Fuckin' user interface design, I swear
blog.plover.com
blog.plover.com
As organizational complexity increases, design debt and responsibility becomes diffused among larger and larger groups of people. Leading to the bizarre situation where no individual has power or responsibility over anything specifically.
Any individual interface element might have taken input from as many as 100+ different people over many years, each with competing interests and goals (no, I'm not joking). Combine this with the precedents and decisions made on projects in the past (design debt), and you end up with stupid outcomes like this.
As a multiple FAANG alumni, I've seen this firsthand hundreds of times.
I think it's cute that people think IC designers or engineers have the power to make any real decisions inside large organizations.
What's more likely, is these stupid icons were part of some design system somebody created 7 years ago (have to stay consistent of course!). The circular floating buttons were a precedent somebody set 5 years ago on a completely different product (god forbid it feels "off-brand"). The colors were set 6 years ago on some project where this kind of application was never thought of.
And finally, the order & placement of the icons was changed 15 times by some PM, then the PM's boss, then the accessibility guys, then the brand team, the brand team's boss, then the director of marketing, etc. etc. The tie breaking vote going to whoever is perceived as having more soft power inside the org at the time.
Hence, the inevitable outcome of big company stupidity.
Because as they get bigger and hire more employees you inevitably move back towards the mean. There are only so many good designers and good PMs out there.
However, I would argue that the level of skill of any individual employee is made irrelevant inside big companies.
If Google pays 3X salary to get the best designer in the industry, it's completely wasted, because this person will be hamstrung by the much more powerful forces of bureaucracy and design debt.
If you place that same person high enough up in the org chart that they have power to make decisions...then they can't design anything amazing because they're just another manager attending meetings all day and not designing.
It's a catch-22. Hence why companies commoditize labor into pay bands.
You might as well just hire modestly above-average people at modestly above-average salaries who are easy-going and get along with their peers without drama. This is basically what most company interview processes are optimized for.
My experience is to manage people effectively, and apply just enough process for each person and job.
Eventually, some nimble whippersnapping startup who only hires "A players" eats the large enterprise's breakfast. But to satisfy the shareholders, the startup takes on more work and to cope with that work, they start hiring B players... and so it goes on the enterprise merrygoround.
There's no real solution, just different ways of playing the game.
I'd guess that it'd work better with a better-than-good-enough Benevolent Dictator who gets to improve the user interface however s/he wants,
than to go looking for the "magic" UX improvement process
>As companies get larger and more complex, there’s a tendency to manage to proxies. This comes in many shapes and sizes, and it’s dangerous, subtle, and very Day 2.
A common example is process as proxy. Good process serves you so you can serve customers. But if you’re not watchful, the process can become the thing. This can happen very easily in large organizations. The process becomes the proxy for the result you want. You stop looking at outcomes and just make sure you’re doing the process right. Gulp. It’s not that rare to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, “Well, we followed the process.” A more experienced leader will use it as an opportunity to investigate and improve the process. The process is not the thing.
https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2016-letter-to...
Sounds like you have a decent lightweight process-making-and-revising process. Most organizations don't. Instead, most organizations create processes mostly ad-hoc in reaction to some trauma, and then never remove them. It accumulates, like scar tissue that only ever gets thicker unless it is ripped away, which just causes different scars.
> mandate
The problem with mandatory processes is that people don’t take responsibility for the outcome of a process over which they have no power. Processes should be tools people can pick up to improve clarity.
Arguments over features basically yield to whoever has the most soft power, which is they you see the C suite so invested in the outcome of various features... it's literally theirs.
I wish HN had a 'follow' feature...
Anyway, thanks for your quality comments.
Not completely wasted. At least they made sure the best designer is not working for a possible competitor.
There are exactly zero good product/project managers out there. There are some really nice and good and capable and kind and talented people who have this label attached to them. There are some good product/project clerks. There are some good product/project directors. There are some good product/project evangelists. But no good product/project manager. The term is a pariah on the well being of teams and productivity and delivering the right product to the right people. Many peers have been placed in this position over the years, in every case, they've become less likable people because of it and we're no longer a net positive collaboration. In every case, they themselves were less happy and felt less about themselves over time.
Maybe some of you have experienced a good product/project manager (who wasn't really just masquerading as some other responsibility), but I stand by my assertion. My sampling of this "position" remains at zero good ones.
What would it take to change your mind?
Most first class work out in the world was not produced by teams of only extraordinarily talented individuals. Most of it is done by fairly regular teams who take the care and attention to do good work.
What you're describing is an extraordinary team composed of regular individuals.
