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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#551

Post by elwell »

bob1029 wrote: post #492

For me the worst isn't even that the UI composition/presentation is bad. It's that the performance of these interfaces is getting monotonically worse over time. No one wants to take the time to learn the hard native UI development processes, so we just wind up throwing some shitty angular SPA application into electronjs and calling it a day. Those of us with non-sloth-like reflexes now have to experience torture as e…

> monotonically worse over time

An orthogonal interrogation of course, but I pontificate: does specificity truly monotonically increase by specification of some gradient being monotonic, making the modifier "monotonically" not merely monotonically increasing with grandiloquence?

Re: The Decline of Usability

#552

Post by eitland »

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…

> 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 the minimal VM I actually want to poke around with inside that installation.

If there's anyone like me here they might be happy to know that KDE Neon exists and is something like:

- Stable Ubuntu base.

- Infinitely (almost) customizable KDE on top.

- And (IMO unlike Kubuntu) sane defaults.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#553

Post by gbrown »

swiley wrote: post #202
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…

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 actually like Gnome 3 a lot. I feel like it’s the first DE I’ve tried that I could interact with with the appropriate mix of 90% keyboard 10% touchpad on a laptop.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#554

Post by hilbert42 »

jpxw wrote: post #521
ordu wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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’m 20 and it took me literally minutes to realise I needed to swipe up. I thought the computer had frozen.

It's not your fault.

It's the shitty ergonomics that have been pervading software UI design for several decades now.

From the huge number of responses to this article, it's clear the software industry has a very major problem. The question I ask is why haven't users/user complaints been successful in stopping these irresponsible cowboys.

Seems nothing can stop them.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#555

Post by tunap »

Noos wrote: post #224
rapind wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having rarely seen a VCR that wasn't flashing "12:00", I came to the conclusion that a clock was simply feature bloat.

Not really, that's more a cliche. I set the clock on mine to tape programming when I wasn't there, and if anything it was probably easier than setting clock radios and watches now.

I think of programming the Betamax(VHS rival) everytime I scrolled through the interface on 1990s/2000s printers. I built the nested file structure in my head rather than reading it on the screen. It has made navigating the digital world so much more natural(for me).

*The hard part of programming the Beta(and early VHS) for me was getting the family to leave the tuner on the channel I/we wanted to record.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#556

Post by BubRoss »

PunksATawnyFill wrote: post #515
andrepd wrote: post #499

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Blender fanboys argue for using keyboard shortcuts instead. The keyboard shortcut guide is 13 pages. Well to be fair Blender is a professional tool. It is expected that users read the manual and learn the shortcuts, etc. Discoverability is something that should not be optimised for in a tool for professionals like Blender.

That is such a lame, played-out excuse. A real favorite of apologists for shitty UI design.

You are absolutely right. It doesn't hold water once you look at other professional programs. They all use the same math underneath and love or die to a huge degree based on their interface. Blender being free and open source opens up possibilities for people with no access to professional tools and researchers, but compared to the commercial tools out there its interface is a mess of inconsistency.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#557

Post by hilbert42 »

swiley wrote: post #202
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…

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.

"This is why I don't touch GUIs from the major binary distros or gnome3 with a 10 foot pole"

Exactly, but what perplexes me is why aren't these issues that are so obvious to us not obvious to them. Why do they think so differently to normal users?

Re: The Decline of Usability

#558

Post by b3kart »

StartupTree wrote: post #133
postalrat wrote: post #77

https://new.reddit.com vs https://old.reddit.com

New Reddit is so so bad, I feel like I'm in a hallucinogenic nightmare when I accidentally click into it. Kudos that they kept the sane old option for people who want to use the website.

Question is, for how long? I am dreading the day when I can no longer switch to old.reddit.com whenever my laptop is begging for mercy.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#559

Post by [deleted] »

fiblye wrote: post #291
kristopolous wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gimp is a great example. If you look up screenshots from the late 90s of gimp 1.0 you think "Hey wow, that looks pretty great! I know where the buttons are, I can quickly scan them and it's clear what they do! It isn't a grey on grey tiny soup, they are distinct and clear, this is great. When is this version shipping? It fixes everything!" Apparently almost everyone agrees but somehow we're still going the wrong way,…

What's crazy is Gimp has always felt user-hostile to me. Loads of other people share this complaint. With every new release, there are people recommending giving it a second/third/fifty-third shot saying "They finally made it easy to use this time!" At this point it feels like a prank that's been going on for a quarter century.

[deleted]

Re: The Decline of Usability

#560

Post by cycloptic »

hilbert42 wrote: post #541
fiblye wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's crazy is Gimp has always felt user-hostile to me. Loads of other people share this complaint. With every new release, there are people recommending giving it a second/third/fifty-third shot saying "They finally made it easy to use this time!" At this point it feels like a prank that's been going on for a quarter century.

"What's crazy is Gimp has always felt user-hostile to me." You're not wrong, I wish you were but you're not. By any measure GIMP is a dog of a program. I wish it weren't so as I stopped upgrading my various Adobe products some years ago, but alas it is. It would take me as long as this 'The Decline of Usability' essay to give an authoritative explanation but I'll attempt to illustrate with a few examples: 1. The way…

I've only hacked on GIMP a small bit, so I'm no means an authority, but the sad truth is that GIMP is an extremely small project driven mostly by volunteers. There is a desire to correct these issues but there are many, many other issues to prioritize them against. It's been a very infrequent occurrence for them to have the resources to work with UI/UX designers. I'm not trying to dismiss your complaints, but I think you would see some better results if you didn't wait for someone else to fix it for you. My only suggestion is that GIMP actually has very complete Python/Scheme scripting interfaces that can be used to make a lot of little UI tweaks, although the APIs are not well-documented.

>they do things their way, not the way users want or are already familiar with

In my experience, a program that has never had a feature removed (or unintentionally broken) is an exception, not the rule. It takes a lot of effort to keep things working over the years, and if there is no will to maintain that, then those things will disappear.

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