Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Decline of Usability

datagubbe.se

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

681–690 of 719 posts

Re: The Decline of Usability

#681

Post by mcswell »

oftenwrong wrote: post #32

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…

Thunderbird (an email desktop client) has a similar issue: some keystroke (I don't know what, but I've accidentally hit it a few times) collapses the folder view on the left. The only way I've found to restore it, is to mouse-drag the dividing line back right. But it's not clear there is a dividing line, you have to guess that it's there, and be excruciatingly careful about positioning the mouse cursor.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#682

Post by mcswell »

ativzzz wrote: post #614
austincheney wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problems with reliance on a giant framework are many. Yes, a noticeable decay of performance is one of those. The biggest problem I see though is lost imagination. Usability concerns seem all but completely and generally forgotten unless a given framework deliberately provides a dedicated convention for a specific usability concern. Worse still is that many developers reliant upon a giant framework absolutely can…

Bad UI design has nothing to do with your coding framework of choice, it has everything to do with the design. Most programmers are not good designers. I cringed a bit at the background color of the OP's blog. There's a reason that most people are unimaginative, because just like coding, design is hard. Design for multiple platforms (the whole point of using UI frameworks is easier multiplatform development) and mult…

"Most programmers are not good designers." Unfortunately, most designers are not good designers, at least these days. I say that because from what I've heard, the UI abominations that are being rightly bemoaned on this thread are not things that the programmers decided to do--at least not at companies of any size--rather they're things the company's designers told the programmers to do.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#683

Post by mcswell »

ooobit2 wrote: post #523
bob1029 wrote: post #492

For me the worst isn't even that the UI composition/presentation is bad. It's that the performance of these interfaces is getting monotonically worse over time. No one wants to take the time to learn the hard native UI development processes, so we just wind up throwing some shitty angular SPA application into electronjs and calling it a day. Those of us with non-sloth-like reflexes now have to experience torture as e…

No one wants to learn how to develop a proper UI either. For all the heatmap and eye-tracking and logging tools available, no one seems to be doing anything useful with the data they get. Do you know it takes 3 or more states for Google Maps to load and start navigation from within it's own app ? Try it. Count how many times you have to interact with the screen just to use the actual main feature of the app. Here's a…

I'm not disagreeing, but I have noticed that in the current version of Outlook, when I tell it I want to attach a file, it suggests the last few files I've edited in some program (I'm guessing it has to be an Office program), which are often exactly what I want--e.g. I'm sending some report I just finished in Word.

That said, the File Open process in Word has gotten considerably more cumbersome, with more decisions that have to be made before you can see a list of files to open.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#684

Post by mcswell »

dijit wrote: post #2

I'm typically a person who would agree with an article like this; I think we _lost_ something with the modern age, even if we gained a lot. (especially in terms of developer "velocity" (I hate that word)). However, I really feel like context is important. Computers today have a context given to them over time, users don't need so much hand-holding these days because the expected paradigms are ever so subtly changed.…

Linguist here. I think you over-estimate the linguistic change in the last century. Sure, there's new vocabulary for new things: spacecraft, hybrid (car), email, covid-19. But syntax and morphology have hardly changed at all, and you can still read Mark Twain (more than a century old) just fine, even the dialectal parts. And while we can't run the experiment backwards to see if our language would be muddy to them, I doubt it (again, apart from new words for new concepts).

Whereas the changes this thread is talking about have been major UI changes in the space of 10 or 20 years: loss of standard menus (I'm looking at you, Microsoft Office), hidden functionality, etc.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#685

Post by mcswell »

pragmatic wrote: post #290

The designers took over. They finally gained power and with it, unfortunately, users lost out. In my unified theory of organizations, the organization is eventually taken over by the employees/"servants" and instead of serving the constituents it becomes about serving themselves. Think Congress, teacher's unions, USPS, IT depts. In programming it's resume driven development, playing with new toys constantly instead o…

Yeap. Look at the users' reaction to changes to Google News (must be ten years ago now), or to Google Maps. The GooN fiasco resulted in tens of thousands of complaints on their feedback page, and only one single "that was a good change" post that I ever saw--and that change was sarcasm (and tagged as such).