This is extremely true in my experience, but how can you fight against this as an organization scales? Just simplify the org structure and define strict definitions for what each level is responsible for?
The moment you get whole departments involved you’ve already lost.
Why is a dev earning 200k/year working on CSS and JS something a grad on 60k/year could easily do?
Who knows. This industry is fucked.
1) A complex set of circumstances explains the current situation.
2) Nobody on the outside has the ability know very much about this complex situation.
3) They "personify" the problem, and start referring to the company as a "single entity" who has made foolish decisions.
This is a heuristic people employ to try to understand things. It'd needlessly simple, and relies on a moral narrative about "personalities."
Throughout our lives the configuration and extent of these filters changes in response to stimuli, yet another series of feedback loops and filtering processes that exercise meta-control over the large-scale structure of our brains.
The end result is what you describe - people turn companies into singular, personified entities, because our lives are completely shaped by interactions with mostly-understandable people-units. Most people just don't have the mental model to process the behavior of multi-national conglomerates (I certainly don't) so our brains filter the incoming information (observed behavior) until it becomes something we can successfully process without too much mental stress (i.e. pretend it's a person).
IOW, humans have and apply a theory of mind to other humans, but don't really have one for corporations (or other large organizations which are composed of humans, but whose organizational complexity is somewhere between that of a slime mold and an ant colony), so we (mis)apply the human one to the group.
This is far from a new phenomenon (although large orgs used to be less common), and many people do have what amounts to a TOM for small groups of people, so at that scale we are much less likely to anthropomorphize, but above a certain scale it becomes inevitable, particularly since it is often to the advantage of various humans within the org to encourage and leverage that anthropomorphization to wield authority, evade responsibility, or both.
The interesting thing is that we have much less trouble seeing groupings of non-humans (eg. herds, flocks, insect colonies) as fundamentally different than their components merely writ large, with behavior patterns all their own. OTOH, we certainly still have a tendency to anthropomorphize both the individual non-humans as well as the groups, so perhaps with human organizations the problem is just that anthropomorphizing the individual humans would be redundant.
For large organizations, in a way, the whole can be less than the sum of its parts?
> For large organizations, in a way, the whole can be less than the sum of its parts?
They can be, but I don't think it is inevitable.
By way of analogy, large herds of herbivores are arguably much stupider than the individual animals, while insect colonies are considerably more intelligent than their components. Packs of predators (eg. wolves) generally seem to be approximately as smart as an individual, at least so far as hunting is concerned.
Human organizations vary considerably and it isn't hard to come up with examples ranging from 'dumb as a bag of hammers' to 'smart as a whip'. Analogies to various mental illnesses may sometimes apply as well.
The reason small startups can innovate faster than large enterprises is that they can’t afford to make stupid mistakes. There’s no such evolutionary pressure on enterprises, unless it until the scale of the stupid mistake becomes life threatening for the company.
Makes me wonder if there's a real life story behind that
> small startups [...] can’t afford to make stupid mistakes
Yes, well, I'd say all companies do stupid mistakes?
And the small ones need to be good at noticing when they do it, and revert, undo :- )
You (and all other humans) are made up of thousands of bacteria and other specialised cells, but we don’t treat you as plural, although you are also a single entity consisting of tens of thousands of components.
Comfort, internal space, manufacturability, safety, and so many other aspects are carefully taken in consideration during the design phase. Trade-offs are constantly made in order to reach a balanced design. And that, for some reasons I can only speculate about, doesn't seem to be happening in the software industry.
For quite a long time, technologies advance way faster than our ability to fully understand their possibilities and implications. I believe it explains, partially at least, our current struggles.
Humans suck at dealing with complexity. Companies are semi-arbitrary globs of humans. Even an extremely small company has enough complexity that one person may not understand it all or make mistakes dealing with it.
The bigger question is, how does any company get anything done at all?
The only way for bad interface to ship is for good designers to do nothing!
Implicit here is the claim that giant companies do hilariously dumb things a greater fraction of times than small companies, but I have seen absolutely zero evidence of that.
If you think the buttons in Gmail are bad, check out the UI of almost any site or app made by a randomly chosen small company. Doing things well is hard and doing things not very well is often sufficient. We take for granted that small businesses are kinda crappy at almost everything and yet still we get what we need done and the world moves on.
For example, my local luxury chocolatier is Theo. They have a very nice looking website. Take a look at the chocolate finder: https://theochocolate.com/chocolate-finder. It tells you to input a "postal code" which to most means a zip code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_code). But when you type in a number, it tries to autocomplete addresses so you end up on some random street at an address that starts with your zip code. This is literally me picking the first small-ish business I could think of and clicking around for less than a minute.
