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The Decline of Usability

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Re: The Decline of Usability

#671

Post by iggldiggl »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #589
alpaca128 wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 10 allows a normal mouse click as well, unless Microsoft changed that afterwards.

It still does. When you do a mouse click, the lock screen moves up very fast - the animation is also a hint for the future. If you have a touch-enabled device and touch-press the lockscreen, it jumps up a little and falls back down, suggesting the swipe movement. On top of that, just typing on your keyboard works. So MS has managed to make an interface that works just the same on desktops, laptops and touch-enabled d…

Generally yes, except I seem to run into an annoying bug where if you start typing your password too quickly after the initial unlock keypress, the password input control sometimes decides to select everything you've managed to type so far when it initialises, so your next key press overwrites everything. Plus at home I've kept the full lock screen because I actually like those random landscape pictures, but at work they've set the computers to directly boot into the password entry, which of course rather plays havoc with your muscle memory.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#672

Post by necovek »

ahsima1 wrote: post #465
robocat wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About half way through article: “The new lock screen is easier to use, no longer requiting you to ‘slide up’ to reveal the password field (which now sits atop a blurred version of your desktop wallpaper):” Great! That UI was horrific. Hitting a key like spacebar didn’t unlock. Aside: I completely broke the Ubuntu login screen yesterday. I did `apt remove evolution*`. Unfortunately the login screen depends on evolutio…

apt automatically removing dependencies by default is such a trap, I much prefer pacman's behaviour of refusing to remove package that breaks dependecies unless explicitly told to do so.

apt will not automatically remove dependencies either.

I suspect the OP already had ubuntu-desktop package removed for some other reason, and there was no direct dependency on evolution-data-server for gdm: it will only remove dependencies which no other still-installed package depends on. That might still mean a packaging bug (but at least on 18.04, attempting to remove evolution-data-server prompts me how it's going to remove gdm3 too — sure, it's short and easily missed; attempting to remove evolution does not attempt to remove evolution-data-server since a bunch of other stuff depends on it like gnome-calendar too).

In any case, apt will prompt you about all the packages you are about to remove (unless you pass "-y(es)" to it).

Re: The Decline of Usability

#673

Post by necovek »

brabel wrote: post #478
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,…

Ubuntu 19 is terrible. I was forced to use KDE (Plasma) instead because they broke so many basic UI concepts (to give you a tiny taste: changing tabs went from Ctrl+Tab to Meta+Tab, the keyboard layout switcher takes 2 seconds or more because it pops up a stupid little window to show the language selected, and many other things just like this I thankfully erased from my mind and now only the frustration remains).

I use the keyboard layout switcher only with the keyboard which is pretty much instant, so I wonder how was it broken in any of the Ubuntu 19.x releases — that sounds worrying if it carries over to 20.04? (I am on 18.04)

"Any Ubuntu 19.x" because non-LTS Ubuntu releases come out every six months, so there was Ubuntu 19.04 and Ubuntu 19.10, but never an "Ubuntu 19": they are never as polished or as stable as LTS releases, and are only supported for 9 months, forcing you to update regularly.

If you are looking for a more stable experience and you are not chasing the latest features, you would probably be better served with LTS releases which come out every 2 years (they have hardware updates with newer kernels included every once in a while, so you do not have to worry about using them on latest laptops either).

If you want the most stable route, go with LTS point (.1) release. Eg. I only update my servers when 18.04.1 or 20.04.1 is out.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#674

Post by hf8665 »

ogre_codes wrote: post #143
askafriend wrote: post #6

Little of what he says is a problem on MacOS fwiw. I can resize my Slack by dragging anywhere on the toolbar, for example.

The fact that MacOS shows the menu at the top of the display all the time used to bother me but I've long since come around. As more and more cross platform Electron apps take over the desktop, I'm even more thankful that it's there, keeping a lot of this nonsense at bay. Microsoft has been going downhill for a loooong time, the stupid Ribbon Bar drove me off of MS Office 15+ years ago. The control panel in Windows X…

The ribbon bar was when I started noticing this mess. I liked the extended tab concept but the UI was inconsistent because some things were accessible through the tabs but others you had to go through the button, in a way that has never made sense to me.

