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Comment by loceng | Hacker News Reader

The biggest issue to me is the dumbing down of an experience and design, treating your users as incompetent vs. treating them as intelligent and being able to figure out things; there's still bad design that can occur when complex, but good UX of presenting information appropriately and contextually can create a rich but easy, intuitive flow.

The slowness of certain platforms is also an equally big issue, Reddit for example who seems to purposefully ignore and allow their website via browser experience to suffer - in an attempt to drive people to their app for ad tracking purposes - which I think is shooting themselves in the foot with the trend towards eliminating shallow-manipulative advertising from existence.

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Indeed.

I'd also mention a small experiment I often do.

If you have the opportunity of visiting a company still using COBOL, Clipper or some other text mode software, ask their users for an opinion on those old systems compared to the current ones.

Most of them prefer the acient ones. When asked why, they simply say "I don't know. It works, it feels right".

Even the younger users (who already had experience with web applications, big tech's stuff etc when they joined the company) prefer the text based ones.

I'm not at all implying that every software should be text based. But I think there are some very important lessons to be learned here. Things we developers used to know, intuitively.

I think UX designers should listen more to those users and less to theories and to Google and its MDC trying to make the internet look like their own products

For a network of sites I am developing I am planning a command prompt where users can type /command for basically every function: /msg username, /logout, /search phrase, etc.

Interesting! I had a similar idea but as a library to drop into existing sites, perhaps even be a browser extension. Vimium does a great job of enabling keyboard control over a website but I think a generic web CLI could take the experience even further.

I did something similar for a web app at work and the people on the floor really liked it. It was mich faster than trying to mouse to things, especially when half of their task is scanning barcodes anyway.

Can confirm. Started out writing code in IDEs, now I'm using Vim and CLI utilities. It's a polished, stable ecosystem that doesn't hide anything from the user and isn't incentivised to do anything other than its purpose, and that becomes very noticeable once you're familiar with it.

It doesn't come with file sync, plugin management or flashy animations. But I also don't get loading screens, don't need to look at SaaS pricing tiers and don't get overwhelmed by UI dark patterns. That's a trade-off I'll take any day.

One of the great things about command-line interfaces of old are that you could often enter your keyboard input faster than the system could respond to it, and it was OK because the system buffered them up for you and executed them as it caught up.

So if you know on this screen you need to hit F1, and that on the next screen you will have to hit X, then on the following screen, you need to type in the SKU number, you could simply issue as fast as you wanted: F1-X-4112295[ENTER], and take your mind off it while the system would just go through the whole experience successfully at its own pace.

With "better" GUI/mouse based systems, you have to click here, wait... wait... wait..., now click there, wait... wait... wait..., then click there and type in your SKU. Your attention needs to be on the screen at all times in order to wait for the UI and aim the mouse.

Next time you go to your bank web site to pay a bill, think to yourself: Wouldn't it be nice if, rather than navigating their cumbersome UX, you could just hit a known string of keystrokes that you memorized, hit enter, then walk away to get coffee while all the Javascript and page reloading chugged along and paid your bill?

So much this! I've noticed how common it is that interfaces can't keep up with me when, by all rights, they should be able to! I'm a limited, slow human, while their instructions execute billions of times per second. And yet I'm constantly running into scenarios were the next screen comes up and I try to give it an input, but it's not ready. Or when I hit the next-preset button for my car radio, and yet it has to pause to load that station before I can use the button again.

Yea. I have 48 cores on my workstation at work, dozens of gigabeans of RAM and an ultra-mega-terra-gigabit ethernet connection, and still I sit there watching spinners as websites composed primarily of text and images struggle to load.

It's like we're regressing year after year.

Right, any desktop app where you have to wait for a non-stupid operation (like a Gaussian blur on a 50mpix image) makes me want to throw my computer through the window. It's 100% unacceptable, every interaction should have its result in the very next frame, and we have all the tools for that.

Indeed. I'd never realized the power of keyboard strokes buffering

That would be nice but it is impossible because to actually commit some money I have to go through 2FA involving the bank app on my phone and enter one or two other secrets on the bank website. This is Italy and probably most of EU since the last year.

I understand this is for the safety of my money, probably also for the safety of the bank itself (if something goes wrong it's more and more my fault) but sending money to someone is becoming a PITA.

Even checking your balance from your non-mobile device is quite a pain now. It's much more likely for me to miss a fraudulent transaction now since I no longer login on a daily basis.