We notice the mistakes of giant companies because we spend 99% of our life these days interacting with them and because the mean quality out of giant companies is somewhat higher, so the mistakes stand out as relatively worse.
I don't think that's necessarily what is implied. Small companies make decisions with many orders of magnitude less resources applied to making those decisions, so we expect the outcomes to be significantly worse on average. If Google spends 100,000 times the resources on its decisions but the outcome is only 10x better than the output of a random small company, that is notable.
It looks like Theo is a US company, so perhaps "zip code" is more appropriate but those of us in the rest of the world are generally frustrated by websites which present a form field which could be called the generic 'postal code', meaningful to anyone in the world, labelled as 'zip code', something which is specific to the US.
Looking at the Theo website, it appears they use BigCommerce, which is an Australian ecommerce as a service site, which explains why they don't use 'zip code'. Although, your usability complaint about the behaviour of the field absolutely stacks up and suggests they might be using the wrong form widget there.
In this way there are a lot of web developers making money preventing businesses from acquiring all of the customers who might be interested in them.
Also, the bigger the company the duller the job. After a while you just implement the damn button and stop caring or looking for improvements.
When you have N IT specialists with years of intimate experience with a certain design paradigm designing stuff, it becomes extremely difficult to even consider outsider perspective.
How many working on laptops have touchpads that never ever upon release move the pointer slightly? Close to zero. Mouse people may not even know of this issue.
Firstly, I've observed a phenomenon when I talk to a programmer about a problem I want to solve. They might get excited, learn a bit of the problem domain and then go off and build something that kind of solves part of my problem. But then I'm stuck in a endless cycle of explaining the rest of the problem, to someone who isn't really interested, then waiting for a new iteration and then evaluating how it doesn't completely the solve the problem until the programmer gets bored and goes off to find something new and exciting to do with computers. Programming the computerwas always the end for them. They don't actually care about the problem. I care about the problem. So for me computers are a tool to solve my problem. I might as well write the program myself because it's less work to become a mediocre programmer than to intimately understand the problem.
My theory is that something like this happens in interface design. There are designers who love to create beautiful designs, and we love that, but beauty is the end of it for them. They don't actually care about the problem that the program (website, app, whatever) is supposed to solve. If they were stuck in a job filling out forms all day they would quickly learn the lesson to put the reset button out of the way. If they were intimately familiar with the problem, the better design would be obvious. And so it is that people with no "design skills" can point out the obvious mistakes of the designers.
It's also true that good design is hard. Starting with a blank sheet and creating something, let alone something good, is daunting. Perhaps the hardest part is having the humility to admit, "I don't understand the problem sufficiently" and the empathy to care about the problem enough to learn it well.
There's this widespread belief now that software is only good if a user who never saw it before can become proficient in it in seconds to minutes. I think this is one of the most devastating, dangerous ideas in computing. The only way you can achieve a learning curve like this is by removing almost all functionality from software - make it so dumb that it really takes only a minute to figure it out entirely. Sadly, this is what we see in mobile and web applications these days.
What worries me here is that we've conditioned everyone to assume software is immediately and fully discoverable. Nobody is expected to read the manual these days, and so manuals are not provided, and since manuals are not provided, any feature that cannot be made apparent without explaining it in the manual goes away.
(Even with kitchen appliances, the situation isn't that bad. When a person sees a particular appliance for the first time, they do read the manual, or get someone to show them how to operate it. Maybe it comes with the fact that buying appliances is expensive and overall a hassle, whereas software is too easy to procure?)
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[0] - I highlight that condition, because it's my belief that most software vendors don't care about delivering value to users. They care about making money off users, and there are many cheaper ways to do that than creating a truly useful and ergonomic product.
I *try* to make my software initially intuitive and gradually discoverable. I think a gentle learning curve is better than a completely flat one.
I thought quite a bit recently about the problem that you are talking about (diminishing end user value in software). I think the source is that we have a lot of devs and designers whose only experience is designing for maximized conversion rate or maximized engagement. As opposed to professional software.
They have no habit of designing for value.
And *that’s the culture*. Go to any awwwards gallery - all of the websites or webapps mentioned there are essentially ads with minimal content.
Which isn’t too bad, since it leaves a market untapped through the collective arrogance of the incumbents...
Right. We're prioritizing learnability over usability.
> We should be making the easy things easy, hard things possible, and forget about the whole intuitiveness thing.
