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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#531

Post by bitwize »

anticristi wrote: post #529

I would be harsher than the OP: This inconsistency is deliberate and a natural consequence of attention economy. Every PMs dream is for their app to become the new homepage/home screen. Want to switch out of Slack to send an email to your boss? It SHOULD feel painful, so that next time you do it on Slack. Want to set yourself a reminder? Well Slack can do that for you. No need to deal with the "foreign" Google Calend…

> One day there will be the "great merger", Slack + VSCode + GitHub + Spotify, the Dev Desktop.

So... yet another way in which VSCode is catching up to where Emacs was decades ago :)

Re: The Decline of Usability

#532

Post by EmilioMartinez »

myself248 wrote: post #163
Pmop wrote: post #121

I'm young (25) but my first (family) computer used to run Windows 98 (that's what we could afford). And I can recall well, UI had one "meta-language": menu bar (file, view ..., help), toolbar, and if you'd hover your mouse pointer over a widget, a tooltip would show up with explanation about what the widget does and the keyboard shortcut for that action. Once you learnt how to use one application, say Paint, you'd pr…

YES. We spent years training our muscle-memory to understand this interface, and it's gone. It's like someone flipped gravity because they thought it was cool, and if your stomach isn't okay with that, well that's your stomach's problem. Fuck those people. The top 2 evils on my list right now: Buttons that don't appear until you wave the mouse near them. I spent way too long, and had to Google, how to zoom a PDF in C…

>Borderless windows

An attempt at being sophisticated, that to me translates as "fuck you, you can't touch me, I'm too ethereal for this world"

Re: The Decline of Usability

#533

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

aspenmayer wrote: post #459
lmm wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an extreme nitpick. The whole argument for time shifting is to be able to record something while you're not at home.

Let’s hear them out in the spirit of debate. I’m curious how this hypothetical VCR is programmed, what the remote and interface might look like. I might even like it, or at least want parts of it as concepts to integrate with other things that already exist. Could shake loose some ideas. Honestly I don’t know why VCRs are so hard to program but all of the buttons can’t help. I might be getting old but the Roku remote…

I remember what setting the time on a VCR was like and it's interesting to think of all the assumed knowledge you actually need in order to have it seem intuitive.

Two things off the top of my head that I can think of: 1) knowing that a blinking number is indicating some kind of selection and more generally 2) seeing the UI as a glimpse into a larger abstract space that can be navigated. Or in other words, having used computers for many years, what my parents sawzl as just a blinking word, I would see as a menu where up/down/left/right had meaning.

There's also some more abstract thinking involved there - for me it's very spatial so I think of it as being able to keep track of your place in this 'abstract map'. You had to learn some non-obvious things like "if the down button stops working, it probably means I'm at the 'bottom' of my available choices" or "if I start seeing the same choices again, it means I have 'wrapped around' and in a logical sense I'm back to where I've been before".

I actually remember thinking something like this as a child when we got a VCR. I think I remember that realization that "this is a menu I can explore". The exploratory skills you pick up when you have to figure out how to use something technical generalize really well to other technical things.

TL;DR: I think VCRs were hard to program because the limited UI of buttons and a tiny screen meant that you actually needed a fairly built-up mental model of the process to keep track of what you were doing.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#534

Post by shureluck »

I love this post. I have been screaming at my monitor now for several years. Something shifted about 5 years ago in UX and everything has definitely gotten worse since.

When Google Docs started to bring back a traditional menu display in the top bar, I was so excited. Everything felt normal and it was easy to find what I was looking for.

But the rest of Google Drive is a disaster. Sometimes buttons are in the upper left, sometimes lower left. Recently they moved the “Add new document” button to the lower right and I spent forever trying to find it. It is infuriating that there is not intelligent person at a company of that size who can put a stop to this crap.

I really hate to say this, but I think a lot of UX designers are trying to justify their existence by reinventing things that have already been solved.

The reality is once you decide how a dropdown or a text input works on desktop, there is very little reason to reinvent it. Ever.

Stop reinventing things UX engineers: your small usability study with 3 of your friends who got confused for 5 seconds is not a sign that you should reinvent how to select things in a list.

/endrant

Re: The Decline of Usability

#535

Post by smichel17 »

Jtsummers wrote: post #100
jimmaswell wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alas too many people are either incapable of this kind of ubderstanding or it would take even longer than just giving them directions every time something changes.

