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The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

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Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#71

Post by lmm »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #20
peter303 wrote: post #2

Mobile offered a bit hope. First, the screens were to small to clutter with complicated GUIs. Second, you could substitute some visual controls with touch.

I recently tried to get my mobile provider to set up data roaming while I was away from home. (You can't set up data roaming from home, for reasons that remain mysterious and unexplained.) The fact I was using a mobile device didn't stop my provider's site from asking three times if I wanted to take part in a survey, or from displaying a floating "Would you like to chat?" dialog that was so big it literally covered a…

Try using an iphone (or spoofing your user agent as one). Often they don't test or care about any other phones, but iphone users get the VIP treatment.

Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#72

Post by SixSigma »

coldtea wrote: post #58
SixSigma wrote: post #51

The fact that those are the faults you think are the worst shows how entrenched bad UX is. E.g. drop down menus are a fail. If you read Raskin's "The Humane Interface" you can see a whole host more. Raskin, Jef 2000.The Humane Interface, Addison-Wesley ISBN 0-201-37937-6

> If you read Raskin's "The Humane Interface" you can see a whole host more Well, Raskin also has some bizarro ideas about what a good UI should be, and his later attempts of realizing one is not anything most people would want to use.

I use Acme text editor which uses some of Raskin's ideas It is the best I have ever used

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acme_%28text_editor%29

Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#73

Post by schrodinger »

rpgmaker wrote: post #35
prawn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I avoid updating apps that are working satisfactorily because many later add ads or other annoying functions.

Or remove functions, or change the UI needlessly and for the worse. I honestly don't know how people can update their apps without having a backup to go back to. I probably would not do it if I didn't have one of my backups around. The different app stores should offer the user a way of going back to a previous version (if you already had it installed) but it seems that none of them do so...

As an app developer, I understand the frustration but you've got to see the other side too. There's a huge cost to maintaining legacy server side API end points. I think the sibling commenter makes a great point about the difference between standalone apps and apps that are a client to a web service. It's also very frustrating when I see a crash keep happening in my error logs that I know is fixed in a later update :(

Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#74

Post by J_Darnley »

DonHopkins wrote: post #30

The review of the QuickTime 4.0 player [1] at the User Interface Hall of Shame [2] should be required reading for user interface designers. Apple can't even follow their own guidelines, and keeps making the same mistakes (and worse), even today. [1] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm [2] http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.php?mode=original

Thanks. A real trip into history. (I was about to say "memory lane" but I think most of these predate the point where I stared using computers a lot.)

Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#75

Post by paulojreis »

foofoo55 wrote: post #32
icebraining wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. If you read The Design of Everyday Things and then look around, you see so many faults with the UI of physical things, even some which have been around for more than a century. A good example is packaging: "The Consumer Product Safety Commission estimated that attempts to open packaging caused about 6,500 emergency room visits in the U.S. in 2004."

I highly recommend The Design of Everyday Things to everyone I know who is designing any kind of user interface, whether machinery, houses, or software. I believe that until there is some effective, easy, and universally-accepted metric of UI quality, there will be little to differentiate good designers from poor. ("Our UI meets UIQC Class 1 Standards", or in a specification, "All user screens must score level 96 or…

I don't believe user interfaces could be evaluated in such a quantitative and useful way, as you describe. You could slap some number in there, but that doesn't make it useful.

Bear in mind that the UI itself is just a part of the equation, alongside the user and the usage context. Two identical UIs (evaluated at about the same score with the hypothetical UIQC) can perform radically different in the hands of the end-user, because the users and their contexts are different.

Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#76

Post by HankB99 »

IANAUIE (guess what that stands for. ;) )

Yet I am primarily responsible for the UI on the product on which I'm writing code. I started out with a bland and crappy interface expecting the client to look at that and provide their branding and suggestions for how it should work. Most UI elements are their default colors. Style? Please, I'm an engineer! I thought at some point they would provide a detailed list of requirements to provide a decent UI. I thought wrong.

I have done what I could to provide an easy to use intuitive interface. Unfortunately what is intuitive for me is not going to be intuitive to others.

Eventually I did receive some usability suggestions. I'm not sure they were carefully thought out. One point I would have suggested aligned with a marketing video on their web site but did not match their requirement.

Until producers of products of products care about the appearance and usability of their products, these things are not likely to get better.

As for my own feelings about UI, there are a few beliefs I hold deeply.

If a UI can model some sort of physical reality, it is going to be easier to use. If not a physical reality, at the least a consistent model.