Whoa there... Another way of thinking about 'intuitiveness' is in terms of affordances. We mustn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. While it is too much to ask that every function should be obvious upon first seeing the UI, it is not too much too ask that every function should at least be obvious in retrospect after trying to use it or having it demonstrated, and of course leveraging affordances and interaction patterns the user is likely familiar with from elsewhere should be given priority.
Yes, of course. Thanks for bringing this up. I apologize, I went a bit too far there - what I meant was just "intuitiveness" in the sense of expecting people to be immediately able to work well with something they see for the very first time, with no explicit learning or training.
I also don't mean to ignore familiarity with UIs in general - yes, unless you have a good reason, it's a good idea to copy design elements users are well familiar with (if they're not completely insane, or dark patterns). This matters particularly on mobile and desktop. On the Web, everyone is used to websites looking different from each other, but there are still higher-level patterns (like footer with company info, "contact" link somewhere on the site, site logo redirecting to home, etc.).
I totally agree about affordances, and mental handles in general. "Obvious in retrospect" is a great way of putting it - once you know a feature exists, or used it briefly, it should be easy to find it again. Once you familiarize yourself with a bunch of features, it should be obvious where to find them, because they should fit a consistent mental model. In a way, it's the job of the UI - to let the user learn the correct mental model of the application, and how it manipulates underlying resources.
For that to happen though, you as a software team need at least to a) have a consistent mental model yourself, and b) design both "backend" and UI around that model. I think this is one part where we fail frequently, but unintentionally - the developers and the designers don't spend enough time ensuring they have a shared mental model. When this happens, you have UI that may be consistent with itself, but feels off when used, and every now and then you see surprising behavior or incomprehensible error messages - that's the "backend" model leaking out.
The fact that the code is available means someone can fork it and make their own changes and improvements.
Therefore, in this project you'll be helping a professor from some non-CS department write educational software. You have to balance accessibility with pedagogical accuracy, as guided by someone who doesn't secretly know that some specific algorithm is the magic key to solving the problem.
If the stakeholder has such a clear vision of their end result, they probably won't need you to help them implement it!
This is giving a false complacency to what outta be a tight intergration between design + developers with an oversight from the product owner. It is simply inexcusable. We're actively creating a culture of disregard/complacency/ignorance by not shedding light on this as a huge problem in UX/UI design.
I want more people to make noise about this.
I do believe there are programmers for every category though.
[1] https://blog.gardeviance.org/2015/03/on-pioneers-settlers-to...
The thing is: both design and programming are more often than not messy when things get real, but every programmer wants to create clean and beautiful code and every designer wants to create aesthetical designs. Many intuitively perceive this "beauty" to be in tension with the complexity of the problem that needs solving. The goal of programming and design is however not to create beauty, but to solve problems and do so beautifully and clearly communicate these solutions, because it doesn't matter how beautiful your code/design is if nobody understands it. Beauty is the cherry on top that you get to achieve once the cake below is done, tastes well and puts a smile on the faces of all the party guests. If you are good you might already plan the cherry into the shape of the cake at the very beginning — but confusing the cherry for the cake IMO means you are either not there yet in terms of your profession or the thing is a toy project to try things out specifically — which is totally acceptable if everybody involved agrees and totally egoistic and shitty if they don't. Don't agree to serious projects you are not willing to commit to once the initial interest fades.
Really good designers are about integrating both usabilty and aesthetics in an iterative process, and do so in such a way the problem is solved, and solved beautifully, all while reducing the cognitive overhead needed by users.
And this cognitive overhead is really what should drive us. The work of programmers and designers is so beautiful/dangerous because it multiplies to a thousand people for a thousand hours. Our decision affect people on a daily basis. Removing a papercut might seem like nothing, but if it avoids irritating even ten other people who use that thing 10 times a day, isn't it the obvious thing to not half-ass on, not to toy around with?
Btw. Design that is only about aesthetics is something that I call "styling" maybe we need a similar word for programmers who toy around?
There's a research field called Semiotics of Human-Computer Interaction studying user interfaces from that angle. Developers usually have a technical background from maths or engineering, and often are not aware of the importance of linguistics in our field.
Both programming languages and GUIs are languages (artificial, sure, but linguistics also study those) which are used to write expressions that can be read by humans. Semiotics, the study of signs and their meaning, provide methods to analyze how users make sense of the software artifacts (products and tools) delivered to them.
One researcher called the user interface a designer's deputy, i.e. a messenger that conveys in its entirety a message that the programmers wants to communicate to the users. This deputy must stand on its own, since it's the only information available to the user.
Users then perform sense-making on the symbols in the interface, to infer the meanings of all elements [1]. Notice that the user can't see what each interface element actually does, since they don't have access to the code; they can only guess what it does from the available symbols. If the symbols lead the user to infer an incorrect meaning, communication breaks.
