41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective • Hacker News Board

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#41

Post by m_2000 » Sun, Feb 04, 2024, 10:02 PM UTC

BlueTemplar wrote: post #21

hdaz0017 wrote: post #10

Congratulations Jakob on your Liberation Day :) Are you saying the UI is your fault ;-) Serious question though: how come over the last 15 to 20 years UI's have got considerably worse?

IMHO a lot of this comes from : 1.) The move to the Web, where the browser's interface gets in the way once you start doing something more fancy than just viewing basic HTML documents. 2.) Trying to make a program work well both on a small touchscreen and on a large screen + mouse + keyboard : this is literally impossible without the result being a worse experience for both.

Regarding 1: I remember the internet of the 90s and find our current internet comparatively boring in terms of UX. Back then, websites were created manually, without using "abstractions" like wordpress or wix. This forced us to think freely about UX and to hack HTML+CSS as much as possible. The browser's interface you mentioned is quite powerful. And with HTML6 on the way it becomes even more powerful.

Regarding 2: A paramount program utilizing responsiveness at it's finest won't take compromises for different screen sizes, but it takes longer to develop. Compromises like these usually emerge through the economic circumstances of software development.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#42

Post by throw_pm23 » Sun, Feb 04, 2024, 10:24 PM UTC

zer00eyz wrote: post #33

tbitrust wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that people "far removed from tech" are "sub-90 IQ" (a "delicate" euphemism for "stupid"). And I don't think that people on facebook, youtube or tick tock are "sub-90 IQ". Thanks for making clear that it's what was implied by the original commenter. That's lack of empathy coupled with sheer, crass ignorance.

I know people with PHD's who can run rings around you on "their topic" and can't cross the street without support. I know teachers who are smart, and phenomenal at their job who I had to arm twist to go play with chat GPT cause it's not in their wheelhouse/on their radar. The not so bright person, who is stressed out is likely a user of your app. The same as the absent minded PHD or the teacher who is too over worked…

I'm with you on all these examples but why is it wrong if someone is not interested in chatGPT?

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#43

Post by lakpan » Sun, Feb 04, 2024, 11:06 PM UTC

amatecha wrote: post #38

lakpan wrote: post #4

Nitpick: interesting how a UX website doesn’t let me resize it since the font is likely set via viewport units.

Huh, which browser? Scales flawlessly for me in Firefox. Actually one of the smoothest-scaling websites I've encountered in ages, wow. Nice!

iPhone Safari.

Judging by the comments, they set the text via viewport units only on smaller viewports.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#44

Post by BlueTemplar » Sun, Feb 04, 2024, 11:11 PM UTC

m_2000 wrote: post #41

BlueTemplar wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO a lot of this comes from : 1.) The move to the Web, where the browser's interface gets in the way once you start doing something more fancy than just viewing basic HTML documents. 2.) Trying to make a program work well both on a small touchscreen and on a large screen + mouse + keyboard : this is literally impossible without the result being a worse experience for both.

Regarding 1: I remember the internet of the 90s and find our current internet comparatively boring in terms of UX. Back then, websites were created manually, without using "abstractions" like wordpress or wix. This forced us to think freely about UX and to hack HTML+CSS as much as possible. The browser's interface you mentioned is quite powerful. And with HTML6 on the way it becomes even more powerful. Regarding 2: A…

2. You will quickly end with two programs with different features, or maybe a single program that only offers a fraction of features depending on input/output capabilities :

Screen size is just one aspect of this, consider how different programs might be optimized for a vertical screen layout, or the use of smartphone's accelerometers, or working best with precise mouse movement, or relying on the user learning to use keyboard shortcuts (ideally with an easy on-ramp phase) for effectiveness, or relying a lot on hovering your mouse over features for popups (which is very poorly translated as a press and hold on touchscreens - consider how rare hover text for pictures has become).

(More extreme examples would be also being able to use the software from, for instance, a monochrome, low refresh rate watch with only a few buttons, at which point you get the option to use vibration feedback notifications that you can't expect to have on a desktop.)

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#45

Post by lakpan » Sun, Feb 04, 2024, 11:12 PM UTC

beebeepka wrote: post #30

michaelcampbell wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like px if my inspector isn't lying to me. Ctrl-+ and Ctrl-- work fine for me on desktop/chrome.

