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41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

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Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#61

Post by seumars »

zer00eyz wrote: post #9

20 ish years ago I ended up with a UX gig. Best experience of my work history. Detouring into site structure, information design, and doing actual USABILITY (behind a 2 way mirror watching real people use your app) was amazing. Jacob Nielson was blowhard even then. His "all links must be blue and underlined" mantra was tired even then. It takes a lot for me to say this, but his pedantry at the time puts peak Richard…

>Jacob Nielson was blowhard even then. His "all links must be blue and underlined" mantra was tired even then. It takes a lot for me to say this, but his pedantry at the time puts peak Richard Stallman to shame!

And that'd be an understatement! I feel Nielsen spent most of his professional career calling himself a guru mostly to boost his consultancy firm. He also reminds me of Norman in the way that their contributions to the field are lofty aphorisms that don't provide any actual solutions.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#62

Post by zer00eyz »

throw_pm23 wrote: post #42
zer00eyz wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know people with PHD's who can run rings around you on "their topic" and can't cross the street without support. I know teachers who are smart, and phenomenal at their job who I had to arm twist to go play with chat GPT cause it's not in their wheelhouse/on their radar. The not so bright person, who is stressed out is likely a user of your app. The same as the absent minded PHD or the teacher who is too over worked…

I'm with you on all these examples but why is it wrong if someone is not interested in chatGPT?

The only thing that is wrong is when UI doesn't account for these sorts of user contexts (disengaged, disinterested, distracted, disabled ...)

Chat GPT is about highlighting a breadth of experience. The world has stupid people and smart people who will be baffled by bad UI. It has people who might not have the context that we, the tech community, has around emergent tools.

Many of us live so far in the tech bubble that we forget how people who do "other things" approach technology. This is the gap that UI design should be bridging (and is doing a horrid job at these days)

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#63

Post by ivan_gammel »

_gabe_ wrote: post #58
ivan_gammel wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming language is not a user interface, it is a way to describe commands. The UI in this case would be the way to enter the program, e.g. punch cards, text editor or IDE, or AI copilot. People who can write code are very broad audience and of course all accessibility requirements must apply.

A programming language is absolutely a user interface. The error messages and diagnostics emitted by the language are the feedback mechanisms. The syntax and semantics are the design of the interface. The documentation is the user manual. Text editors, IDEs, punch cards and AI copilot are all separate UIs on top of whatever programming language you happen to be using. After all, TUIs are a thing and nobody debates th…

>The error messages and diagnostics emitted by the language are the feedback mechanisms.

The error messages and diagnostics are emitted by the tools like compiler, linker or interpreter and are part of their interface. Language standard may codify some error messages, but language itself cannot present them to you because language is not a program.

>Just because a programming language is all text doesn’t mean that usability metrics don’t exist for it.

Just because some usability metrics can be applied to a programming language, it does not make it UI. Interface implies interaction. You do not interact with language - it cannot receive UI events and react to them, you interact with the tools that understand it.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#64

Post by alpaca128 »

brailsafe wrote: post #28
wharvle wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A whole lot of us will be mentally impaired sooner or later. Our experience with software when that happens is sad for everyone but bad UI designers. For them, it’s justice.

A UI designer does a good job if the person who's paying them thinks they did a good job, not whether or not they actually followed best practices, unless that's how the work gets approved. A frontend developer does a good job if their tickets are done and their boss likes them, which may or may not include actual quality work that's accessible or usable. That's the secret I wish I'd known when I started working, cou…

Just like morality and law are not the same, the objective quality of a UI designer's work doesn't necessarily have anything in common with their employer's preferences.

You're right that only one of those is paid well, but that's not what GP was talking about.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#65

Post by ivan_gammel »

doublespanner wrote: post #51
ivan_gammel wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck designing aircraft cockpit with this kind of thinking.

You are missing the point, it's obvious that a cockpit needs to account for stress or a crisis. Extending this to CAD software for example is nonsense.

I like your confidence, but it also manifests lack of experience and understanding of what engineering is. Expert tools have much lower tolerance for user mistakes because there are big money at stake (or sometimes lives of other people). A typo in Instagram post is not the same as a wrong number in CAD. I have personally seen a construction project where incorrect input in CAD resulted in several dozen foundation piles for a 16-story building installed outside the site boundary. Just because an architect responsible for aligning the building on site made a mistake working in a hurry, confusing two fields in the UI. Of course, there was a chain of failures, each next step costing more than previous one, but it could have been prevented if the software cared about the user and did not assume he is a superman.