[1] https://blog.prototypr.io/how-semiotics-can-help-us-in-ux-on...
That’s how I identify what I understand and what I don’t.
I think a lot of the methodological knowledge built by usability people has probably been ignored in favour of a metric-driven approach these days. That approach is very good at identifying bottlenecks in existing workflows or deciding between two ideas, but ultimately lacks the empathy you describe. You can only really build that by engaging directly with users, and watching them suffer at the hands of your creations.
Do normal users know all this? Or do they just only use the 10% easy functionality of the phone and is happy with that? Maybe articles like "17 Things You Didn't Know Your iPhone's Home Button Could Do" is a sign usability has been sacrificed in order to have a clean&neat design.
Of course menus don't translate well to touch devices, and menu systems can quickly become unorganized junk drawers for functionality, but it feels like discoverability was never fully solved on touch devices.
And it also has the same problem you describe - you don't know how to find something unless you know what it's called. And even if you do find something, there's no breadcrumb trail to learn how to find it without using search. You have to look at what's on the current page and like some kind of reverse engineering sherlock, think about where a designer could possibly have put this page. It's insane.
Sure, discoverability is good to have, but it is not a failure that you need to be told about it as long as it only contains features useful to power users.
Requiring experts to undergo some training to make the most out of their devices is acceptable UI if the final interactions are optimized for their use; double so if it doesn't interfere with usage by untrained users.
I wonder if it's kinda a stockholm syndrome or if it caters to one's ego somehow. After discovering a feature, one feels smarter / more connected to the device, compared to if it was actually easier to use from the get go.
For example, he texts frequently but doesn't know how to check his email. Because I am the tech support child, he reaches out to me for iPhone help. However, since I am not an iPhone user, I always struggle and sometimes fail to solve his problem.
Perhaps this is a sign I have not dedicated enough time to learning this new OS in my family ecosystem, but I do feel it is the least-similar to the other OS's I have used. It's like if my dad was learning programming and asked if I'd help him with his Lisp program. No thanks.
Though maybe I am just a luddite and the universe is written in iOS.
Not just unfamiliar, difficult.
When that phone stopped working I got a decent Android phone and it felt so much more comfortable.
I will say that when it first came out the direct manipulation of the iPhone UI was a qualitatively different experience compared to any other touchscreen for a very long time. Back then most Android reviews included caveats like "stuttery", "janky", or "low resolution", and these had the cumulative effect of spoiling the illusion of direct manipulation.
Today the gap is much smaller and easier to ignore, and the iPhone has added lots of hidden affordances like swipes and double, triple, and force taps to cater to expert users at the expense of novices.
One danger is if the affordance is triggered accidentally. For example, my kids like pushing buttons and swiping when I wouldn't think to do those things and accidentally switch apps or enter into guided access modes without meaning to. In my case I occasionally trigger things like sticky keys unintentionally.
Another danger is if application developers start assuming that they can rely on users knowing hidden affordances and use swiping, double-tapping, force pressing, right-clicking, etc in the core application workflow. Not an Android iOS example, but last night one of my kids started playing Stardew Valley as their first non-tablet game. It has a steep learning curve since it relies on multiple different keyboard keys and on differentiating between right and left-click, whereas I wouldn't consider right-clicking to be a novice skill.
For complete novices, the first thing they do is click the mouse, and since there are only two buttons it doesn't take long to figure out that left-click is the primary button, and right-click brings up a menu with handy options (practically everything has a context menu in Windows). But with the Web, where context menus are rare, I wouldn't be surprised if it's not as well-known anymore.
I have theories -- maybe it's because most web apps do not bother with context menus (outside of text operations), maybe it's because more people have developed their mental model from touchscreen devices where context menus are less commonly used, maybe more people are on laptops with trackpads that do not make right-clicking as obvious, maybe because there's no visual affordance indicating which onscreen elements have a useful context menu and which have the standard webpage context menu so it's a guessing game. I don't honestly know. But I am confident that if you place key functionality in a context menu of a web-based app that most novice users will not discover it on their own. As per Jakob Nielsen: "...be warned: less skilled users rarely use these [context] menus." [1]
Once end-users learn how to use your app (and therefore are no longer novices) then they seem to have no trouble remembering and using context menus, so it's a great way to expose expert affordances.
In the case of my kids I can also say that the Stardew Valley user interface (such as keeping right-click and left-click actions straight) has been the most difficult part of the game so far. And it doesn't seem like it was particularly necessary distinction to make -- there seem to be few cases where both right- and left-click actions are equally appropriate.