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…

This is a key insight. It's why I hate when we refer to "non-technical people" -- I don't believe possessing the technical skills is a meaningful differentiator in users. The more important categories are those you mention; the non-fearers will eventually figure out a solution, becoming technical along the way if required. The fearful stop trying to do that.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#537

Post by red_admiral »

AlexandrB wrote: post #43
red_admiral wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure, given a bit of time, one could come up with a consistent design language based around "hamburger" menus. At the moment though, as the article states, a lot of previous consistency (e.g. open/save/exit will be in the "File" menu) is being sacrificed as everyone rolls their own. I've actually seen applications where the first button on the toolbar is a hamburger menu and when you click it you get a dropdown w…

> I've actually seen applications where the first button on the toolbar is a hamburger menu and when you click it you get a dropdown with File/Edit/... etc options, that work as expected. I can live with that for now. So instead of just having File/Edit/etc. on the toolbar they're nested inside another menu? This seems like introducing an extra click for no reason :(

A good example that works for me is SumatraPDF, as 90% of the time I don't need the menu (I use keyboard shortcuts) so the screen estate saved is a fair trade-off for the extra click the few times I do need it.

[EDIT: probably more than 90% of the time, actually; EDIT2: and I'm pretty sure there's an option to show a proper menu bar all the time for those that want it]

Re: The Decline of Usability

#538

Post by bsdubernerd »

outworlder wrote: post #209
Semaphor wrote: post #4

I had some reflexive reaction of wanting to disagree because there are also a lot of things that got better. But inconsistency? Hell yes. It feels like every company tries to run their own experiment, getting more and more erratic, and apparently all getting great feedback from their users (not sure if all the feedback systems are broken or something else is going on). Of course, Microsoft who in recent years started…

> But inconsistency? Hell yes. It feels like every company tries to run their own experiment Get off my lawn! More seriously, old apps were way worse. Specially on windows, as soon as APIs for creating non-square windows became available, everyone wanted to use them. Nevermind that performance was horrible. Even widely acclaimed apps had zero consistency with the OS. Remember Winamp? https://repository-images.githubu…

I absolutely do remember this. Horrible. I think, during that time, Windows was the absolute worst offender.

I always used windows/mac and linux together during that time.

Early versions of OSX on PPC were pretty consistent. I didn't particularly like some of the "candy" design styles, but the UI guidelines seemed like a breath of fresh air. Note that Apple themselves started to destroy the consistency by introducing questionable things like "sheet metal" windows, sheets, and abuse all of them in iTunes first. Consistency went down pretty fast.

Looking back, GTK2 for me represented the pinnacle of consistency under Linux. As a toolkit it enforced resizable UIs (at a time when both OSX and Windows used fixed-width all the time) and decent components, not to mention that it supported system-wide themes to a degree never seen before. You can even set Qt4 to render GTK2 style widgets.

I have to absolutely laugh when I see that apps today "support a dark mode", where you could (and partly still can) switch THE ENTIRE UI to a dark theme in seconds in gtk.

But I don't want to defend Linux either. This has too regressed in GTK3 and Qt5 as well. The internal support for skinnability with CSS has caused most UIs to override the system theme irreparably. Many UIs ship with hard-coded themes that you simply cannot change anymore or break horribly when switching to a non-default theme. There are a ton of widgets which have incredibly poor consistency and often bring UI paradigms from phones that have _no_ reason to exist on the desktop. Qt5 QML widgets are so bad I cannot even describe how frustrated I am every time I see a good UI being converted to downright crap for "reasons?".

Ubuntu keeps following the latest fads with absolute zero consideration for UI customization, consistency _and_ performance. We have LXDE, but they too will have to inherit all the inconsistency on the programs running on top of it and since they too inherit GTK, there's no escape on the long run.

Still, Android beats the crap on all three easily.

It seems like nobody is even trying anymore when even developer tools gets rewritten in electron UIs with appalling performance and glaring bugs, yet they receive praise (and excuses).

Re: The Decline of Usability

#539

Post by NikolaeVarius »

kristopolous wrote: post #130
xg15 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is that modern UX is data-driven alright, it just follows radically different paradigms and goals. It's not at all anymore about presenting consistent mental models, it's solely about the ease or difficulty with which particular isolated tasks can be performed. It's also not automatically the goal to make all tasks as easy as possible. Instead, discoverability and "friction" are often deliberately tuned…

Data driven ux seems to put all users in a single bucket. I will readily admit in collective number of clicks and screentime, 37 year old men with advanced degrees in computer science are a super small minority. But who is the majority then? Who spends the most time on say Reddit and YouTube? Children! Yes, people who we know are dramatically cognitively different than adults. Why does YouTube keep recommending video…

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics

It already exists.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#540

Post by cercatrova »

kevsim wrote: post #464
Spivak wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It can do either. Small screens close it as there usually isn't enough space for it. Large screens do have the space so it minimizes rather than closes, and it's especially imperative that it does so, because if it closes on a larger screen, it's unintuitive to swipe from the side of the screen like it is on mobile.
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