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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#431

Post by romwell »

EEMac wrote: post #222

Part of this is because the sensors are winning. Sensors (about 70% of the population) use an application by mapping: a click here does this . Based on literature and my experience with my husband, maps are made separately for each application no matter what the similarities are. Most computer programmers are intuitives: we want things to work the same way in one application as they work in another. That makes it eas…

I don't think sensors are "winning".

I probably could fall into that category; I use Gold Wave v.4.51 for aduio editing (instead of, say, Audacity) because I've been using it since year 2000, and I know where things are.

The thing with modern software is that it tends to update and move things around. Things don't only have different semantics, but also buttons in different places.

The downward spiral of UI/UX is not due to users, sensors or not. It stems entirely from the disregard for ones.

And don't even get me started on latency, which is a whole another can of worms.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#433

Post by Drdrdrq »

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…

I don't know about Chrome (rarely use it), but I _hate_ megabar in Firefox. It covers my bookmarks and is completely useless. Why would this input be any different than other input? I wonder whoever thought that covering other UI elements is a good idea.

Hopefully now that I know the keyword ("megabar") I will be able to find a way to disable it. I have searched for an option before but found nothing.

EDIT: just noticed:

> And it only covers the bookmarks toolbar (should you choose to enable it) when you're using the address bar and the dropdown is visible.

No, that's the problem - it (partially) covers bookmarks even when the url bar is empty and there is no dropdown.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#434

Post by Havoc »

I find the OS interfaces to be OK.

The internet on the other hand is a train wreck. Oh you want to read a website? Not before you click away these million popups and cookie banners and news letter things. Scroll down? haha no. You're in for some sort of sideways scroll phamplet thing. Or my personal favorite alternating down and sideways by page number (yeah I couldn't believe it either)

Re: The Decline of Usability

#435

Post by rleigh »

philsnow wrote: post #254
swiley wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care how "user friendly" you think you are, not being able to log in is an absolute fail. Even getty has a better user interface, imagine that: regression all the way back in to the 70s. This is why I don't touch GUIs from the major binary distros or gnome3 with a 10 foot pole. If I can avoid it I don't ever install anything from those projects.

I have avoided gnome as much as I can since the gnome2 days. The entire project is rife with UX decisions that leave a bad taste in my mouth. [0] is the example that always comes to mind. I guess this made sense to somebody at the time, but it adds overhead to a process that was simple before, and isn't enabled just for "Enterprise" deployments, it's just dumped on the user to figure out how to configure screensaver…

This page isn't new enough to include more recent failures.

One of my least favourite was when it was not possible to configure the screensaver timeout to never turn off the display. IIRC you had a choice of several fixed times, from 5 minutes to 4 hours, but no "Never" option.

Not useful for systems which display information and are infrequently interacted with. That use case was completely ignored, and for no good reason.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#436

Post by tomgp »

EEMac wrote: post #222

Part of this is because the sensors are winning. Sensors (about 70% of the population) use an application by mapping: a click here does this . Based on literature and my experience with my husband, maps are made separately for each application no matter what the similarities are. Most computer programmers are intuitives: we want things to work the same way in one application as they work in another. That makes it eas…

Where do these terms and figures come from? I’ve never heard them terms before but it’s an interesting framework with which to think about different peoples experiences with UIs. it strikes me that most people probably exist in both categories to some extent : even hardcore sensors will probably know and expect consistency some from apps, eg. some keyboard shortcuts (ctrl c, ctrl v etc) whilst some intuitives will have strong mental maps of certain pieces of software (games where creating such a map is often a path to mastery, or in my case adobe illustrator which is a UI train wreck but with which after 20 years I find it very hard to be as productive with anything else)

Re: The Decline of Usability

#437

Post by rleigh »

_jal wrote: post #274
swiley wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care how "user friendly" you think you are, not being able to log in is an absolute fail. Even getty has a better user interface, imagine that: regression all the way back in to the 70s. This is why I don't touch GUIs from the major binary distros or gnome3 with a 10 foot pole. If I can avoid it I don't ever install anything from those projects.

Gnome and KDE are both worse than useless - They poison other, useful projects. There is never going to be a unified GUI for Linux; that requires a dictator. KDE tried to provide the carrot of development-ease, Gnome tried to generate some reality distortion, but nobody cared. Carrots don't work. As far as I'm concerned, the experiment is over and it is time to embrace the chaos. Now, this is easy for me to say, I'm…

> embrace the chaos

Linux was all about chaos and herding cats until a short number of years ago.

It's the "standardisation at all costs" brigade who have killed the goose that laid the golden eggs. It's now far worse than Windows in many aspects. Freedesktop and GNOME deserve the lion's share of the blame, but RedHat, Debian and many others enabled them to achieve this.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#438

Post by KingOfCoders »

Recently my MacBookPro stopped working with an external LG monitor. Until then the laptop used the highest resolution spanning the whole wide monitor.

Then it suddenly stopped and only displayed a 4:3 image in the middle. Preferences didn't show anything.

I've learned that you need to option-click the settings to see all possible hidden resolutions. There was the wide large resolution again. Not sure how one is supposed to used this preferences panel usability wise.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#439

Post by agigao »

Let's avoid putting all the weight on the shoulders of Microsoft, although I tried to use W10 couple of times last few years, for the job (SE), it doesn't work for me, but for other major reasons.

Using Manjaro i3 on desktop and MBP 15 on mobility.

But overall in UI/UX we are having a hype of newness, to stand out among competitors on the expense of functionality and also making it all "accessible" for as wider audience as possible. FF's address bar zooming "feature" makes me feel like a damn moron :))

1. The job is still done on desktop/laptop computers and touch screens doesn't really make much difference I think. I wish all the major companies incorporated that point of view into the planning process. F*ck shareholders, you gotta think about your users in the first place!

Apple suffers another dead end here - so many colors it squeezes the energy out of my brain! Maverick was the last sane macOS with sane colors.

2. Regression to the mean, that's exactly what happened to educational system, and textbooks as well, make everyone comfortable with themselves, instead of pushing kids to actually learn.

Dumb down everything!

Re: The Decline of Usability

#440

Post by philsnow »

rleigh wrote: post #435
philsnow wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have avoided gnome as much as I can since the gnome2 days. The entire project is rife with UX decisions that leave a bad taste in my mouth. [0] is the example that always comes to mind. I guess this made sense to somebody at the time, but it adds overhead to a process that was simple before, and isn't enabled just for "Enterprise" deployments, it's just dumped on the user to figure out how to configure screensaver…

This page isn't new enough to include more recent failures. One of my least favourite was when it was not possible to configure the screensaver timeout to never turn off the display. IIRC you had a choice of several fixed times, from 5 minutes to 4 hours, but no "Never" option. Not useful for systems which display information and are infrequently interacted with. That use case was completely ignored, and for no good…

> This page isn't new enough to include more recent failures.

oh no doubt, I have another comment from 4+ years ago about the same topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10883631 and even then it was ancient history IIRC

man, just looking at that page again reminded me that Windows Registry for Linux^W^W^W^W gconf exists.

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