Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

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Minimalism, too much white space

Those two tend to be related. It really angers me every time I see a huge amount of whitespace for no good reason, but then most of the functionality is hidden behind a dropdown menu whose equally stupid '...' indicator only shows up when you happen to hover over it. WTF.

Back when UIs were still good, things would usually be hidden only if there wasn't enough space. You could see almost everything you needed at a glance. The "designers" dismiss that as "messy" and "clutter", which is frankly absurd --- something functional is not going to look "clean", much like a machine shop that's in active use: Tools and parts are laid out everywhere, because the user needs access to them.

That diskprices.com site is great. Craigslist is another one that comes to mind. The only thing it's missing is a "submit" button for those who have JS disabled... otherwise it's a perfect example of extremely functional design that wasn't ruined by "UI/UX designers".

"indicator only shows up when you happen to hover over it. WTF."

My wife and I had this conversation the other day. There are things in iOS you only get or see if you long press. How the hell are you to discover these things?

> How the hell are you to discover these things?

Sometimes by accident, sometimes from hearing about it from others, sometimes from searching on Google for how to do something.

I keep hearing about these secret iOS features. Is there a manual or something I should have read?

But "modern" software is perfectly usable without documentation! /s

I miss the days when software actually came with very detailed documentation for the user. They had their hidden features too, but at least there was documentation for them.

Both ios and android have 'tips' app that fulfills this role and are hard to miss since they spam notifications at you.

It's a subtle psychological manipulation of the mind of the users of computers - stick to the simple use case, and don't do complicated things, don't try to be an advanced user, don't think for yourself and just consume what we tell you to.

I hate it.

> I hate it.

There's nothing you can do. Computing stopped being about expert users the minute the rest of the world got online. Now the giants control all the devices, platforms, and mindshare. They will never cater to you. Informed users aren't the ones clicking the ads or buying the things as intended.

We've crossed into the gravity well of user hostility, and there's no longer any escape.

I hate it too.

The annoying part is that they still need help with a lot of stuff but now all I can say is "no, I just don't know." I used to be able to figure out just about anything they wanted help with, be it how to program the video or set up windows just the way they wanted or in worst case write a program that solved whatever for them. Now I just feel stupid. What happened?

This sounds like a great inspiration for a modern parody of "They Live" (1988)

Some times not even long pressing is enough. Try to find the timestamps of your texts in Messages on iOS.

I spent several minutes bashing around, double tapping, longpress, force press, went into settings to look for toggles. Had to google it eventually. Turns out you do this by swiping left. And i had actually tried to swipe sideways before, but only right.

Once you know it it's actually very convenient, but discovering it is near impossible.

>How the hell are you to discover these things?

The same way power users discover e.g. keyboard shortcuts, I imagine.

The same way power users discover e.g. keyboard shortcuts, I imagine.

At least keyboard shortcuts are visible directly in the menus, for both Windows and Mac.

Long pressing is the equivalent of a right-click or shift-click, it's a well-established pattern. MacOS tried to avoid right-clicks for the longest time, but often there's just not enough space to have every feature discoverable by visuals alone.

Of course, hiding everything behind that is not good, but when I look at apps like FairMail that try to show you what you can do directly, it just gets very confusing and the space left for the actual content becomes miniscule.

Hamburgers and Hieroglyphs are where UX goes to die.

This is all personal preference, but personally I strongly disagree with you. I find that diskprices site to be poorly organized, difficult to use, and the majority of the site is the full (non-normalized) text descriptions of the individual items, which is not only a giant mess of text, but also unnecessarily replicates data. The data columns are misaligned, too much repetition of certain words that could be abbreviated ("External/ Internal"), etc.

I think it's good design to hide certain functions behind "..." - For example, I can't tell you the number of times I've accidentally flagged a post on HN just because my finger accidentally touched my phone or because I was trying to click the comments link a few pixels away (which is the feature that people want to access on 95% of clicks that occur in that region). If I had to hit "..." first, it would never happen because I would have just accidentally opened a menu. (And if you flag something, you may never be able to unflag it because it loses ranking and appears at another position somewhere on the site or disappears entirely).

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