Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance
hadermann.be
Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance
1–10 of 95 posts
Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance
#2These are always useful reminders. It's easy to get so lost in designing a system that you forget the perspective of the user, which is what really matters.
One of my current favorites is Rocksmith (guitar learning software), where upon exiting you are prompted with "Do you wish to continue? Yes/No". You as the user need to essentially state, "Yes, I would like to continue...exiting the program". This is right next to another menu option that I sometimes accidentally select which prompts me to "Quit", which in fact just brings up the "select profile" screen. It does boggle the mind how some things like this get all the way to production.
Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance
#3The Design of everyday things [1] (Found on Coding Horror's recommended reading [2]) was crucial in understanding how people intuitively interact with the world around them - including your web application - based on the visual cue's you provide.
While this article provides some metaphorical fish - I found the Design of everyday things helps you become a fisherman.
EDIT: Swapped the order of references.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expande...
[2] http://blog.codinghorror.com/recommended-reading-for-develop...
Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance
#4>Use of image-only icons/buttons that have no distinctive meaning
There's nothing worse than this, along with no alt-text on web pages. With font-icons being so common nowadays, designers want to remove all text and revert back to hieroglyphics.
Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance
#5This feels like one of those articles that the people who need to read it never will; developers who don't care to improve their craft, and are churning out software to check off some box in a list of features demanded by management.
Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance
#6The Design of everyday things [1] (Found on Coding Horror's recommended reading [2]) was crucial in understanding how people intuitively interact with the world around them - including your web application - based on the visual cue's you provide. While this article provides some metaphorical fish - I found the Design of everyday things helps you become a fisherman. EDIT: Swapped the order of references. [1] http://ww…
Your reference [1] confused me because most of the books I saw were about code and design patterns, or books by Tufte. I also didn't realize what DoET meant, on first glance.
Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance
#7Shotgun full of buttons is your standard coder designed UI.
Many of the common alternatives are worse though, I prefer a shotgun full of buttons to many of the supposedly simpler systems unless they are very well thought out.
Good UI is very hard.
edit - to me, really good UI is simple shit like things that gather system stuff, then install while gathering user stuff. When that started coming in as standard with many linux installs, I almost wept ;)
Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance
#8Not saying this is a bad article but the 'first glance' part seems misleading. There's lots more to read than the title suggests.
Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance
#9I 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 seem to have trouble with.
In some cases it can be better to have a more human, relative notation, e.g. ‘within the last hour’, ‘yesterday’, ‘next week’…
Actually I really, really abhor this style of date formatting since e.g. seeing events all dated "yesterday" - possibly on different sites - make ordering/comparing them nearly impossible. Is ISO 8601 really beyond comprehension for most of the population?
The user interface is totally empty when starting out
Unless you mean completely empty (as in devoid of any buttons or other widgets), I don't think that's a bad thing. It's funny that it mentions adding an explicit instruction "Click ‘add contact’ to add your first contact." when the next point is "Visual clutter", since it could very well be the case that the users are confused because after removing that "Visual clutter", "add contact" doesn't even look like a button anymore! Incidentally, this trend of "flat" UI designs is another thing I loathe.
Am I the only one who thinks it's rather sad that, despite society spending great effort over the last few hundred years to improve literacy (which was quite successful), we're now dumbing-down software to encourage basically the opposite?
Re: Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance
#10EDIT: disabled zoom?
It's weird to me that Google fails, hard, on so many ui things.
Here's one example from the Gmail app on iOS, from the feedback screen.
The [done] button is where the [return] button usually is; and it's directly over the [send] button. So if you don't notice that return is now done, and tap it twice to get a new paragraph, you just sent your unfinished feedback.
I blame Google, but it could be Apple being stupid with the dreadful iOS keyboard.
> possible to get a pretty good impression of whether the user interface was thought about or rather just an afterthought.
I'm sure Google spends a lot of time and money on the UI. Which just makes it more frustrating to me. EG Chrome's (on iOS) address bar does not let you select and copy an address until the page has nearly finished loading. And to paste an url into the bar you don't tap the cursor but some mid-point of the address box - except it's flat UI so you just guess where to tap. Items in the burger menu take five seconds to become clickable.