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Software should convey a sense of calm

patrickjuchli.com

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Re: Software should convey a sense of calm

#51

Post by Zababa »

ysavir wrote: post #47
jrm4 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is the best argument one can come up with for not being critical here, for me it absolutely proves we need to be more critical here. Of course, I don't wish to see anyone suffer, but I'm seeing something like: "Hey, we're paying a guy to dig holes and fill them back up with no value whatsoever, why are we doing that?" "Hey, man, stop attacking hole-diggers, they're just trying to make a living."

Can you go into more detail of why you think we need to be critical of designers? The GP makes no effort to justify their criticism of designers, perhaps you can provide some reasons for it, and thereby allow people to respond to actual arguments.

A good example that was discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28504573

The justification isn't "It helps users" or anything like that. It's "This is not a new idea either — pretty much everyone else is doing it, e.g. macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, elementary OS, KDE.". Reducing usability and breaking habits to follow trends is a bad thing.

Re: Software should convey a sense of calm

#52

Post by Zababa »

varikin wrote: post #26
throwaway09223 wrote: post #17

I remember decades ago building a menu system for a homebrew media center to launch game emulators and so on. I wanted it to have a loud arcade style feel. All menu text was rendered in 3d and would bounce and vibrate. Lots of flashing lights, noise, music and high energy. Functionally, it was just a simplified file explorer. It was very fun to use. I agree with most of the opinions in this article, but I don't like…

> Video games are a great example of simplified, intuitive interfaces which are often the polar opposite of calm. Video games are interesting in terms of usability. I thought a lot about this the past couple years after a UX course. A lot of UX principles are about making things easier, like large clickable areas, not moving clickable areas, contrasting colors, proving plenty of time to react or undo, and making thin…

> Video games are interesting in terms of usability. I thought a lot about this the past couple years after a UX course. A lot of UX principles are about making things easier, like large clickable areas, not moving clickable areas, contrasting colors, proving plenty of time to react or undo, and making things obvious and as easy as possible. But in a game, many of those principles are flipped. In a shooter, the enemies are smaller and move. They may be difficult to see. Solutions are not always obvious, especially if they are extras or hidden power ups.

The goal of usability is to be able to accomplish your goal. In a lot of games, the feeling of getting better or overcoming an obstacle is part of the goal. So the UX is not surprising, it's following the goal of the product.

Re: Software should convey a sense of calm

#54

Post by sizzle »

tmp_anon_22 wrote: post #50
sizzle wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visual UI "graphic" design, full of fleeting design trends and dark patterns, sure I agree, bundle them up and send them to the moon. UX =/ UI Human-centered design professionals who went to school for/taught themselves from the field of Human Computer Interaction, which involves a multitude of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies for assessing usability and bringing the voice of the user early into th…

> from the field of Human Computer Interaction This is how you get death by a thousand A/B tests a la Google, Facebook, and other ultimately user-hostile interfaces that optimize for ad engagement. Give me a compassionate, thoughtful, designer who isn't an ass hole any day of the week.

A/B tests are more of a thing in the ecommerce and ad-tech space and only a small aspect of the UX research methodology landscape, see: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/which-ux-research-methods/

The field of HCI (and Human Factors before it) pioneered the application of qualitative research methods from adjacent fields e.g. anthropology, cognitive/social sciences, etc. towards computers and information technology. Optimizing for 'ad engagement' seems to be a recent phenomenon in the timeline of HCI and arguably is being written by the likes of Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. and the people on their payroll who sold their soul to make this their life's work.

Re: Software should convey a sense of calm

#56

Post by btbuildem »

throwaway09223 wrote: post #17

I remember decades ago building a menu system for a homebrew media center to launch game emulators and so on. I wanted it to have a loud arcade style feel. All menu text was rendered in 3d and would bounce and vibrate. Lots of flashing lights, noise, music and high energy. Functionally, it was just a simplified file explorer. It was very fun to use. I agree with most of the opinions in this article, but I don't like…

I think "calm" might refer to the user in that context, as the opposite of "frustrated to the brink of violence".

A game UI might be wacky and as twitchy as a rodent dosed with recreational stimulants, but the user feels calm, capable of navigating through it and never doubting they can accomplish what they set out to do.

Re: Software should convey a sense of calm

#57

Post by brundolf »

I agree with the goal, I have mixed feelings about the listed solutions

I'd like to add one: using consistent metaphors. A user of software is constantly trying to form a mental model of how this ethereal, formless thing behaves. A state machine. What can and cannot happen, what will and will not happen after a given action, what can and cannot happen once we're in a different state. The shakier and less scrutable and/or reliable this mental model, the more anxiety is felt.

As programmers we're partly insulated from this effect. We may not know the exact inner-workings of a piece of software we didn't write, but we know some general things about software and the way it does and doesn't behave that soften the huge void of scary unknowns. This helps us form our mental model.

Physical metaphors of objects, continuity, permanence, locality, persistence, independence, are often used in GUIs for this reason. If I click a tab and then click back to the previous one, I expect to return to the same state I was in. If I change the text in one field, I expect that unrelated fields won't be impacted by that. Etc. This is a good starting point. Desktop platforms and then mobile platforms have built additional semi-consistent UX expectations on top of those largely physical intuitions. This helps too. But your application needs to go beyond that: it needs to present a simplified model of its internal state-machine to the user, and then it needs to hold to that. That mental model, once formed by the user, needs to have predictive power about the way the system behaves under different circumstances.

Re: Software should convey a sense of calm

#58

Post by ElFitz »

tmp_anon_22 wrote: post #50
sizzle wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Visual UI "graphic" design, full of fleeting design trends and dark patterns, sure I agree, bundle them up and send them to the moon. UX =/ UI Human-centered design professionals who went to school for/taught themselves from the field of Human Computer Interaction, which involves a multitude of qualitative and quantitative research methodologies for assessing usability and bringing the voice of the user early into th…

> from the field of Human Computer Interaction This is how you get death by a thousand A/B tests a la Google, Facebook, and other ultimately user-hostile interfaces that optimize for ad engagement. Give me a compassionate, thoughtful, designer who isn't an ass hole any day of the week.

Is this issue here how they optimise their interfaces or what they optimise them for?

Re: Software should convey a sense of calm

#59

Post by qmmmur »

brundolf wrote: post #57

I agree with the goal, I have mixed feelings about the listed solutions I'd like to add one: using consistent metaphors. A user of software is constantly trying to form a mental model of how this ethereal, formless thing behaves. A state machine. What can and cannot happen, what will and will not happen after a given action, what can and cannot happen once we're in a different state. The shakier and less scrutable an…

Well written and a nice way to conceptualise the problem and zoom out a bit.
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