Interface abusers

It's not just mobile apps, it's everything. I write demo software and libraries to control sensors that are used in everything from university lab benchtop research to heavy automation. You can never trust that the user reads a word of the manual (well the heavy automation guys probably do, because there's real danger involved), so I do my best to make it so in the demo software, there's one button you need to press to start communicating with the sensor, and very clear options from there to change the sample rate, save data to a file, etc.

In the APIs we provide for them to do their own programming, ideally they only have to declare a new instance of a single object, with the necessary configuration data passed in as explicit arguments to the constructors, and all the communication methods are immediately accessible from that class' API. There's not a lot of extra new classes to hold configuration data, etc., because then the user doesn't know which fields are necessary to set in those objects. Sometimes that means you get more parameters than you might like in a constructor, but it makes it a lot easier for the user because they know exactly what you require from them.

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal?

I think everyone who reads it had that experience at some point. Going back through the archive for the bonuses you missed is half the fun!

First we couldn't have 3d widgets, then we got them and designers took it away during the flat ui craze. These designers surely don't use what they design. What's worse is that everybody (KDE and GNOME) went with it drinking the kool-aid. Add on top of that that GNOME doesn't want you to use your own theme and do everything to unsupport or stifle custom themes. GNOME is following Apple's lead of "we know best". It's a sad day to be a GUI user. Look at the wasted vertical space in GNOME3 and tell me how that makes sense with widescreen displays that shrank in vertical size. Designers do not understand that 3d widgets serve a purpose. I wait for the day that designers make everyday tools all totally flat but at least there we have people without sight who will object. I remember when people complained Linux desktops were didn't have UI designers. If this is what it means to have designers, then I'd rather have my OS/2 GUI theme please. Designers gave us square toilet seats and rectangle table ware but our sitting organs and spoons do not match.

Many of iOS' "flat" design choices have taken me an embarrassingly long time to figure out. Timestamps in iMessage are definitely one of them.

But once you know how to do it (it's swiping from right to left in a chat screen, by the way) it's a genius use of touch movement, right?

I'm torn about this - it's annoying that it's hard to discover, but I also hate when an app gets all up in my face about how to use its features - I usually open an app (especially a utility app like iMessage) with a specific intent and having the app interrupt that intent to tell me about itself is annoying.

I also have the perspective of being an engineer who builds interfaces. I think these are just hard problems and these kinds of pain points are inevitable as we continue exploring interfaces. I mean, the door is an interface that has been around since at least Egyptian times, and people still screw up affordance with it (how many times have you pulled a handle on a push door?)

I came from android (and am going back tomorrow) and I can't count the number of things that I couldn't figure out on my iPhone or its apps. I won't get into the apps, as thats an app developer thing mostly, but man, it took me googling after 2 months of frustration to find out to ignore a phone call (make it stop ringing so I can continue listening to spotify in my car) I had to hit the power button. On my Android I just swiped "ignore" or whatever it says.

When did you figure it out? The feature was only introduced in iOS7 two years ago almost do the day.

Or the time you sit in front of a dialog thinking it's installing the software only to realize there's a flat button you didn't think you have to press first when a flat button always just means "disabled". We're using designers that want to create art pieces when we need designers who should create usable interfaces. I don't want to hang the GUI on the wall to look at, I need to interact with it with as little guesswork as possible.

When a thermostat is on, it controls the temperature. If you don't want to control the temperature, would you not want to turn the thermostat off?

I turn off my HVAC frequently in the transition months between winter and summer. I would not buy a thermostat that did not allow me to do that, and this "feature" is yet another knock against Nest that will keep me from buying one.

For reference, the very common Honeywell thermostats that seem to be in every US house built in the last 20 minutes just have an unmarked button that cycles between Auto, Off, Heat, and Cool. (Auto means Heat/Cool.)

It does have the advantage that there are only four buttons on the whole unit, so trial and error works pretty well.

Yeah, that was my first thought.

I'm thinking there are two things at play.

I'm from Scotland where nobody has AC, so when you are cold, you turn on the 'heating'.

And generally we have a separate control panel and thermostat so they don't get merged in my head and I would never say 'switch off the thermostat' when I meant 'switch off the heating/AC'.

https://xkcd.com/1576/

"An apple UI/UX guy"

Cthulhu_ was likely understating on purpose, but this "Apple UI/UX guy" is Don Norman.

HN shows underscores on hover, which at least lets you check if something is a link by mousing over it. But it falls apart on touch devices where hover doesn't exist.

This was my take...the interface for turning it off is difficult to find because it was designed to be thus. The last thing most thermostat users want to do is to turn it off completely. Instead, they want to "turn it off" or "on" relative to local environmental conditions...and that's the dead-easy interface mentioned in the link: turning the big dial ring and having it respond both numerically and by color: I am going to get hotter or I am going to get colder. The click side of the interface is deliberately more obscure and meant for the administrator (for lack of a better term) and not the random temperature adjuster.

TFA seems to be complaining that it's too difficult to find a feature that most thermostats elide completely. Every other model I've owned in the past could only be turned off by unplugging, which requires un-mounting the entire thing or powering down the furnace (or similar).

Yes, you can hold the outside as if you're about to turn it, and push it in.

I don't get this criticism either. Maybe that's because it works just like an iDrive controller. Plus, it's not really pushing on the screen, it's moving the entire device.

Yeah, even on the Apple watch it's pretty inconsistent. Things that should have a force touch option don't, and things that do, don't tell you.

Apple's slipping way behind on this.