[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/feature-richness-and-user-e...
While that's the only way to build empathy, you should be aware (and beware) that it is also a good way to build contempt (as counterproductive as that often is). Many of the "dark patterns" probably originated that way.
I know, there are open source business models which work for some companies and that's true but generally in the sorts of technical problems for IT people. Compared to the IT industry as a whole those are edge cases. They seem more important to us embedded in the IT industry, but compared to the overall multi-trillion dollar global IT industry they're peanuts.
Did you mean MacOS?
Seriously, Linux has a lot of UX issues, but hiding the full path of files is a problem that plagues literally every single OS file manager. It seems that at some point, all the major OS makers agreed that users are too stupid to understand a file hierarchy, and came up with tricks to hide it.
I find this annoying as well, but it only happens when you use quick access shortcuts. And then once you're in a sub folder it'll display the full path in the title bar provided you turn on "Display the full path in the title bar" in the Folder Options.
Navigating directly to c:\Users\MyUser\Downloads will also show the full path in the title bar.
It seems some of these shortcuts have "special" behaviours in explorer.
And this is why I find myself mostly in the text shell.
Were I to go graphical the minimum I want is a simple address bar that I can override the current path with a specified path at will.
Maybe a tree view like in Windows 95 Explorer just to pretty things up. Some of the modern comforts like thumbnail images would also be welcome.
I wish they would stop insulting their users who have taken the time to understand the underlying technicalities of a file system. All this should be user-configurable in a good file manager. SpaceFM and PcmanFM come closest to what I've specified.
That's not a difficult question. The only time it makes sense to expose the internals is if you build a specialist tool for people who like internals exposed.
This means that no, it shouldn't be "user configurable" either. You don't want a combinatorial explosion of states in your UI for a tiny set of users in the general purpose case, and you don't want to create a honking fat tool for specialists who'll only use the specialist path.
The computer industry is discovering what the mechanical tools industry has known for a while: You can build a general purpose tool that's simple & straightforward, or you can make a specialist tool.
Pretty much any specialist will be slightly unhappy with the specialist tool and modify it to their own requirements, but you can't build a specialist tool that makes even close to all specialists happy. The specialists will also continue to use the generalist tool if it gets the job done, but they'll complain every step of the way.
- Drag and drop the file into a terminal to insert the path
- Copy and paste the file into the terminal, which inserts the path
- Press Command+I to show a popover describing the path to the file
- Enable the "show path bar" option in the Finder's "view" menu, which will show a nice graphical representation of the path to the current location at the bottom of the window (which lets you copy the POSIX path to each item)
- For more advanced users, run the command `defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES` to show the full path to the current folder in each Finder window title
THANK YOU!
- use columns view
Ah, and also if you alt-rightclick on an item, you can copy its path to the clipboard. Or you can open the ‘Edit’ menu with alt pressed and copy the path to the current folder. Apparently there's even a shortcut for this.
It's certainly fine if you work a lot locally with the Mac; but for me, the cost-effective thing has been to fumble around each time (since I only do this a few times a year) rather than memorize handling that I use so seldom.
Also, nothing to memorize about copy & paste or drag & drop. I would say you’re used to Linux GUIs not doing what you expect so the obvious solutions aren’t even considered.
Showing the Finder path bar is the more obvious option. Nautilus, the file browser on some Linux distros, supports this as well.
To a terminal. I thought Linux was the one where you needed to open a terminal to do basic things, yet from my experience it's usually MacOS that needs a terminal for such basic things as turning off mouse acceleration.
- Drag and drop the file into a terminal to insert the path
- Copy and paste the file into the terminal, which inserts the path
- Press Alt + Enter to see details describing the path to the file
- Press Ctrl+L to see full path. Or just use better file manager like Nemo
In macos I don't have to edit random .conf files in system/application directories just to make my wifi work correctly. The graphical UI is configurable enough that I rarely need to modify anything outside of my normal user directories.
Where as in ubuntu the forums/stack overflow usually say "go to this file at /sys/whatever and write in this". Hence the need for full file paths.
Quick example, because I'm trying to make my nas usable on a mac and it's given me a headache.
The first thing I do on any Mac is to drop into Terminal to run this:
defaults delete com.apple.systempreferences AttentionPrefBundleIDs
defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YESIt's quite a basic thing, most games include it in their settings yet it doesn't seem important enough to have a setting in the OS itself.
Terminal -> Finder:
open .
I made a Bash function:
function cdf {
DIR=$(osascript -e 'tell app "Finder" to POSIX path of (insertion location as alias)')
cd "$DIR"
}True of any hotkey.