Firefox has always been even better because you can easily scale only the fonts.

If the website uses viewport units Firefox can’t do it either, IIRC. My guess is that the website uses vw only on “mobile”

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#46

Post by doublespanner » Sun, Feb 04, 2024, 11:28 PM UTC

ivan_gammel wrote: post #40

karaterobot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren't making a consumer product for nursing home patients with sub-90 IQs, then you'd be wasting your time, and the feedback you got from the exercise wouldn't be useful. In fact, any decisions you made based on it could be wrong. The point isn't to design for the lowest common denominator, but for the users you will actually have, and usability test participants should be recruited with that in mind. There i…

>The point isn't to design for the lowest common denominator, but for the users you will actually have Keyword: situational disability Even a perfectly fit and educated target audience sometimes suffers from certain conditions or in an environment that significantly reduces their mental or physical capacity. Stress, injury, pregnancy, too many beers, very long nails, terrible weather, a toddler trying to grab your ph…

Horrible advice for expert tools. If you can make the assumption that the end user is going to learn the tool you can design it for peak effectiveness after a learning curve. If you have to consider retards and hostage situation level panic you can't do that, and create a worse product overall.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#47

Post by AtlasBarfed » Sun, Feb 04, 2024, 11:34 PM UTC

zer00eyz wrote: post #14

wharvle wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now older and wiser, candidly a lot of folks would be well served by default blue links, og html submit buttons and tables for layouts. A fair bit of modern UI is complete trash: it's the product of a designer and a product person putting the next bullet point on their resume. If I were emperor of the world I’d make every consumer program pass a battery of tests that included demonstrating sufficient usability for…

>>> users from a nursing home, a panel of users with sub-90 IQ who were in a stressful environment and trying to complete other tasks at the same time, blind users, deaf users, et c. Or we could just give the Product manager, designer, and JS engineer a 5 year old laptop with 8 gigs of ram at least 10 browser plug ins and every corporate security package... We have gone from "go fast, break things" to moving at the s…

Why not just come out and say you hate JavaScript :)

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#48

Post by ivan_gammel » Sun, Feb 04, 2024, 11:42 PM UTC

doublespanner wrote: post #46

ivan_gammel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The point isn't to design for the lowest common denominator, but for the users you will actually have Keyword: situational disability Even a perfectly fit and educated target audience sometimes suffers from certain conditions or in an environment that significantly reduces their mental or physical capacity. Stress, injury, pregnancy, too many beers, very long nails, terrible weather, a toddler trying to grab your ph…

Horrible advice for expert tools. If you can make the assumption that the end user is going to learn the tool you can design it for peak effectiveness after a learning curve. If you have to consider retards and hostage situation level panic you can't do that, and create a worse product overall.

Good luck designing aircraft cockpit with this kind of thinking.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#49

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp » Sun, Feb 04, 2024, 11:44 PM UTC

doublespanner wrote: post #46

ivan_gammel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The point isn't to design for the lowest common denominator, but for the users you will actually have Keyword: situational disability Even a perfectly fit and educated target audience sometimes suffers from certain conditions or in an environment that significantly reduces their mental or physical capacity. Stress, injury, pregnancy, too many beers, very long nails, terrible weather, a toddler trying to grab your ph…

Horrible advice for expert tools. If you can make the assumption that the end user is going to learn the tool you can design it for peak effectiveness after a learning curve. If you have to consider retards and hostage situation level panic you can't do that, and create a worse product overall.

You know very well that “retards” isn’t an acceptable word. It’s not even used in scientific literature anymore in the way that you’re using it.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#50

Post by doublespanner » Mon, Feb 05, 2024, 12:08 AM UTC

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #49

doublespanner wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Horrible advice for expert tools. If you can make the assumption that the end user is going to learn the tool you can design it for peak effectiveness after a learning curve. If you have to consider retards and hostage situation level panic you can't do that, and create a worse product overall.

You know very well that “retards” isn’t an acceptable word. It’s not even used in scientific literature anymore in the way that you’re using it.

I do not care about your opinion of acceptable language.

Attempting to insert your off topic opinion is a character flaw.

Keep it to yourself.