"So if you know on this screen you need to hit F1, and that on the next screen you will have to hit X, then on the following screen, you need to type in the SKU number, you could simply issue as fast as you wanted: F1-X-4112295[ENTER], and take your mind off it while the system would just go through the whole experience successfully at its own pace."

This gave me goosebumps.

There actually are a few plugin managers for Vim. I think i used Vundle once upon a time, but honestly don't recall.

My biggest pet peeve with vim and emacs is that (a) discovery sucks as with most all text mode tools, and (b) emacs in particular is slow and difficult to configure to get some mainstream languages working. Doom was the closest I ever got to being happy with my setup, but the tooltips and autocomplete were still objectively inferior even to vscode (for typescript and react, at least).

Lisps are a different story, but not by much. I'm actually fairly happy with using vscode to write common lisp, though I don't do much of it these days.

What? Discovery in Emacs is amazing; all the API is a keystroke away.

Do you mean something else?

*discovery for laymen

Emacs tells you to hit "Ctrl-h" when you start it. The documentation for Emacs is about as good as you can get for a software product.

(Now let's talk about Excel if you want to discuss discoverability issues.)

Sorry to come at this late but there's discoverability-by-doing and I think it's clear from general user feedback that emacs doesn't have it.

I agree it's very well documented, and I assume your impulse upon reading the previous paragraph is to tell me there's a REPL. it's simply not casually approachable. sorry. ask someone who isn't drowning in koolaid!

Note that the GP said

> It doesn't come with... plugin management

Also, for Vim, `:<tab>` gives you all available commands in the current buffer and `:h command` gives you the vim help page for that command (which is usually at least a few sentences long, and pretty thorough).

> Also, for Vim, `:<tab>` gives you all available commands in the current buffer

Don't misunderstand me, I love vim and use it almost exclusively and everyday, but tab-ing in the way you describe yields 2-3 screenfulls of commands that I have to manually (well, with my eyes anyhow) scan to find what I want and it includes gems such as: "spellrare" and "{{{{{{{{"

The latter of which I do not know how to open a help page for.

To me "discoverable" would mean that I would be able to use this interface to learn more commands, but this is only as discoverable as having to read man-pages. Sure - that is a great way to learn, but it's not discoverable.

Now, what would probably get a little closer is if `:<tab>` opened a list if commands in an fzf-style list also listing their descriptions and maybe grouping them by some other way than just alphabet sort order.

(If anyone can tell me what is up with those '{' I would greatly appreciate it)

Having used 3270 terminal for time registration many years ago. And it was 1000 times better and faster than all the web apps that followed. So I can confirm this.

I'm working freelance and built my own cli for this exact purpose. I've been wanting to redo it as a web app, but i honestly like my cli tool better. It lives in git, and Gitlab CI handles generation of pdf/excel reports and uploading to Dropbox. Inputting new data is just so damn fast compared to opening any web app!

I would love to see that app.

Hi, it's not really documented all that well, but if you don't mind diving into code, then give it a go: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@lvqconsult/spatium-cli

I don't think the issue is text based or non text based. In my opinion, the problem is TOOL versus ASSISTANT. A tool is easy to understand and does one thing, an Assistant is more hand waving, tries to guess what you "really" want, steers you away from error and lures you into something.

When I started at my current employer we were running our retail management software on DOS terminals connected to a SCO Unix box. My experience with the system was that it wasn't intuitive or easy to learn, but was pretty bulletproof for the veteran users who had been working with it for ~30 years. I learned as much of it as I needed to know, and got to the point where I could do some tasks without even thinking about which keys I was pressing.

I helped set up the replacement system and received a lot of complaints from those same users - some resistance to change, but also some legitimate failings of the new software. Tradeoffs in the network structure made it run more slowly at satellite locations, Windows 10 on all of the terminals caused network issues until we got updates and bandwidth moderation dialed in, and some employees needed additional practice using a mouse.

I see trade-offs between the old and the new here. The new software is easier to train new users (less arcane) and able to securely handle things like chip credit cards (which had previously needed a separate card terminal system) and charge accounts. At the same time, the old system was faster (for the limited features it provided) and was able to run more smoothly on older equipment (very little OS overhead, text only network transmissions).

>text only network transmissions

As opposed to what, base64 images or something?

Text-only as opposed to encrypted text and images.

