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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#421

Post by danielscrubs »

pcurve wrote: post #350
omniscient_oce wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get these fake persona things I see in portfolios and on Behance and stuff. Are these a legit thing or just something that is taught in school so students do and put on their portfolio but isn't used in practice. I get the basic idea behind it but a lot of the time it comes off as quite pretentious, or filler work.

Not just persona. There's journey mapping, storymapping, design thinking, storybrand exercise, designops, formative/summative/ generative research, ethnographic study, service design, heuristics, lean ux, contextual inquiry. I'm not saying these are all useless, but many are just old things re-packaged. And I've noticed that UX people are rarely challenged by other stakeholders because no one can possibly keep up wit…

Worked at a company where they decided to have a consultant design firm do the designs. 20 designers and 3 coders to do the actual things.

The money dried up really fast (they where extremely expensive) and the design just sucked but boy did they have meetings like nobodies business.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#422

Post by pfranz »

kristopolous wrote: post #269
pfranz wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they couldn't make it easier to set I think the clock should have been less prominent. It's necessary if you're doing a scheduled recording. It's too bad time sync over power lines didn't catch on widely (or broadcast over the radio). It would still be saving everyone from changing their digital clocks during DST.

Time codes inside of analog terrestrial NTSC sounds really easy and obvious. Given that nobody did it, it would appear that even though legally people like Mr. Rogers were making the case for time-shift programming, the industry must have assumed it was a minor use case.

The main reason I mentioned it is that I know I've seen various implementations--they're just not widely adopted. I guess nobody has the business interest to make it all work?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Data_Services (NTSC) looks like a 2008 standard and most PBS stations provide "autoclock" time data

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Data_System (FM radio) I figured this had an implementation considering text has been around for years. Amazingly, I don't think I've ever seen a car stereo use it to set the time!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_over_power_lines I know this has been around but has had a lot of hurdles. I figured the current time might be a simpler thing.

The only reliably time-setting tech I've seen integrated is GPS--I'm not 100% sure how time zones work with it, but it does know your location.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#424

Post by adeel_siddiqui »

rpm91 wrote: post #420

I'll give the author the complaints about modern scroll bars, which drive me up a wall, but the complaints about Firefox and Chrome really feel like grasping at straws to find something to dislike. "This new take on the [Firefox] URL bar pops up when you least expect it, is very hard to get rid of and, as a bonus, covers the tried, tested and highly usable bookmarks toolbar below it." What? It pops up when you click…

Honestly, when the URL bar on Firefox started to get fatter on focus with the latest update, i found it a bit distracting. It was a sudden change to a component which people use the most and the behavior had been quite stable for some time. So, i guess that could have put off a few people and we started complaining ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: The Decline of Usability

#425

Post by WalterBright »

tcoff91 wrote: post #412
WalterBright wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think I'm growing old, and just couldn't keep up with a pace of changing On the other hand, when my iPhone suddenly would connect with a caller, but neither party could hear the other, redialing didn't help, turning it off/on didn't work, I remembered the ancient trick of "cold boot". Which resolved the problem.

You put an iPhone in the freezer and booted it, and that fixed it? Wow. I thought that was just for saving spinning disk drives and preserving the contents of RAM for an attack.

A cold boot means shut off all power to the device. The normal "off" button the iPhone puts it in standby mode, not off. This is so it can still listen for calls.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#426

Post by simooooo »

markus_zhang wrote: post #277
oftenwrong wrote: post #32

It is quite sad how often I end up having to help older relatives with their computers on account of unintuitive UI. One memorable, recent example was my mother, who could not figure out how to get her GMail sidebar to un-collapse itself. Here's a screenshot of a collapsed sidebar: https://storage.googleapis.com/support-forums-api/attachment... and a screenshot of an un-collapsed sidebar: https://techcrunch.com/wp-co…

YouTube does that too, but on smaller screens. Still confused me to death in the first couple of times.