It is so easy to squeeze as much functionality as possible on a screen trying to optimize productivity, but then quality of labels is sacrificed, click zones become too small and feedback is reduced to a barely visible message in status bar. It takes one sleepless night or a family argument for the user to get distracted and make a wrong but very expensive mistake.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#66

Post by alpaca128 »

karaterobot wrote: post #22
wharvle wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now older and wiser, candidly a lot of folks would be well served by default blue links, og html submit buttons and tables for layouts. A fair bit of modern UI is complete trash: it's the product of a designer and a product person putting the next bullet point on their resume. If I were emperor of the world I’d make every consumer program pass a battery of tests that included demonstrating sufficient usability for…

If you aren't making a consumer product for nursing home patients with sub-90 IQs, then you'd be wasting your time, and the feedback you got from the exercise wouldn't be useful. In fact, any decisions you made based on it could be wrong. The point isn't to design for the lowest common denominator, but for the users you will actually have, and usability test participants should be recruited with that in mind. There i…

Countless apps do not even accomodate the users they actually have and very obviously don't test accordingly. The non-lowest common denominator is far lower than you seem to assume.

If you think that a fancy UI rework or "please pay our subscription" screen is only confusing to people in nursing homes you are very wrong. They can be nontrivial obstacles to users who work every day, organize conferences etc.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#67

Post by lazyasciiart »

alpaca128 wrote: post #66
karaterobot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you aren't making a consumer product for nursing home patients with sub-90 IQs, then you'd be wasting your time, and the feedback you got from the exercise wouldn't be useful. In fact, any decisions you made based on it could be wrong. The point isn't to design for the lowest common denominator, but for the users you will actually have, and usability test participants should be recruited with that in mind. There i…

Countless apps do not even accomodate the users they actually have and very obviously don't test accordingly. The non-lowest common denominator is far lower than you seem to assume. If you think that a fancy UI rework or "please pay our subscription" screen is only confusing to people in nursing homes you are very wrong. They can be nontrivial obstacles to users who work every day, organize conferences etc.

Then you shouldn't need to test on nursing home residents.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#68

Post by V-2 »

wharvle wrote: post #11
zer00eyz wrote: post #9

20 ish years ago I ended up with a UX gig. Best experience of my work history. Detouring into site structure, information design, and doing actual USABILITY (behind a 2 way mirror watching real people use your app) was amazing. Jacob Nielson was blowhard even then. His "all links must be blue and underlined" mantra was tired even then. It takes a lot for me to say this, but his pedantry at the time puts peak Richard…

> Now older and wiser, candidly a lot of folks would be well served by default blue links, og html submit buttons and tables for layouts. A fair bit of modern UI is complete trash: it's the product of a designer and a product person putting the next bullet point on their resume. If I were emperor of the world I’d make every consumer program pass a battery of tests that included demonstrating sufficient usability for…

> a panel of users with sub-90 IQ who were in a stressful environment and trying to complete other tasks at the same time

So long Vim or Emacs ;)

I understand that your example is somewhat tongue in cheek, serving illustrative purposes, but I think good UX is about trade-offs more than a one-dimensional spectrum of convenient vs. inconvenient, and you can't optimize it for the sake of stressed out sub-90 IQ users without hurting the usability for some other groups.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#69

Post by mdekkers »

zer00eyz wrote: post #9

20 ish years ago I ended up with a UX gig. Best experience of my work history. Detouring into site structure, information design, and doing actual USABILITY (behind a 2 way mirror watching real people use your app) was amazing. Jacob Nielson was blowhard even then. His "all links must be blue and underlined" mantra was tired even then. It takes a lot for me to say this, but his pedantry at the time puts peak Richard…

> Now older and wiser, candidly a lot of folks would be well served by default blue links, og html submit buttons and tables for layouts. A fair bit of modern UI is complete trash: it's the product of a designer and a product person putting the next bullet point on their resume.

Material design, and a lot of the related nonsense was one of the worst things to happen to modern computing. It sure _looks_ pretty, in the way an expensive, glossy brochure looks pretty, but the usability is garbage. A good UX should signal intent and function at all times. Anything less is doing a disservice to your users.

Re: 41 Years in UX: A Career Retrospective

#70

Post by amykhar »

kleiba wrote: post #8
christophilus wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which book? There seem to be quite a few, and I wouldn’t mind picking one up, if you have one to recommend.

The one he mentions in the article: "Designing Web Usability".

Yes, this was the one. I think it was my first exposure to UX - probably around 2000, 2001.
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