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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#461

Post by philsnow »

gorgoiler wrote: post #395
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Between this and https://stopthemingmy.app/ and the various other systemd/freedesktop “anti-hacker” initiatives, I’ve been finding Linux to be more and more becoming the opposite of the operating system I’ve used for the last 20 years.

A neat idea that I hadn’t thought of until your comment: Because it’s now possible to run multiple VMs at once (containers, etc) perhaps it’s time to run a simple, minimal, admin friendly hacker vm inside Ubuntu desktop? Let Ubuntu configure all that it needs to get a good functional machine out of the box (working sleep mode for laptops, WiFi management, GPU support, systemd if that’s what it wants.) I then deploy t…

sounds a little bit like https://www.qubes-os.org/intro/

Re: The Decline of Usability

#462

Post by Moru »

msla wrote: post #371
Jtsummers wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think we just have to accept that we all are different. Some have it easy, other don't. This comes doubly with all subjects that we are not trained for or not interested in. It might take a lot more to learn or a teacher that understands the problem and can guide around it. Only the individual can say if the added time and effort is worth it. This insight can take many years though, it's hard to get a teenager to believe they will ever need math (or whatever other subject) in their life.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#463

Post by julienreszka »

photawe wrote: post #457

I love the article! Couldn't agree more! One of the trends was set by, who else, Microsoft. They went mobile first, failed miserably, but still kept the concepts. It's prevalent in their UWP apps - especially settings, in Win10 - one of the worst UI's I've ever seen. I can't explain how much I hate this.

Everybody doesn't agree with you. I believe going Mobile First was the best decision they made in decades.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#464

Post by kevsim »

Spivak wrote: post #352
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…

I was confused about what you were talking about until I saw your screenshot. Fascinating. Coming from Android it is completely normal that hamburger on the left is drawer and three dots on the right is menu. Pretty much every app does it so you can't help but learn it but if you're coming from the desktop and it suddenly appears it makes a lot less sense.

But doesn't the burger menu usually open/close a drawer? On gmail all it's doing is expanding/collapsing the menu that's always on the screen no matter what. Feels like Google is breaking their own convention here.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#465

Post by ahsima1 »

robocat wrote: post #283
_lbaq wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

About half way through article: “The new lock screen is easier to use, no longer requiting you to ‘slide up’ to reveal the password field (which now sits atop a blurred version of your desktop wallpaper):” Great! That UI was horrific. Hitting a key like spacebar didn’t unlock. Aside: I completely broke the Ubuntu login screen yesterday. I did `apt remove evolution*`. Unfortunately the login screen depends on evolutio…

apt automatically removing dependencies by default is such a trap, I much prefer pacman's behaviour of refusing to remove package that breaks dependecies unless explicitly told to do so.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#466

Post by distances »

imhoguy wrote: post #79
the_af wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 highly recommend trying out other flavours of Ubuntu: Xubuntu (XFCE), Lubuntu (LXDE), Kubuntu (KDE), Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Budgie. Next week all should get 20.04 LTS release.

For KDE you're better off with KDE Neon. Still based on Ubuntu, but that's the official KDE distro if you can speak of one.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#467

Post by macleginn »

WalterBright wrote: post #397
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 Google an icon. I've been complaining about that since 1983, when an Apple evangelist came to my workplace to show off the Mac's icons. Nobody was able to guess what the box of Kleenex icon was, much to the frustration of the evangelist. Of course, there wasn't a Google then, but how do you look up a picture in a dictionary? We've reverted to hieroglyphic languages. (Ironically, hieroglyphs evolved over t…

> Ironically, hieroglyphs evolved over time into phonetic meanings.

No, they didn't. The original creators of hieroglyphs knew how to use them to spell phonetically, but they didn't do it that often, they were satisfied with the old system (just as Chinese are now). It was a job of other people, who actually didn't know how to use hieroglyphs properly, to build a functioning alphabet on top of them. Two systems coexisted for some time, and then hieroglyphs went into decline with the whole culture that supported them.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#468

Post by CRConrad »

a1369209993 wrote: post #385
astrobe_ wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's deliberate. The saying "a picture is better than a thousand words" doesn't apply when the picture is 16x16 pixels. Every single icon that makes sense to you now (the floppy disk, the binoculars...) do so because you learned them a long time ago; it's funny how you can now find YT videos that explain where that weird blue icon for the "save" function comes from. The images are just a mnemonic device - in the se…

Actually the floppy disk made perfect sense when I first saw it: "we're going to do something involving the floppy disk, and there's a put-onto arrow superimposed over it" (the load-file icon had a take-off-of arrow). It makes less sense now, but only because computer storage no longer has a single, iconic (heh) form factor. ZXCV is positional, [C]opy having a nice mnemonic is more of a happy coincidence than a desig…

> ZXCV is positional, [C]opy having a nice mnemonic is more of a happy coincidence...

ZXCV is actually half positional/mnemonic, half graphical-as-letters, a bit like old-fashioned smileys: X for cut looks like opened scissors, and V for insert looks like the downward-pointing “insert here” arrow-like mark editors and teachers use(d?) to scribble onto others’ texts.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#469

Post by greggman3 »

ben-schaaf wrote: post #330
madjam002 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike it too, but doesn’t Windows 10 do the same thing?

Windows 10 is even worse. It swipes up for you when you press a key, but it won't pass that key on to the password box. So you have to press a key and then type your password. At least with gnome you can just type your password and it works as expected...

On my Windows 10 if I press a key nothing happens. My fiction is something else has taken the focus away from the "login app". If I press Alt-Tab then suddenly another key will wake up the login app and give me a password prompt.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#470

Post by meerita »

Whatever they say, as a Mac OS 8 and 9.1 user I don't think there will be anything similar for a long time: macOS today is a usability disaster. A user interface that is mined with options for all cases. Gosh, it's a pain in the ass to work with macOS these days of so many options you have. Before it was simpler but things were done in an effective way without cutting the user's chances of working comfortably and customizing their work desktop. And the Finder is a disaster, for me the epitome of the Finder will always be Norton Commander.
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