I do blame monopolies for this in part. When some single thing dominates (office suite, web browser, whatever it is) the comparator shifts. It's no longer "how do these 6 things compare", it's "is what's new here entertaining enough and not too much of an inconvenience to cause me the pain of abandoning an entrenched tool?" So then users convince themselves the improvements are progress because it's always implicitly compared to the alternative of struggling against the lack of choice of other products.

That's not all of it by any means, but I do think it created a context for what's deemed acceptable ux-wise.

MacOS isn't all it's cracked up to be though and is maybe another historical source of this mess. I use osx daily and it's much, much, much too easy to lose track of open windows. Dialogs open and you don't even know they're there, and you find windows open that you thought were closed weeks ago.

This doesn't happen with a lot of other OSs, or at least used to not happen.

My favorite UX has always been through KDE, although I haven't had the opportunity to as much as I used to because of work reasons.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#675

Post by twistedpair »

ilamont wrote: post #129
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.

I think a lot of companies have too many designers with not much to do. Google has a team of people responsible for changing up the art or making whimsical games on the home page every day. I also read 10 years ago that Amazon hired a big name to take over design for the shopping portal and Bezos wouldn't let this person do much of anything.

Too true. As an Amazon user for 22 years now, I was amazed by the greater than decade run some of their pages had with the UX appearing nearly unchanged (e.g. login flow).

Re: The Decline of Usability

#676

Post by julienreszka »

Nextgrid wrote: post #660
julienreszka wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody doesn't agree with you. I believe going Mobile First was the best decision they made in decades.

Why? Windows is a desktop OS primarily used to get work done. “Mobile first” doesn’t make sense here and just gets in the way (it personally made me give up on the platform and switch to Mac instead).

Having a ui that adapts to screen width is important to me because I do a lot of things at once, the window manager on Mac is the worst for this

Re: The Decline of Usability

#677

Post by majewsky »

toohotatopic wrote: post #409
majewsky wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently on Firefox 75 on Linux. Clicking in the address bar when not focused consistently selects the entire URL.

Right. I forgot to mention that the problem comes with X11 and the clipboard. The first selection doesn't and shouldn't copy to the clipboard because entering a new address would focus the bar and replace the existing clipboard. It wouldn't be possible to copy any selection into the address bar. So to use an url from the address bar requires selecting and re-selecting the entire address. That second selecting has bec…

You want right-click > "Paste & go".

Re: The Decline of Usability

#678

Post by mcswell »

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.

Anecdote: a little while after the start of this covid thing, I broke the band on my wristwatch. My first impulse was to run to the store, or order a new one from Amazon. Then I realized: I'm working from home, there are clocks all around me, and I don't need to be anywhere at any particular time (and my computer warns me about upcoming Zoom meetings).

So now my wristwatch is sitting on the desk.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#679

Post by mcswell »

flir wrote: post #322
_y5hn wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Krita matured nicely over the years and last time I found it quite easy to use. UI is hard. It got replaced by "UX", but nobody agrees what that really is. So it boils down to whatever impracticality designers dream up. When UI was easy, there were real research, data backing up claims of improvements and laid down rules to enforce some consistency. This became "unfashionable" and was removed.

Hamburger menus are symptomatic of this for me. I spent /way/ too long not understanding this completely new element everybody was suddenly jamming in everywhere.

Agreed, 1000%. I have the traditional Firebox menu bar turned on, but I can't get rid of the lousy hamburger menu. Plus I have ten icons up there, most of which I don't have any idea what they do. I should probably get rid of them. (When was the last time you used the "Home" icon in a web browser? What is "home", anyway?)

(I just now cleaned it up, although there are some icons you can't get rid of.)

Re: The Decline of Usability

#680

Post by mcswell »

kebman wrote: post #490
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,…

Long time Adobe user. I tried Gimp. Shut it down, and merrily went back to my Adobe subscription plan.

I haven't used Gimp in perhaps a decade, but I can't imagine a worse UI than Adobe. At home, I have a free PDF reader, but at work (...when I was going to work...), I had to use Adobe's PDF editor. (Not that I edit the PDFs, I mostly just read them; occasionally a highlighter would be nice.) Ugly huge icons that I don't need and which take up lots of space. And next to nothing in the menu, except ways to turn on icon bars at the top and/or side, hopelessly emsmallening the page I actually want to read.
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