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Sanding UI

blog.jim-nielsen.com

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Re: Sanding UI

#61

Post by emmelaich »

quirino wrote: post #12

On Safari (iPad), type something in the search bar. If you accidentally click outside of your keyboard it will deselect the bar and delete everything you typed. On Spotify the three little dots to do some action to a song have too small of a hitbox. Press even the slightest bit under the button and it will start playing the song. You'd never click there to play the song. When you consider the scale of these apps, the…

On the Tesla screen, parked view you can tap the frunk and trunk buttons to open them.

If you miss them by even a slight amount, the view does this annoying animation which hides the frunk and trunk butttons for about a second. You have to wait for the animation to stop before trying again.

So damn annoying.

Re: Sanding UI

#63

Post by ants_everywhere »

The algorithm of clicking around trying to break things heavily optimizes for workflows the designer finds natural. The more you do it, the more you reinforce your existing patterns because, you know, brains.

This tends to produce experiences that are very smooth for a large group of people but fail really badly for anyone who is slightly different. Most Apple stuff feels like this to me, for example. It's like carving a polished stone path where any direction you step off the path is raw and jagged.

Re: Sanding UI

#64

Post by raminf »

Built an app when the iPhone first came out. Spent 2 months building the core app and another 3 months working to reduce the number of taps and remove road-bumps in the UI/UX flow.

Totally paid off.

Working on another app now. Sweating the details on the 'watercourse way.' That first experience is critical.

Re: Sanding UI

#66

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

That's pretty much what I do.

TestFlight records how many sessions I run, on the release-ready app. I use TestFlight from very early on.

It always shows thousands of sessions for me. The next-highest tester is often only tens or hundreds.

But that number is dwarfed by how many sessions I run in the simulator.

It tends to result in apps that folks like using.

The biggest danger is that I get so familiar with the UI, that I don't understand its [lack of] discoverability for those unfamiliar with it. I can easily design inscrutable UI.

Re: Sanding UI

#67

Post by jay-barronville »

christophilus wrote: post #62

I generally wrap my radios inside of the label for this reason. Is there a reason not to do that?

> I generally wrap my radios inside of the label for this reason. Is there a reason not to do that?

Actually, I think this is the best way to deal with all inputs that have labels—a small number of issues and edge cases (such as the one described in the article) just disappear. It’s also valid hierarchy-wise.

Re: Sanding UI

#68

Post by inferiorhuman »

aag wrote: post #47
thelastparadise wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep it's just pure jank. Even Apple (especially post-Jobs) can produce jank.

I've never understood the claim that Apple's UIs are better than others'. That wasn't true while Jobs was around, and it isn't true now. Apple Photos, for example, loses keystrokes every time I create a new album. That's been true for years. And Time Machine randomly drops files from backups. Linux isn't perfect, but my daily experience using it has been far superior for years.

Hard disagree over here. Apple's not always been good but my experience has usually been better than the competition (at least OSX 10.4+). They've been on a downward trajectory, certainly I've whined a lot about how bad MacOS 14 is, but their main competition (Microsoft) has also been working to lower the bar. Linux on the desktop's largely been a non-starter for me due to Apple's ARM stuff and disinterest in spending the effort to find compatible hardware.

I've not used Apple for photo stuff past monkeying around with Aperture. However I recently tried digikam, darktable, and rawtherapee. Darktable in particular was atrocious, and if that's how Gtk apps are on Linux I'd consider that another strike against desktop Linux. All three crashed or hanged repeatedly. You could rather easily dismiss some things like keyboard shortcuts not being aligned (rawtherapee) or partially aligned (darktable) with MacOS norms. Even the lack of app signing (darktable, digikam) and mix of cocoa and gtk widgets could be attributed to big bad Apple.

But once you dig into them it's a rogues gallery. Darktable has two different modules for setting the white balance (ugh). Countless issues have been opened (and then closed) over this on github. The docs explain when each one comes into play. With the default settings if you believe the docs and change the module that's supposed to be active, you'll get an error. Widgets respond to mouse events even if you think the cursor isn't over the widget. Rawtherapee, for some reason, renders the metadata widget as blurry mess to the point of the text being illegible.

To me it feels like open source projects sneer at ease of use (especially after looking at how bug reports are dealt with) vs commercial software companies willingness to fund a UX team.

Re: Sanding UI

#69

Post by acka »

dumbo-octopus wrote: post #7
lelandfe wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The HTML spec doesn't speak much on a11y guidelines. Here's what the W3's WAI says https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/forms/labels/#associating-l... > Whenever possible, use the label element to associate text with form elements explicitly > [..] > In some situations, form controls cannot be labeled explicitly... Generally, explicit labels are better supported by assistive technology ...but people have been saying that…

Parent link says NVDA, VoiceOver, and JAWS all support the implicit way. That’s the industry standard suite to support, they’re all free and available across all platforms. If some company makes a shoddy half baked solution for sale (looking at you, Dragon), and they don’t understand basic HTML that has been standardized for years, that’s not my problem. The same way I don’t only use the subset of web technologies th…

JAWS isn't free[1]. Using the trial version for accessibility testing goes against its EULA[2].

[1] https://www.freedomscientific.com/products/software/jaws/

[2] https://webaim.org/blog/jaws-license-not-developer-friendly/

Re: Sanding UI

#70

Post by brontitall »

emmelaich wrote: post #61
quirino wrote: post #12

On Safari (iPad), type something in the search bar. If you accidentally click outside of your keyboard it will deselect the bar and delete everything you typed. On Spotify the three little dots to do some action to a song have too small of a hitbox. Press even the slightest bit under the button and it will start playing the song. You'd never click there to play the song. When you consider the scale of these apps, the…

On the Tesla screen, parked view you can tap the frunk and trunk buttons to open them. If you miss them by even a slight amount, the view does this annoying animation which hides the frunk and trunk butttons for about a second. You have to wait for the animation to stop before trying again. So damn annoying.

OMG yes! That appeared in the somewhat recent UI revamp and I’m so tired of mashing at that button. Not only is it unavailable for what feels like more than a second, but now it’s in a different place
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