Did Google learn the lesson, and go back to the earlier UI? Of course not, because the Designers saw that the change was good. (Just in case anyone misses it, that last clause is sarcasm.)

Re: The Decline of Usability

#686

Post by mcswell »

b0rsuk wrote: post #141

The whole "desktop metaphor", as usually implemented, is trash. I'm a happy user of i3 window manager (a tiling window manager). It's not the first and probably not the last, but it's the first time I can quickly and efficently arrange application windows on my screen. I think this will become the default eventually, tiling WM are the way. The way it uses the screen is beyond anything. They will just make it more int…

You mean like Windows 2?

Re: The Decline of Usability

#687

Post by mcswell »

intrepidhero wrote: post #41

Relevant quote from my reading yesterday: "Time itself is on the side of increasing the perceived need for usability since the software market seems to be shifting away from the features war of earlier years. User interface design and customer service will probably generate more added value for computer companies than hardware manufacturing, and user interfaces are a major way to differentiate products in a market do…

"UIs today are much more beautiful than in 1995." Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I just looked at some Win95 screen shots, and apart from the large pixels (making the icons back then rather grainy), and the fact that displays were far smaller back then (giving a crammed look), I think I prefer the _look_ (if not the functionality) of Win95. A lot of stuff today looks washed out, as if the ink on the printer was getting low.

And as for valuing the beauty, my computer is for work, it's not an art museum. You're right that if visual effects can be provided without sacrificing performance, they're ok--but, I would add, only if they enhance something else (like usability). Visual effects for the sake of visual effects are like tail fins on cars.

Re: The Decline of Usability

#688

Post by mcswell »

tiborsaas wrote: post #507
ChicagoDave wrote: post #494

I read this and I can’t tell if the OP is joking or what. Information Architecture and User Experience Design have dramatically improved application development in the last ten years. This isn’t to say crappy apps aren’t built. They are. But when time and talent are leveraged properly, good things happen.

I'm also tired of articles that are like: "Here's some bad examples, therefore everything is bad". It's missing the constructive part and probably finds the wrong audience.

I'm sure people would be happy to provide more bad examples--indeed, they have done just that (and I contributed my own gripes about Adobe Acrobat).

I can think of bad UI choices in nearly every application I use. I think one over-arching issue being raised here is the lack of consistency among applications, even on a single platform.

But if you don't think everything is bad, perhaps you could provide examples of software with good UIs?

Re: The Decline of Usability

#689

Post by mcswell »

poink wrote: post #216

> Putting things in the title bar saves screen real estate! This is true to some extent, but screen real estate in general isn't much of a problem anymore. Doubt. I may have 3x27" monitors on my desk now, but I work on a 15" laptop way more than I ever have, too. Screen real estate is at a bigger premium for me now than it has been since like 1997. (You can't just scale up resolution past a certain point. I'm also ge…

"I'm also getting old" It could be worse; you could stop getting old.

(I turn 70 in a couple months.)

Re: The Decline of Usability

#690

Post by iggldiggl »

Kaibeezy wrote: post #74

I finally switched from Win7 to 10 about a month ago. Couldn’t put it off any longer once lockdown started. I’m tech management, so it’s office, mail, browser and graphics mainly. Illustrator 4 runs fine on an X220. Win10. I just absolutely hate it. Every day I have to relearn something obvious. I can’t find the corners of windows to grab them, and when I do, it’s one damn pixel wide and I get jitters. Why is Candy C…

> I can’t find the corners of windows to grab them, and when I do, it’s one damn pixel wide and I get jitters.

The window borders technically still have more or less their old width, it's just that they're mostly being drawn as invisible (but you still should be able to grab them just as if they were actually visible).

Post reply on HN