> which is why requiring it for a common UI function is bad design.
it isn't required.
In open source the developer has the power, they get to decide what they work on and nobody can tell them otherwise. The best a user can do is post a begging letter in a bug tracker. It doesn't matter what the user thinks, even a majority of users, all they can do is ask.
In commercial software it's the user putting bread on the developer's table. The user feeds and clothes the developer's children, and/or pays for their supply of mountain dew. If the user wants something, bye and large they get it, or at least they have a pretty solid chance of it more often than not. A vote for a feature speaks a lot more convincingly when it's backed up by a wallet.
There's nothing wrong with open source or free and libre software. It's great, I love it, but a lot of it's proponents seem to think proprietary software is some sort of crime and genuinely don't understand why proprietary software dominates so completely in so many domains outside of IT infrastructure.
Developers know best, even when they don't, because they're the ones doing the actual work. But in the FOSS ecosystem you have: i) the freedom to do the changes yourself ii) the freedom to offer help with design, documentation, ideas iii) a public bug tracking and issues manager
Let me know when you can do this commercially.
On a tangent: it is indeed a crime to use commercial software when there are libre alternatives; every use moves the needle one tick deeper towards Eternal September
For me, a large part of the fun of being a developer is enabling others to do stuff they otherwise couldn't. As such we absolutely entertain feature requests and similar, and implement a lot of them.
When sales come back from a sales presentation laughing and telling of jaws hitting the floor, it's almost always due to features that started as a suggestion from one of our users.
Very often though the feature requests are trying to solve XY problems. Often there's a better route to achieving what the user wants, which almost always is some way of avoiding redundant work or other workflow simplifications.
Us devs often do know best when it comes to edge cases and limitations, and about other use-cases that this particular user haven't considered.
However most requests are born from something real, so we will usually inquire what the user is after, in an effort to determine the impact and alternate routes. I might even contact other customers who I know use that module or have a similar work flow and ask them what they think.
And based on that implement changes that make the program better not just for that user but for all our customers.
unless it's accepted upstream, you've got an ongoing maintenance problem on your hands. getting an idea in isn't always just about time/resources/money. if your idea doesn't fit their 'vision', it won't be accepted, regardless of how much you have funded your feature. do you now take on maintaining a fork? sometimes the answer might be 'yes', but I suspect in most cases it's going to be 'no'.
(I've given up either reporting bugs or, where at all possible, using their software, as it's abundantly clear my interests and theirs are not in the least aligned.)
If they are critical bugs, they might or might not be addressed.
At a certain scale (much smaller than Google's, probably already at about 100 customers) it's impossible to please _all_ users of your software, so you try to please the majority. And whatever you change, there will always be that 'one guy' whose workflow will break.
The Google model dominates the proprietary world presently, and even long-term shrinkwrap / clickwrap vendors such as Microsoft are shifting in whole or part to advertising-supported software.
What I pay for Google software is indirect, but given a roughly $100 billion global spend on online advertising, allocated largely among the world's richest 1 billion people, that amounts to about $100/year for the privilege of tools which frustrate rather than delight me.
As I've described in "The Tyranny of the Minimum Viable User", odds are strong that mass-market software of any stripe, including proprietary whether paid, subscription, or advertising-supported, will fail to address power-user / elite-user interests:
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...
> why can't I easily make a shortcut in ubuntu? > how about the fact that you can't get full file paths shown in the default file manager,
Is it any worse than needing to find the setting to display file extension in windows?
I am on Cinnamon desktop as it's a bit old school and predictable (for people who have been around since windows 98). I right click a file and I have an option to create a link. And my default file manager shows the full file path in the address bar . So I don't think it's a Linux problem rather than a Gnome 3 problem. But I am sure plenty of people don't mind Gnome 3 (everyone else at my work used the standard Ubuntu desktop.
Blame GNOME 3. After a decade it's still lacking polish everywhere. The day Canonical decided to drop the ball on Unity was a sad day.
It was scary how close we got to some published prices.
What do you mean by "proprietary" in this context? I believe that the availability of the software's source code to its users is unrelated to the fact of whether the actual development of such software is paid or not.
Moreover, free and open source software (free as in "freedom", not necessarily free as in "free beer"), makes it generally simpler for the regular users to provide input regarding the features they need changed. So, in a way, it also helps to achieve the goal you describe:
> The best way to ensure people pay close attention to those last areas of fit and finish...