As far as I've been able to make out, document images are generated on the server and sent to the terminals as PostScript files. I've noticed at satellite locations the receipt printers hesitate for a few seconds before printing the barcode at the bottom, which tells me that either 1) it's taking some time to transmit the barcode image over the internet or 2) the server is taking its sweet time cataloguing the transaction in the document archive. Either way, I've gotten complaints about it from the users.

Some of the worst offenders in this area were the preinstalled apps on Windows 8. Their official OneDrive app had I think 1-2 options to toggle and didn't even show how much of the cloud storage was used/free. It was basically a picture viewer but without properly working right click.

And in terms of performance I fear slow, ad-filled websites slowly trained users to accept bad performance in applications outside the browser as well. At least I don't know how to otherwise explain the widespread indifference toward those things, often even among developers.

Makes me think of a system/application getting attention, reach, that it doesn't deserve - hasn't earned - a negative of the advertising industry as well, one reason I love Tesla is that they don't advertise, any attention they get has been earned.

> And in terms of performance I fear slow, ad-filled websites slowly trained users to accept bad performance in applications outside the browser as well. At least I don't know how to otherwise explain the widespread indifference toward those things, often even among developers.

Yeah, I don't know either, and I think yours is a very good hypothesis.

I'm currently working on a windows project after spending four years exclusively on Linux, using mostly vim and Eclipse. Visual Studio feels now way worse than it used to. You get more conscious about the time you're wasting.

And, most interestingly, the same happens to users. It's not a matter of being text based, it's a matter of getting useful stuff done, and fast.

Users can and actually enjoy using the keyboard. Users don't want to be delighted with our stuff (speaking of the enterprise here), they just want a system that helps them to get their job done and, after that, get out of their way.

Designers and more and more developers seem to forget that animations, complex colorful screens, all this stuff has to be built, tested, processed by user's hardware which is already having a bad time supporting windows. So, instead of shipping something fast, something we are able to build and fix and test quickly, we deliver something detrimental, in many ways, to user experience.

I think this is why the spreadsheet is the killer productivity app. It's just a keyboard enabled information management tool, power users can take a spreadsheet really, really far. Entire businesses rest upon spreadsheets.

That is coming from someone who considers the need to use a spreadsheet as a marker that my job scope had gone awry. Love spreadsheets, hate managing information.

I really wish spreadsheets had a way to loop over rows and columns. Currently I have to create a huge mess of ARRAYFORMULAs whenever I need to apply some computation to all rows. I use my spreadsheets as databases and I want them to calculate new information as soon as I input new data. This use case should not be so hard...

vba?

http://www.blockpad.net might fit your use case

Yeah, using an actual programming language would probably solve all this complexity. I'm using Google Sheets though and I absolutely need everything to be fully functional in the mobile app so I'm not sure how far I can take it with the javascripting. The app doesn't even support editing pivot tables.

Imagine if Excel had 1 inch padding around any cell, a gray large font on a light gray background, no cell borders and autohiding row and column labels because "cleaner and modern UI" :-)

Wouldn't we use Lotus 1 2 3 in some emulator?

> Visual Studio feels now way worse than it used to. You get more conscious about the time you're wasting.

Visual Studio is the perfect example to me. I begged dad to upgrade the computer to 64/128MB of RAM to get VC++6 to run. It was feature complete then and maybe a bit earlier. Sure supported languages and syntax of come and gone but the core product feature set (editor + intellisense) has not changed in over 20 years, yet the current version takes an order of magnitude more memory and is slower despite having a desktop more powerful than anything I could have imagined back then.

> It's not a matter of being text based, it's a matter of getting useful stuff done, and fast.

Sometimes this is about being composable and scriptable, text based generally helps here.

> Sometimes this is about being composable and scriptable, text based generally helps here.

Absolutely. This is one of the main reasons I'm using Vim - not only because of the program itself but how I can just combine it with the multiplexer I want, in my preferred terminal emulator, interfacing with other text-based tools. Many things I do regularly would require me to write custom plugins in VS Code. In Vim I can just bind keys to an arbitrary sequence of inputs - something modern applications sorely lack.

It's limited, but that limitation severely reduced the complexity of the interface - it's all just a string and bash is, despite all its weirdness, an extremely productive string processing language.

