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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#571

Post by zipwitch »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #89
wwweston wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think resume-driven development is bad for developers (and it is), consider the career incentives for UI and product people. If there's a "maintain" incentive, I'm not sure what it is. "Didn't change anything about functional and satisfactory interfaces" may be a real value-add in some cases, but it's not a sizzling narrative for selling yourself on the job market.

Very true. Most people get measured by how much churn they create. The more the better. Even if it’s 100% correct for the business you are digging your own grave if you leave things the way they are.

This comment needs more upvotes. It's endemic to the software industry and far beyond. From employees who need to meet some arbitrary (and possibly unwritten) metric, to executives who are compelled to leave their mark on anything they touch, the number of people-years we waste on unnecessary churn has got to be staggering.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#572

Post by dade_ »

I am using a LibreOffice more than Word and Excel these days, besides being far too slow, the UI on these apps keep changing for the worse. I give my feedback, but now there is a search field in the title bar. The MS people claim this is for discoverability. Then let’s put the whole damned app in the title bar. This idea that apps need to be made for stupid and lazy people is why there was Office and Works. This is a catastrophe. I need professional tools, not Farmville word processor edition. Done griping, and I wholly agree!

Re: The Decline of Usability

#573

Post by necovek »

sergiotapia wrote: post #196
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,…

I thought you were exaggerating but holy moly it's 100% true. What happened? search for images: "gimp 1.0" vs "gimp 2020". Wow.

Hah, I see that I'll be in for a surprise myself once I upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#574

Post by agumonkey »

Jtsummers wrote: post #261
agumonkey wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's doubly odd because as many (I suppose) I firmly believed that faster pace and smaller changes would lead to global improvements (same goes for ajax web..). I think we just blew some social limit. People prefer stability, stability allows for more complex but riskier constructions, society enjoys the working ones even better. I like the notion of seasonality these days.

> It's doubly odd because as many (I suppose) I firmly believed that faster pace and smaller changes would lead to global improvements (same goes for ajax web..). A late response, but a response none the less. Faster response time and changes can result in global improvements, but they don't ensure it unless they consider global implications. See also: normalization of deviance [0]. It's very easy to make small chang…

Thanks, once again, lots to learn from other industries "issues" :)

Re: The Decline of Usability

#575

Post by RandomWorker »

Joeboy wrote: post #564
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,…

> Logging in on desktop now requires "swiping up" with the mouse to get the password box. What? I just type my password without swiping anything. I've I think I've upgraded through pretty much every version of Ubuntu for the last few years, I haven't customized it to speak of, and I've always been able to do this on both my desktop and my laptop.

Moreover, specifically I’m running 19.04 and I click anywhere on the screen to open the password. Maybe they changed it over time.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#577

Post by hilbert42 »

yaktubi wrote: post #345
_jal wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Honestly the problem with all software is people trying to “innovate” too much. They made this thing called a book once upon a time and those have worked for centuries. Same thing with UIs: the stacking window managers work well from Windows 95 and XP why change it?

"Honestly the problem with all software is people trying to “innovate” too much."

You are spot on, and your 'book analogy' is perfect. If it works perfectly don't change it — that is unless an innovation arrives that offers a significant improvement and that's just as easy to use.

Unfortunately, most so-called UI improvements over the last 20 or so years are not improvements at all, in fact many have been quite regressive. They've annoyed millions of users who've collectively wasted millions of hours relearning what they already knew (and in the end nothing was added by way of new productivity)—and that doesn't include the developer's 'lost' time developing these so-called improvements. It's time that would otherwise have been much better spent fixing bugs, providing security improvements and or developing software for altogether new applications that we've not seen before.

The question I keep asking over and over again is what exactly are the causes behind all this useless 'over innovation'. Why is it done on such a huge scale and with such utter predictability?

Is it marketing's wish for something new? Are developers deliberately trying to find work for themselves or to keep their jobs or what?

It seems to me that many a PhD could be earned researching the psychological underpinnings of why so many are prepared to waste so much money and human effort continuing to develop software that basically adds nothing to improve or advance the human condition.

In fact, it's such an enormous problem that it should be at the core of Computer Science research.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#578

Post by anthk »

userbinator wrote: post #429
anthk wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

Every time I see a screenshot of someone theming Linux to look like Windows, the most obvious thing that stands out as not being quite right is the font rendering. Even when using Microsoft's own TTFs, the font renderers that Linux use seem to put the pixels in a slightly different place than the MS one. Other differences I could see from the screenshots: the comboboxes have the dropdown arrow next to instead of insi…

Yeah, I began with DOS and later W98 back in the day, but at least Chicago95 is far better than most of the GTK2/3 or QT5 themes. You can always fix the CSS yourself or submit an issue on GitHub.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#579

Post by acqq »

int_19h wrote: post #235
dfox wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This distinction is used by all CUA-derived GUI toolkits. Unfortunately by default windows uses same outline style for both default and focused buttons so there is no visual distinction. (there is an alternative button style on windows that distinguishes between these two states, but it tends to be used to mark buttons as two-state and anyway looks distinctly ugly and non-native)

Windows distinguishes default and focused, it's just a bit subtle. A button in focus has a dotted rectangle around the contents (immediately adjacent to the actual border, which is why it's kinda hard to see). A button that's the default has a thick blue outer border in Win10, and used to have a black border in the classic Win9x theme. What is different in Win32, however, is that if any button is focused, it is also…

And even that concept (of "defaultness" of a button) is IMO wrong: it introduces "modes" of operation -- you have to look to see what is the default before you can press Enter. Which also means that you can't even have some general expectation what the Enter key is going to do when.

There were computer keyboards which had a distinction between the button to enter the field and the button to, for example, do the desired action behind the whole dialog. Just like today it is common to expect that Esc is going to cancel the dialog (or the entry form) there was a key that one knew would do the "proceed" (GO) independently of the position in which field your cursor is at the moment (or was). In these operating systems Enter always did just the non-surprising "end of the entering of the current input field, skip to the next" and the "GO" signaled the end of that process and the wish to use everything that has been entered up to any point. It's particularly convenient when entering a lot of numerical data on the numeric keypad, where Enter also just moves to the next field.

I think that concept was right, and better than what we have today. Entering what are basically "forms" in any order (filling the dialogs) and proceed from any point is a basic task and could have remained less surprising.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#580

Post by buckminster »

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...

It's not just the logon screen. In many apps if you type CTRL+O followed by a file name to bring up the File Open dialog and populate the name field then the application frequently loses the first few characters of the file name. Or type CTRL+T followed by text. This opens a new tab but the text appears in the old tab if you don't pause.

These things used to work reliably. I think most of the problems are caused by introducing asynchronicity into apps without thinking about how it affects keyboard input. Keyboard input should always behave like the app is single-threaded.

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