You can also drag the mouse from the left edge to open it on desktop. Feels like some mobile hangover

Re: The Decline of Usability

#427

Post by zrm »

ordu wrote: post #379
zrm wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 thin…

I think it's the familiarity which is actually hurting you there. If you come up to a device which as far as you know is alien technology, you don't know if it should behave like a Mac or an iPhone, so the thing that works on an iPhone feels like more of a valid possibility. If you come up to it knowing exactly what kind of device is and that it isn't at all like an iPhone, it doesn't.

Because any hope of guessing it comes from knowing that phones do that, so the less like a phone you know it to be, the less likely you are to try that. Notice that even on phones it isn't intuitive if you've never done it before. If you tap the lock screen on Android it shows a message that says "Swipe up to unlock" -- because how else would you know that for the first time? But at least there it serves a purpose.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#428

Post by visarga »

int_19h wrote: post #243
Jtsummers wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The old interfaces (I guess we can say that now, talking about a quarter century ago) tended to have several modes. The menu bar was always just text. The toolbars offered several options: large/medium/small/no icons, text/no text. (Not all of those options were always available.) This let you progress as a user of a system. When you first experienced it you could use the large icons with text because it made the thi…

It really depends on the period. On Windows, Microsoft eventually unified menu bars and tool bars - the widget was called "cool bar" or "rebar", and it was basically a generic container for certain specific kinds of children that organized them into floatable and dockable "bands", with automatic layout: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/controls/reba... The widgets that can be placed on that are buttons…

I get the point about extreme customisability but I still think the "rebar" is ugly as fuck and inconsistent (non uniform look, a salad of different types of elements). As a mac user I didn't have to put up with it and was disgusted when I first saw it.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#429

Post by userbinator »

anthk wrote: post #288
btrettel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This would be one place where free software could really shine - you could convert a lot of people with "every application works the same, and we promise we won't change the UI more than once every two years unless we really have to. This is one reason I use Xfce. My brother once told me that my computer has looked basically the same since I used Gnome 2, and he's right. I'm not entirely immune. After switching ful…

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Every time I see a screenshot of someone theming Linux to look like Windows, the most obvious thing that stands out as not being quite right is the font rendering. Even when using Microsoft's own TTFs, the font renderers that Linux use seem to put the pixels in a slightly different place than the MS one.

Other differences I could see from the screenshots: the comboboxes have the dropdown arrow next to instead of inside the edit control, the table headers should have a thick left and top border too, the up/down control's buttons should also have a 3D border, the scrollbar buttons shouldn't become disabled even at the end of travel, and non-top-mounted tabs have their shadow in the wrong direction and side tabs should have text rotated accordingly. I've used this UI for over two decades so it's pretty easy to see when something doesn't look quite right.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#430

Post by tannhaeuser »

the_af wrote: post #14
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,…

Is there a sane mode or config for vanilla Ubuntu 18.04? I'm considering upgrading from my trusty old 16.04 LTS (both home and office laptops) and I dread the usual pointless UI changes that come with all the reasonable bugfixes/improvements.

I'm on 19.10, and I'm quite disappointed. Exposing all windows as thumbnails is a big regression compared to Unity. It feels heavyweight, and just doesn't work anymore for window navigation. Pressing the app icon on the side bar brings up small, equal-sized window previews on top of each other without spatial information. Consequently I have now tens of open terminal session and browser windows. Global menu is gone, wasting precious vertical space. Or it would, if apps such as Firefox didn't change to use stupid hamburger menus. The place where the global menu used to be is now used for displaying the time, which is absurd. What's not gone is the chopped display of the focussed app's name on the left. I frequently make errors on window decorations (might be me used to Unity, but it's still the case after two months). Search isn't as useful as it used to be, but has a pompous animation. Apps are beginning to use snaps, which I have no use for - all I want is a driver for running the same old programs I used to run the last twenty years. It's not that there's been a boom of new desktop apps for Linux lately.

Installation was rock-solid, though. Only had to install synaptics over libinput (libinput causing physical pain for me because I had to press the touchpad hard all the time, and because lack of kinetic scroll).

Seriously considering alternatives.

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