Part of the issue is inter-team communication and part of the problem comes from that very phrase "dumbing down". I often hear people argue for "dumbing things down" when there is an overwhelming amount of information, but that phrase:

1. Treats people's intelligence as 1-dimensional, which it is not.

2. Gives no clear direction to an engineer who is passionate about UX, recognises that humans are multidimensional, and is trying to ask about what their users really need.

You might say I'm arguing semantics, but communication matters!

Without it, you can write code at high speed, but you won't learn what direction to go in order to present information appropriately and contextually to create a rich but easy, intuitive flow.

In order to get my reddit addiction in check I uninstalled the app and started using it in the browser. After 1 week I quit reddit forever. Never looking back.

Reddit is an example of a good dark pattern for me: The popup reminds me that I need to leave the side. Unfortunately, like the Nigerian Prince Paradox, an upfront obnoxiousness is often designed to filter people out early, if they risk not being gullible enough during the rest of the path.

May I ask what you think is wrong with Reddit's UI? In my opinion, it's one of the best out there and I've never had problems with it. HN is better, but mainly because it offers far less functionality.

Facebook is for me the prototypical example of a bad UI with lots of dark patterns, confusing navigation, different settings scattered all over the place, and frequent technical glitches.

Here are my annoyances as someone without an account that dips in from time to time via links or news stories.

The large "this experience is better in the app" on mobile visits

Only having one or two levels of responses visible without completely reloading the page, seemingly all the way down the reply chain

Sides of the page taking you back to the index on clicking (why?)

Having to expand a discussion thread that you clicked into (just to tell me how many replies there are, why?)

Not scrolling correctly when clicking threads, meaning I end up somewhere in the infinite 'other threads' list at the bottom of the page

The updating and flashing number of upvotes constantly drawing my attention while trying to read

As an outsider reddit is a disgusting mess, and every minute I spend reading it is mental harassment.

Have you used Reddit on a phone without using the app? It constantly berates you to use the app, even when you've clearly stated your preference for using the site before.

There's also the problem that the new UI is clearly more buggy than the old one, and requires manually refreshing to fix glitches far too often, but that's more of a technical problem and not a UX issue.

When I click on a post it only shows 4 comments by default, and I have to click again to see more.

To be honest, they actually seem to have improved new reddit a lot since I last looked (a few months ago). Now once you do that second click it shows a decent number of comments, whereas previously even then it would still not show many.

> May I ask what you think is wrong with Reddit's UI?

Worth noting that the mobile experience is VERY different from the desktop website, and the desktop website is very different if you're using the Reddit Enhancement Suite plugin (and if you haven't used the site in a while, that difference is even starker now that RES uses "old.reddit.com" while everyone else is stuck on the new redesign)

I love the RES / old.Reddit experience, but the new desktop redesign and the mobile experience are both pretty annoying.

This offers an interesting tangent to me: is the dumbing down of the user experience what ultimately opens the door for dark patterns?

"treating your users as incompetent"

Actually, this is good practice.

We are all busy and distracted. Dumbing down an experience to it's essential aspects is a great way to make something easier to use.

If a 'fool could use it while trying to juggle' then that's good.

Making it dumb means speaking to intuition, not thought.

I should add, there are some good comments here about 'command line' etc. - I suggest that that makes sense but in an entirely different realm of usability.

Designing for something that's going to be used by competent people all day for their jobs, is different than designing for the proles standing in line at the bank, looking for 3 minutes of respite from whatever, or even trying to squeeze in that little update.

I somewhat agree. A UI that works well for inexperienced users is better than one that isn't. But the real measure of a good UI is if it works well for inexperienced users and actively allows for them to gain experience while using the software.

A good example is how, in classic application menus, each entry would have its keyboard shortcut printed next to it. A fresh user can navigate the menu to find an action, and the same option is open to anyone how forgot about how to invoke the action, but whenever they land on the action, they can see the keyboard shortcut and eventually they'll remember it and learn to invoke the action faster without having to make an active effort.

This is good UX.

Then designers or product owners or someone decided that the shortcuts made their menus look cluttered (or maybe they really took that "treating your users as incompetent" mantra to heart and thought the shortcuts looked too technical or intimidating), thus condeming inexperienced users to stay inexperienced forever.

This is bad UX.

Those are good points - often we're in different headspaces as well on the matter.

Physical product design, mobile app, command line, common entry (like the software the waiter uses), pro software (i.e. Photoshop) are all very different aspects of usability representing colliding viewpoints.

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