It’s very funny to me that people think “the past” was a UX wonderland.
Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
91–100 of 210 posts
Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
#92The original Mac would pop up a dialog with a threatening icon of a bomb with a lit fuse, whenever it crashed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon) >The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) had a crash which the system decided was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box in Windows 9x th…
Not sure if you’re being serious or not, but these stories seem awfully apocryphal to me.
I can’t imagine anybody - not even a total novice - running away from their computer upon seeing a cartoony image of a bomb. It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time.
Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
#93The share sheet on Android is super confusing. It doesn't help that several apps implement their own, and some of them scroll horizontally while others scroll vertically. Edit: apparently they're forcing apps to use the native share sheet in Android 12? https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/06/01/android-12-will-spe...
For reference, this issue was brought up to the chromium maintainers but it was closed as wontfix without giving a real reason.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=112301...
> We are not going to migrate to the system share sheet any time in the near future, so this bug itself is WontFix / WAI. We are also not likely to have an option to disable the chrome share sheet.
And yes, due to API changes you'll no longer be able to replace the system share sheet in Android 12, because it basically amounted to a loophole that shouldn't have existed.
> We had never actually intended to allow apps to replace the share dialog, that Intent is for apps to launch the share dialog.
Now I will have no choice but to eat the 2 seconds of loading every time I want to share something as it loads a set of irrelevant share targets that I will never use anyway.
I really wish that feature was configurable but you can't turn it off.
Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Horizontal lines (or sometimes an array of dots) are sometimes used as a "grip" icon to represent reorderable list rows.
I know, I've used them in my own designs. It just sounded like he saw a hamburger menu now for the first time 5 weeks ago! Or maybe it is some kind of joke?
As a designer himself, he probably tries to approach design examinations from many different perspectives (we do this at work with new designs: if I was an 70 year old woman, what would I see here?) to find edge cases where the design doesn't work.
Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
#95Windows 11's rollout made me want to barf. Lots of marketroidy "Simple, clean, beautiful!" and "We put the Start menu at the center because we put YOU at the center!" Yeah, those are nice inspirational sound bites, now how are you going to make Windows less of a pain in the ass to work with, day by day? Windows 9x put the Start menu down in the corner to effectively give it infinite width and height per Fitts's law. It also gave us buttons that look like buttons. The beveled edges did more than make things look pretty, they signalled availability for user interaction and roughly delineated the boundaries where such interaction could take place. It was a massive UX improvement over Windows 3.x. Is Windows 11 less fraught with friction than Windows 10 in real terms? All the indications say "no, but it is prettier!" No affordances, no signals to the user, just plain white panels that don't look like anything and now the Start button -- the Schelling point for telling Windows what to do -- is harder to hit with the mouse. Oh, and how do you put to use Windows 11's new tiling and virtual desktop features? Hover over maximize! So easy to figure out!
Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
#96The original Mac would pop up a dialog with a threatening icon of a bomb with a lit fuse, whenever it crashed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon) >The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) had a crash which the system decided was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box in Windows 9x th…
Not sure if you’re being serious or not, but these stories seem awfully apocryphal to me. I can’t imagine anybody - not even a total novice - running away from their computer upon seeing a cartoony image of a bomb. It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time.
As a child I remember shielding my face and being scared when I tried booting a computer and seeing the Windows 95 boot logo (with the red/blue/green/yellow squares) on screen as it reminded me of CDs and I heard that lasers were harmful. I was probably 4 at the time though.
Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
#97Honestly I don't think minimalism is the issue. And I love skeuomorphism, even the overdone Apple version. Minimalism is ugly but when done right, it's actually one of the clearest UXs possible: only focusing on the content and guides, no weird extras, and every design decision is meaningful because you only get a few. Issues with today's UX are: more dark patterns, more people making apps easier (= more less experie…
As a UX designer: too few companies understand the importance of UX and the difference between UX and UI. It is still too difficult to convince the stakeholders of the importance of user research, adherence to usability and accessibility guidelines, and user testing. Those activities have a cost, both in terms of money and time. But they can save a project, strongly reducing the risks of failure.
Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
#98The original Mac would pop up a dialog with a threatening icon of a bomb with a lit fuse, whenever it crashed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon) >The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) had a crash which the system decided was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box in Windows 9x th…
Not sure if you’re being serious or not, but these stories seem awfully apocryphal to me. I can’t imagine anybody - not even a total novice - running away from their computer upon seeing a cartoony image of a bomb. It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time.
> It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time.
The cultural recontextualization of stories like this in my lifetime has been one of the most fascinating aspects of our modern world for me.
Of course, as I get older, I've seen my own stories and stories about events I participated in get told, re-told, and twisted and exaggerated without absolutely any malice. We also all see how people misrepresent news stories, social policies, and scientific studies (with various degrees of malice). So I think I know almost exactly how the Film of Train anecdote happened.
1. Theater owner starts showing Train film. Stands outside and yells "Come inside and see the wonderous train show. This new 'cinema' is so real that audiences have been reportedly running for the exits in terror!"
2. It's an obvious exaggeration and a joke. Passerbys laugh, but are intrigued nonetheless.
3. Someone writes a newspaper story about the cinema and the train film. Includes the quote as directly attributed to the theater owner. Everyone reading is aware of the context and the situation and the implicit tone, and chuckles appropriately.
4. Story gets picked up in another newspaper but without the context and removes the quote and instead represents it as a factual retelling of what happened.
5. Years later, someone writing a book uses the newspaper as a primary source, and then a cascade of books repeat and propagate the "fact".
Perfectly reasonable sequence of events. But here's where things get even more interesting to me.
There are *dozens* of similar stories that we've all heard and took as gospel growing up that required one person to stop, ask "Wait, does this really hold up to scrutiny?" and the whole house of cards comes crashing down. I'm talking about the "NASA spent $10M to design a space pen, the russians used a pencil", "Water flushes in the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere", and the like.
But why did it only happen just now? What prevented people from being more introspective and curious about these subjects 10, 20, 30 years ago? I guess the answer is we needed the Internet to hit a certain critical mass for enough people with sense to be able to reach the rest of us, but I don't know.
Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
#99The original Mac would pop up a dialog with a threatening icon of a bomb with a lit fuse, whenever it crashed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon) >The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) had a crash which the system decided was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box in Windows 9x th…
Not sure if you’re being serious or not, but these stories seem awfully apocryphal to me. I can’t imagine anybody - not even a total novice - running away from their computer upon seeing a cartoony image of a bomb. It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time.
I remember seeing this dialog as a kid (probably ~5 years old) and being scared the computer would blow up. Actually, for years, I assumed I must have dreamt it.
Re: Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
#100The original Mac would pop up a dialog with a threatening icon of a bomb with a lit fuse, whenever it crashed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon) >The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) had a crash which the system decided was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box in Windows 9x th…
Not sure if you’re being serious or not, but these stories seem awfully apocryphal to me. I can’t imagine anybody - not even a total novice - running away from their computer upon seeing a cartoony image of a bomb. It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time.
It seems kinda hyperbolic, but then again the death chime on Power Macs scared the hell out of me as a kid.