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

Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance

hadermann.be

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 95 posts

Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance

#71

Post by icebraining »

anigbrowl wrote: post #60

On the other hand, developers have a knack of seeing everything as the user interface they’re most familiar with: their development IDE. Along with the bizarre idea that the best interface of all is one that forces the user to write code of their own. Look folks, if everyone wanted to type then text adventures would still be top of the video game charts.

Yet text chats are much more popular than videochat. Typing makes sense in some situations, and not in others. What works in videogames is not necessarily adequate for other UIs.

Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance

#72

Post by icebraining »

baddox wrote: post #14

I've never heard the term "hallway testing" before, and I'm assuming I'm inferring its meaning correctly. I'll be using it in the future.

Why assume when there's Wikipedia? :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability_testing#Hallway_test...

Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance

#73

Post by onion2k »

steveax wrote: post #42
TimFogarty wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I'm shocked by how UIs dealing with very precise things sometimes use imprecise dating like "tomorrow". On the DHL website, if I am ordering a collection for a certain time, I have to choose if I want it for "tomorrow". If it's 23:00 BST from where I am accessing the website and I'm ordering the collection from a country in EEST, am I ordering the collection for one or two days from now? This kind of sloppy UI fr…

I really hate the "humanized" dates in the github website interface. "3 days ago" is not useful to me when I'm comparing dates.

"3 days ago" is not useful to me when I'm comparing dates.

I'd say it depends what you're doing. It's easier to compare lengths of time than dates - the difference between "3 days ago" and "5 days ago" is more obvious than the difference between "01/07/2015" and "28/06/2015". That said, if you want to know what happened on a specific date (eg commits that happened on 28/06/2015) then the time passed isn't useful. Ideally you should be able to toggle between the two.

Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance

#74

Post by iSnow »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #38
vitd wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Is ISO 8601 really beyond comprehension for most of the population?" Absolutely! I have had to program date-related code, and I am familiar with the differences between US and European date formats, and I have never heard of ISO 8601 before today. The average person from the US will assume that 2015-04-03 is March 4th, 2015, while a typical person from Europe will assume it's April 3rd, 2015. You're still thinking i…

I'm not sure I can really speak to how the "average person from the US" would deal with 2015-04-03, but two data points: 1. Everyone I personally know would know that that meant 4/3. 2. 4/3 in US usage is April 3rd. As I understand it, it's March 4th in European usage, but you say they have no problem with YYYY-MM-DD. I tend to suspect that you sort of half-learned that "US dates are backwards from European dates" an…

> As I understand it, it's March 4th in European usage

British usage. For Germans, 4/3 means 1.33333. April 3rd is 3.4. here. If you do i18n, do NOT assume there is one consistent European convention. Either use ISO 8601 or a library that understands country conventions.

Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance

#75

Post by DanBC »

iSnow wrote: post #74
thaumasiotes wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I can really speak to how the "average person from the US" would deal with 2015-04-03, but two data points: 1. Everyone I personally know would know that that meant 4/3. 2. 4/3 in US usage is April 3rd. As I understand it, it's March 4th in European usage, but you say they have no problem with YYYY-MM-DD. I tend to suspect that you sort of half-learned that "US dates are backwards from European dates" an…

> As I understand it, it's March 4th in European usage British usage. For Germans, 4/3 means 1.33333. April 3rd is 3.4. here. If you do i18n, do NOT assume there is one consistent European convention. Either use ISO 8601 or a library that understands country conventions.

I wouldn't assume anything if I saw 4/3.

4/3/yyyy would be day month year.

People probably say "Tuesday the 3rd of April, 2015" instead of "Tuesday April the Third, 2015".

(Brit here.)

Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance

#77

Post by lentil_soup »

userbinator wrote: post #9

I agree with some of the points (like ambiguous icons and vague error messages), but not all of them. ‘If you are an X, then you have to fill in Y and Z. If you are not an X, please only fill in Z, unless Z=1, then you should fill Y too.’ This could be simplified considerably: "Fill in Z. If you are X or Z=1, fill in Y." Although I'm not surprised that refactoring boolean expressions is something that a lot of people…

This could be simplified considerably: "Fill in Z. If you are X or Z=1, fill in Y."

You could easily have the computer present to the user the option to fill Y only when the conditions are met (or something similar). Why leave it up to the user to decide with a confusing message box?

Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance

#79

Post by paulojreis »

Well, this is nothing new. It's called heuristic evaluation and it's been around at least since 1990 [1]. Almost every item in the article's list maps to a simple and well known heuristic.

It's very strange (or sad) that the author doesn't mention heuristics in his post and talks about his conclusion as something "new": "it dawned on me that a trained eye can often spot unfriendly software a mile away." It may have "dawned on you", but it's nothing new.

It never ceases to amaze me, how oblivious of basic usability the people in IT are.

[1] Nielsen, J., and Molich, R. (1990). Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces, Proc. ACM CHI'90 Conf. (Seattle, WA, 1-5 April), 249-256.

Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance

#80

Post by paulojreis »

vixsomnis wrote: post #12

As someone who hasn't worked in the software industry yet, stories like these are beginning to horrify me. Is the bar really this low?

It is. One of the most basic usability references talks about this [1] and:

1) Nobody cares - nobody respects it; 2) People make posts saying " it dawned on me that a trained eye can often spot unfriendly software a mile away" as if this is something new!

[1] Nielsen, J., and Molich, R. (1990). Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces, Proc. ACM CHI'90 Conf. (Seattle, WA, 1-5 April), 249-256.

Post reply on HN