661–670 of 719 posts
Another rather infuriating example: On iOS Mail you now have to hit the "reply" icon to move a received email to another folder, mark it or print it. Very poor discoverability. They should at least have changed the icon when they changed it into a multiple purpose thing.
Simply put; If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I feel like modern development has developed into "features for the sake of features" rather than actual improvement.
Maybe this is a result of companies hiring way more full-time people than they need in the long-term instead of using short-term contracts to develop the initial product and now they need to keep all those people busy.
It is quite sad how often I end up having to help older relatives with their computers on account of unintuitive UI. One memorable, recent example was my mother, who could not figure out how to get her GMail sidebar to un-collapse itself. Here's a screenshot of a collapsed sidebar: https://storage.googleapis.com/support-forums-api/attachment... and a screenshot of an un-collapsed sidebar: https://techcrunch.com/wp-co…
I have never come across a Google product and thought “this is a well designed and clear to use program”. Except perhaps Google Search and Gmail of old - between circa 2005-2008.
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Competely orthogonal to the megabar being shit, you can[0] middle-click on a bookmark entry to open it in a new tab immediately. 0: could at some point? I revert and stop updating software that sends downgrades and regressions as updates, so I'm not sure what all firefox-latest is doing.
Yeah, but the order of events in my brain is: 1. I want to go somewhere new. Opens new tab. 2. I have a bookmark for where I'm going!
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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…
"There is never going to be a unified GUI for Linux; that requires a dictator." Agreed, but I can never get to the bottom of or reason why developers do not provide alternative UI interfaces (shells) so that the user can select what he/she wants. This would save the user much time relearning the new UI (not to mention a lot of unnecessary cursing and swearing). For example, Microsoft substantially changes the UI with…
It's because everybody wants you to use their thing and not some other thing. If people have a choice then some people will choose something else.
This is especially true when the choice is to continue using the traditional interface everybody is already familiar with, because that's what most everybody wants in any case where the traditional interface is not literally on fire. Even in that case, what people generally want is for you to take the traditional interface, address the "on fire" parts and leave everything else the way it is.
Good change is good, but good change is hard, especially in stable systems that have already been optimized for years. Change for the sake of change is much more common, but then you have to force feed it to people to get anyone to use it because they rightfully don't want it.
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Problem is, would that even help? What I want is what Gnome 2 already was. Their changes indicate they themselves don't want that anymore. Any attempts at voicing my concerns are met with disdain. What more can I even do as a developer?
You can fork! /s
Though in the case of GNOME, that's rarely productive. I had one of my contributions sit around (with tested patch ready to apply) for 10 years! Despite comments saying it was good to apply. That entire component ended up dying through lack of maintenance even when people were happy to contribute effort.
GNOME's problems like squarely with its terrible choices.
What I do agree with: UIs have gotten worse on the usability front, this is undeniable. Each application does its own thing when it comes to layout, and each app is also subject to change so not only do new users struggle to find where a button is, but experienced users have to re learn the UI. I also agree that a lot of the bad changes to the desktop come from mobile. Something that works on mobile because of the small screen, limited horizontal space, and inaccurate input method will inherently not be the most efficient on a usually large wide-screen device with very precise input methods. There is also a large element of sacrificing usability for aesthetics which doesn't help.
What I don't agree with: I don't think we had ever reached a stage where we nailed usability. The "golden age" he talks about, with the file, edit, view menus weren't all that great. I remember using word 2003 and having to click through each menu and reading each entry one by one to find the option I needed because it wasn't obvious where it should live. The one advantage this system had was that every app used it and so everyone understood the paradigm, which is arguably a bigger factor to usability than the actual design.
He also makes it seem like (although I don't think he argues this point) every new innovation in UIs past a certain point were bad. But he also gives a counter example, the bookmark bar. Older web browsers didn't have this feature, it was something that came later. Some wizz kid one day implemented it and this feature happened to stick. We haven't solved UIs yet, and so we have to try new things in order to figure out what works and what doesn't.
Finally, I don't think the most important thing with many UIs is how easy it is for a new user to understand. Most people would agree that Vim has a great interface, but it just takes a while to learn it. This goes for a lot of specialist and professional applications, I'd prefer it to be designed to be useful for the veteran user, not the newbie, but with good documentation to make the learning as easy as possible.
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Having rarely seen a VCR that wasn't flashing "12:00", I came to the conclusion that a clock was simply feature bloat.
If they couldn't make it easier to set I think the clock should have been less prominent. It's necessary if you're doing a scheduled recording. It's too bad time sync over power lines didn't catch on widely (or broadcast over the radio). It would still be saving everyone from changing their digital clocks during DST.
In the 1990s I encountered a hotel TV with that feature. It had a built-in clock with hands (not on screen), which was also the alarm clock for the room. No one had set it up, and I spent about ten minutes with the remote getting it to find a station with time info and set the clock. Then the "alarm set" function on the remote would work and I could set my wake-up time.
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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,…
Long time Adobe user. I tried Gimp. Shut it down, and merrily went back to my Adobe subscription plan.
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>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.