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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#371

Post by msla »

Jtsummers wrote: post #100
jimmaswell wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas too many people are either incapable of this kind of ubderstanding or it would take even longer than just giving them directions every time something changes.

The way people react to computers is similar to how many react to math. A lot of capable people are mathphobic, and it's strange to watch (as someone who took naturally to math). The expressions on the page (or the attempt to produce those expressions from a model in their mind) causes them to seize up. It's like watching an anxiety attack happen. Something about math (the subject, their experience when taking the co…

We definitely should see if we can develop math teaching which doesn't elicit that response, because it has to be learned. Humans aren't evolved to be good at arithmetic or symbolic thinking, but we're not evolved to be morbidly afraid of it, either.

Of course, any attempt to improve math education gets screamed at ("New Math! Common Core! Blah!") and the whole thing just becomes political.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#372

Post by msla »

jcelerier wrote: post #40
bloomberg2020 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Personally I’ve given up on mouse GUIs Why? Photoshop pros use macros Unix pros use text editing macros Why teach new users single point and click methods of computing when the pros think it’s a waste of time It’s from an era when computers couldn’t multi task and were largely business focused data entry terminals Photo manipulation can be automated from a terminal and results displayed in real-time now Why c…

> Photoshop pros use macros > Unix pros use text editing macros pros are like, 0.01 %

And they're the ones who use your tool most of the time.

Do you want to make it "easy" for someone who's never used your thing before, or do you want to make it easy for someone who uses it a lot?

(Hint: A new UI is never easy.)

Re: The Decline of Usability

#373

Post by CameronNemo »

_lbaq wrote: post #83
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,…

The "Slide up" is gone in next LTS due in a few days. https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/ubuntu-20-04-release-fea...

And it is a GNOME-ism, Ubuntu went out of their way to modify it.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#374

Post by [deleted] »

flir wrote: post #322
_y5hn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Krita matured nicely over the years and last time I found it quite easy to use. UI is hard. It got replaced by "UX", but nobody agrees what that really is. So it boils down to whatever impracticality designers dream up. When UI was easy, there were real research, data backing up claims of improvements and laid down rules to enforce some consistency. This became "unfashionable" and was removed.

Hamburger menus are symptomatic of this for me. I spent /way/ too long not understanding this completely new element everybody was suddenly jamming in everywhere.

[deleted]

Re: The Decline of Usability

#375

Post by msla »

kristopolous wrote: post #130
xg15 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is that modern UX is data-driven alright, it just follows radically different paradigms and goals. It's not at all anymore about presenting consistent mental models, it's solely about the ease or difficulty with which particular isolated tasks can be performed. It's also not automatically the goal to make all tasks as easy as possible. Instead, discoverability and "friction" are often deliberately tuned…

Data driven ux seems to put all users in a single bucket. I will readily admit in collective number of clicks and screentime, 37 year old men with advanced degrees in computer science are a super small minority. But who is the majority then? Who spends the most time on say Reddit and YouTube? Children! Yes, people who we know are dramatically cognitively different than adults. Why does YouTube keep recommending video…

> Let's take Wikipedia, it could be broken up into children, public, and scholar. Some articles I'm sure are correct but are way too wonky and academic for me to understand and that's ok. There's nothing to fix, I'm sure it's a great tool for professionals. However, there should be a general public version.

It kinda has this for specific subjects:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Introductory_articles

Re: The Decline of Usability

#376

Post by sytelus »

The main problem is affordances. In old days, users were expected to be new bees and needed to be get productive fast. So menus explicitly featured keyboard shortcuts, apps had status bar telling you what was happening, there were even main menus that told you everything you can do with app.

Then UX designers thought they should be clever and make this a game for user so they eventually figure out how to do X. Some such initial games produced "aha!" moments and UX folks took that as signal for doubling down in the name of minimalism. Now apps rarely have menus or status bars or even toolbars. Users are expected to struggle a bit to get their "aha!" moment. Sometime even critical functionality is kept hidden under weird actions like triple-finger squeeze. It's horrible for users but apparently UX guys think they are doing cool shit.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#377

Post by a1369209993 »

p1necone wrote: post #305
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,…

"You can't have the same UX for both handheld touchscreen devices and M+K laptops/desktops" seems like an absolutely 101 level no brainer to me. How are big projects/companies still attempting to make stuff like this happen?

> How are big projects/companies still attempting to make stuff like this happen?

"None of us are as stupid as all of us."

Re: The Decline of Usability

#378

Post by mixmastamyk »

Today I was using Win 10 in a VM and wanted to put a shortcut in the startup folder. Used to right-click on the start button. Doesn’t work any more. Can’t right click on menu icons either, needed to change one shortcut to minimized, can’t be done. Those were a few of the tiny GUI features that made Windows superior to every floss desktop, gone.

After ten mins of googling I find that you have to open a separate Explorer window and type the secret “shell:startup” into the address line to get there now.

Between that and the control panel mess, what the fuck is going on in Redmond? (and everywhere else)

I gave up on Ubuntu after Lucid I think and eventually settled on Ubuntu Mate because it keeps nonsense to a minimum.

It’s as if a bunch of man-bun wearing devs never heard of Chesterson’s fence. :D

Edit: From the article I realized the fascination with overloading window titlebars was driven by 16:9 screens, making vertical space precious.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#379

Post by ordu »

zrm wrote: post #139
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,…

> 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…

> 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 discovered that you can get the password prompt by pressing Enter.

One more anecdote. I found this screen for the first time when I got my laptop to demonstrate something to a student. I didn't know what to do, started to do random things, trying to figure out what happened, and the student interrupted my attempts, got mouse from my hand and swiped with it. I felt myself old and stupid. It is the thing like 20 years ago when I taught my parents to use standard UI. Only new it is me who needs help.

I asked, she didn't see Ubuntu before, and nevertheless she managed it better than me. I think I'm growing old, and just couldn't keep up with a pace of changing.

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