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Comment by asark | Hacker News Reader

I tried Facebook in, IDK, 2009 or so, for a month or two.

I have productively used, for significant amounts of time: every desktop Windows since 3.1, maybe a half-dozen Linux window managers under almost as many distros, BeOS, Solaris CDE, and more, a half-dozen GUI word processing programs, at least as many instant message programs, forums of all sorts, maybe a dozen image and WYSYWG HTML editors combined, and so on off to the horizon. I've figured out how to use obtuse UIs for games like Shadow President and Crusader Kings II.

Facebook's UI was too confusing so I stopped using it. I couldn't figure it out at all. Recently I've been exposed to "Facebook Work" or whatever, and it's just as bad. What's this? Where does this post go? To whom? Why are these in this order? Is this thing the same as that other thing with the same name, and if so why's it on the page twice and grouped with different things? WTF.

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Facebook used to be polished, believe it or not. The newsfeed was once just that, a feed for new items posted by your friends on their walls, ordered chronologically so you can get through it quickly and efficiently. People used to never share links they found on the web, why would you be that spammy asshole after all? That was the thinking then, at least. Then third party pages appeared and began posting into your newsfeed, then it became possible to share these posts with your other friends, then the feed quickly lost any utility it might have had as it became flooded with third party content and advertisement grouped in no particular order at all.

The next thing to go was notifications. I don't care if my uncle liked my aunts posts, yet I get the notification! They even had the nerve to have a notification setting to turn this off that did absolutely nothing at all. Completely broken, but probably a feature and not a bug.

Once you have audience _capture_, worse UX becomes a valuable dark pattern because it requires _investment_.

Have you ever seen a modern slot machine? There seems to be a pattern to winning, if only you study it a bit longer...just put in one more coin and the epiphany will come.

I may suggest that you are an outlier; many hundreds of millions have successfully figured out everyday use of Facebook’s UI since 2009.

Billions, in fact...

Rather, from observation, I think most people are used to not understanding what any of their software is doing and to seeing what looks like random, unpredictable, or otherwise weird behavior from it constantly, so Facebook's not unusual from their perspective.

For me the worst UI ever invented would have to be the 3D tool known as ZBrush.

It is the least intuitive thing imaginable.

I think there is a certain logic to it, but it is a complicated logic, like learning Haskell or something.

The funny thing is a lot of artists seem to like it.

Strange, when did you first use Zbrush?

I haven't touched it in over 10 years, but back then it was super easy to get started with for a novice. Much easier than Mudbox. Though I had amazing Digital Tutors videos.

Same, haven't used in 10 years.

The UI seemed to have a lot of modes. I mean quite literally they seem hard to learn.

Come to think of it, Blender has a very nonintuitive UI as well. Holy moly, yikes.

I like to look at Solidworks as an example of how to make a 3D user interface rather approachable. It has simple objects organized cleanly.

Granted Solidworks is mechanical and ZBrush is organic, but I can't fathom that organic modeling would require a more complicated UI than mechanical design...

Ultimately some tools are meant to be efficiently used, not intuitively used.

A command-line program is not typically intuitive to the average person, it's why we have GUIs, but given enough knowledge of how it works it's very efficient and powerful.

For me the power of CLI is in the scriptability.

But just because it runs in a terminal doesn't mean it's scriptable easily.

I kind of think that once you've used ncurses in a terminal to make something interactive, you've just made a bad GUI. Slow, often bad scroll behavior, and very prone to the terminal state getting corrupted. (Think of what random binary data will do to your terminal...)

But that's just my opinion

> Come to think of it, Blender has a very nonintuitive UI as well. Holy moly, yikes.

They've redone it in the latest version (2.8) and fixed some of the oddities. Probably the most obvious example being left click selects instead of placing the 3d cursor, so it now behaves like every other program.

> I tried Facebook in, IDK, 2009 or so, for a month or two.

That was 10 years ago. Things may have changed for better or worse (or both)...

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