371–380 of 641 posts
You should know the common retort - but it's different 20%! So you can't create a one-button UI that covers 80%
But the challenge is real, though mostly "unsolvable" as there is too much friction in making good easily customizable UIs
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces Nor can the design world, for that matter. They think that making slightly darker gray text on gray background using a tiny font and leaving loads of empty space is peak design. Meanwhile my father cannot use most websites because of this.
The dozens of people I know that design interfaces professionally can probably recite more of the WCAG by heart than some of the people that created them. You’re assuming that things you think “look designed” were made by designers rather than people playing with the CSS in a template they found trying to make things “look designed.” You’re almost certainly mistaken.
That's part of the problem, they'll defend their poorly visible choice by lawyering "but this meets the minimal recommended guideline of 2.7.9"
A lot of this type of stuff boils down to what you're used to. My wife is not particularly tech savvy. She is a Linux user, however. When we started a new business, we needed certain applications that only run on Windows and since she would be at the brick and mortar location full time, I figured we could multi-purpose a new laptop for her and have her switch to Windows. She hated it and begged for us to get a dedica…
Familiarity is massively undersold in the Linux desktop adoption discussion. Having desktop environments that are near 1:1 clones of the commercial platforms (preferably paired with a distribution that's designed to be bulletproof and practically never requires its user to fire up a terminal window) would go so far for making Linux viable for users sitting in the middle of the bell curve of technical capability. It's…
Grab an LLM and make a nice single button app they can use.
LLMs writing code, plus free software, a match made in heaven.
It’s also a new take on Unix “do one thing well” philosophy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
> It's statistically very likely a hot chick does not know calculus. It would be honestly interesting if someone actually did a study regarding it. I do agree with this statement but it isn't as if everybody doesn't have other opportunity costs, people might have video games as hobbies or just normal hobbies in general as well which could be considered opportunity costs The question to me which sounds more interestin…
Which is a rare thing in this space. Linux is rough around the edges, to say the least. You don't need me telling you. We are in a thread about how open sources software suck at UI design. We could use more people like you in this space.
The men aren't fussed with the "hacker" label. It sounds cool. It's like when people mistakenly think all Asians know Kung Fu or something. The Asian guy isn't complaining lol.
There's definitely stigma/sexism that deter women away from this field. But I think opportunity cost is a factor, gravely overlooked.
Society demands a lot from women, when it comes to appearance. The bar is set very high.
So high, you don't have the time to be a good programmer AND pretty. Unless you won the genetic lottery.
I follow women's basketball avidly. Some of the women are not pretty. They are just very good at basketball. It's refreshing to see women be valued, not just because of their beauty.
> Free audio editing software that requires hours of learning to be useful for simple tasks. To be fair, the Audacity UX designer made a massive video about the next UX redesign and how he tried to get rid of "modes" and the "Audacity says no" problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYM3TWf_G38 So this problem should get better in the future. Good UX (doesn't necessarily have to have a flashy UI, but just a good UX)…
Now he got rid of the modes by adding handles and border actions - so 1) wasted some space that could be used for information 2) required more precision from the users because now to do the action you must target a tiny handle/border area 3) same, but for other actions as now you have to avoid those extra areas to do other tasks.
While this might be fine for casual users as it's more visible, the proper way out is, of course,... MODES and better ones! Let the default be some more casual mode with your handles, but then let users who want more ergonomics use a keybind to allow moving the audio segment by pressing anywhere in that segment, not just in the tiny handle at the top. And then you could also add all those handles to visually indicate that now segments are movable or turn your pointer into a holding hand etc.
Same thing in the example - instead of creating a whole new separate app with a button you could have a "1-button magicbrake" mode in handbrake
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In most organizations the problem is lack of urgency rather than lack of developer hours. The developers sit in isolated siloes rather than going out and directly engaging with business units. This is mostly a management problem but there are plenty of individual developers who wait to be told what to do rather than actively seeking out better solutions for business problems.
This usually comes back to maker time vs manager time. If you want a developer to write good code quickly, put them in an isolated silo and don't disturb them. If you want a developer to engage with the business units more, be prepared for their productivity to drop sharply. As with all things in tech, it's a trade-off.
If handbrake scares them, don’t you dare to demonstrate how to use ffmpeg. I remember when I used handbrake for the first time and thought “wow, it’s much more convenient than struggling with ffmpeg”.
If you only care about converting media without tweaking anything, ffmpeg offers the simplest UI ever. ffmpeg -i input.avi output.mp4