I hate UIs that change depending on state. Disappearing menu items or screen elements drive me nuts. Think of shifting sands.

Discoverability is something that concerns me. Much of the S/W I work with has options or key shortcuts that I never know about because I'm too lazy to read through the manual. I do not know the solution to this, but I do know the problem.

Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#77

Post by newscracker »

rpgmaker wrote: post #35
prawn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I avoid updating apps that are working satisfactorily because many later add ads or other annoying functions.

Or remove functions, or change the UI needlessly and for the worse. I honestly don't know how people can update their apps without having a backup to go back to. I probably would not do it if I didn't have one of my backups around. The different app stores should offer the user a way of going back to a previous version (if you already had it installed) but it seems that none of them do so...

Apple's "app thinning" feature implementation in iOS 9 makes it all the more difficult to "save a version of an app" because iTunes no longer syncs apps into the computer, like it used to before. Any app downloaded on to the device directly from the app store is a device specific thinned version. If you replace the device with a new one, you would have to just get all the latest versions of the apps from the app store. The only inconvenient solution, in my knowledge, is to always purchase and download apps and even update apps from iTunes on a computer. This would make iTunes download a "universal" (for lack of a better term) app file that would run on all compatible devices. Then sync the apps from iTunes to the devices. You lose the advantage of app thinning and use more storage (like in iOS 8 and previous versions), but you would have access to the specific version that you have used and want to keep using.

I emphasized the word "implementation" above because it was not necessary for Apple to disable iTunes from syncing apps on to a computer with the thinned apps. Technically, there are many ways to store device specific copies of an app with the same name on the computer, which for some reason Apple has not even considered. [Apple never allowed downgrading of apps without resorting to iTunes, but that's a different and larger topic]

Overall, the push to use the latest version of any app is really frustrating and will result in more backlash as people realize how much freedom they're losing.

Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#78

Post by newscracker »

derefr wrote: post #53
prawn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. I avoid updating apps that are working satisfactorily because many later add ads or other annoying functions.

Mind you, there's a large difference between standalone apps (e.g. most casual games), and client-server apps. Standalone apps—sure, don't update, who cares. But I don't begrudge the developer of a client-server app, that wants to change their server's API and then push an update to the client that speaks to the new API. Or, more to the point, I don't begrudge them if six months later they shut the old API down and t…

I have seen applications that check the version on launch, inform the user about an update being available and in some cases also prevent the app from running further if it's not updated. Technically this is just a matter of writing the application this way. Even though users may be inconvenienced and annoyed, if the application and its service have not been terrible and if you follow a proper "deprecate and then eliminate" process, most users wouldn't mind updating on a prompt that comes at launch time. More so if the "what's new", along with a "why update" is described on launch. Nothing stops a developer of a client-server application from developing this way.

Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#79

Post by newscracker »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #64
euske wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to rely on the Apple's UI guidelines. They have many hints that are applicable even for non-Apple apps. I remember Apple had a similar thing already back in 80s, which I found amazing. https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/UserEx...

I tend to rely on the Apple's UI guidelines. Please explain the OS X iTunes UI to me. It's beyond awful, and it seems to get worse with every update. If there were a death penalty for bad UI designers, and I were in charge of implementing it, I'd have the iTunes designers first against the wall. My guess is that iTunes doesn't follow Apple's guidelines?

Over time, iTunes has gotten very cryptic and undiscoverable in its features. I really wonder how users who're not well versed with computers even do anything with iTunes. Or maybe they don't even install it in the first place. :)

Re: The Same User Interface Mistakes Over and Over

#80

Post by vitd »

teyc wrote: post #18

Does anyone have enough experience with Tk and REBOL why these should be exemplar as far as UI and layout is concerned?

I was wondering the same thing. Reading the other answers, it seems like the reason the author thinks they're superior is that he can design interfaces using only code. (Not sure if that's the author's point or just the posters here.) I've had to use the apps that result from developers designing interfaces in code and I've had to read some of the code to do it, and in my experience it was all suboptimal.

With a tool like Interface Builder (which I'm not saying is good), at least it gives you guides for the standard places that elements should line up with each other. Sometimes you want the baseline of the text of various elements to align. Sometimes you want to ensure the same padding around elements. All of that typically goes out the window when interfaces are designed via code, in my experience.

Furthermore, the author seems to advocate that UIs should be disconnected from events. I can't think of a useful UI element that isn't tied to some event. I'd love to learn more about what they mean, but right now, it's not ringing true to me.

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