered any bugs while using it. They raised the bar for what I thought a web app could achieve.

I love fastmail but the webapp does this one thing that drives me crazy: The first (and only the first) email I read triggers a reload of the entire page for some reason. It's pretty quick but very jarring...wish I knew what was going on; anyone else see this?

Re: Sanding UI

#349

Post by slmjkdbtl »

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 like zfs.rent, very small but still it's a functioning business site.

Re: Sanding UI

#350

Post by jwr »

Meanwhile in Apple Photos, if you meticulously select 17 images and then accidentally click between photos, your selection disappears…
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