Don't get me wrong, a good interface needs to take user feedback into account. But trying to accommodate the union of all features needed by all users is a recipe for madness. Somewhere you need an engineer, PM, designer, CxO, or someone who can make judgement calls and decide which user needs are more important than others.
This is true, and I've seen that happen too, one of the companies I worked with would sell source licenses to customers, and as I understand it this was very common in the mainframe business going way back. The software vendor retained rights to sell and distribute the software though, that's what I mean by proprietary.
I've seen these arguments for open source and libre software before many times, but there's a huge discontinuity between the theory and what actually happens in reality. In the real world there are tens of thousands of small and large software houses producing niche software for diverse use cases for businesses all over the world. Hundreds of niche engineering design, test and optimisation applications, B2B services, audio and video tools, chemical engineering tools, automation and industrial control systems, booking and billing systems, here are an almost infinite variety. Most of them are only known to people actually in these niche specialisms. In that world customers paying for customisations is stock in trade, it's entirely normal. In fact the company I'm at right now is paying the vendor for customisations to our incident and change management ticketing system.
In comparison open source, outside nerdy IT oriented tech projects, might as well not exist. It's minuscule. Barely even a footnote.
If only that were true. I've watched a completely non-IT person work with both vanilla Gnome 3 and Windows 10; they found the former far more intuitive and unobtrusive (not looking at the individual apps, just the basic desktop UI). Proprietary design-by-committee doesn't necessary make for better solutions: hence the numerous complaints recently from people (often with accessibility issues) trying to book vaccination slots on government websites.
If you go straight from problem to coder, you shouldn't be surprised that you don't have a proper solution, because nobody really made a proper solution. That's like building a house without an architect. Hire an analyst.
This is what agile was created to solve. It was an acceptance of the reality and an attempt to live with that rather than trying to bend it to your will.
Agile does not exclude different roles, on the contrary.
And if they are, it often ends with impossible to implement/maintain designs.
Do you think business analysis is about software architecture? Oh boy.
Given the tendency for software architectures to mirror org-charts, the two aren't as disparate as you think.
Have you ever played that telephone game?
There should actually be testing associated with every step:
Is X a real problem worth solving (severity or cost x frequency)?
Would Y be an appropriate solution (test a mockup, prototype, or stub UI)?
Does the Z implementation work (as in, not just does the problem get solved when Z is used, but does Z actually get used to solve the problem)?
In defence of the developers/programmers, many people are really bad at explaining what they want, not least because it's often not what they actually need.
If a designer is designing something that looks good but doesn't work well (i.e., solve the problem), they are bad at usability/UX. They should be getting user feedback on their design before it's implemented - that's what user-centred design is about.
There's often a gap when it comes to understanding requirements - between the end-user and the developer, between the designer and developer, etc. Requirements gathering is actually a specialised skill and one of the key duties of a business analyst.
Some days ago I wrote here in HN about the change my stock broker made on their default home broker. It immediately becomes obvious that the people responsible for that design have never performed anything nontrivial with stocks. They created a symmetrical, colorful platform. The symmetry is enforced, therefore you don't have the flexibility of setting up your quote-boxes any longer (perhaps because that would break the artist's concept). Just to mention one of many issues the new design brought.
The same applies to the Google Meet example in the article. Functionally, you'd never want those buttons presented that way. But placing them like that makes them look nice and symmetrical and Gestalt-related stuff, so that's the way to go and deal with it, dear users.
> Perhaps the hardest part is having the humility to admit, "I don't understand the problem sufficiently" and the empathy to care about the problem enough to learn it well
I agree, but don't see that happening, not in the short term at least. I had an argument with a designer some time ago about how much longer the project was going to take and how her ideas were actually substracting value from a user perspective. But she ended the discussion with a "this project has my signature, my reputation is in there". And that's what my criticism against current UX trends is all about. Artist's concept trumps user needs, project maintainability and everything. They are investing all the resources on graphic design matters and this is obstructing the whole field.
Some UX folks argue that designers like those "aren't true UX designers". I agree, but those "false" designers seems to be outnumbering the "true" ones. The latter may eventually have to found a new discipline.
Concurrency is excellent as an idea for systems design but horrible for user interfaces. Nothing seems to provide a stable interface and some concurrent process considers it it's privilege to suddenly modify a list of things I'm choosing from .. resulting in the items shifting just a few milliseconds before I click or tap my choice, which results in the wrong choice. This shift happens not only in vertical lists, but also tab-bar style buttons.
To be precise concurrency isn't to blame for it, but it's more like laziness. The interface elements should be locked in place if the system detects that I'm about to select something. Whatever else is waiting to show up can wait, because I obviously didn't need to know about them a few milliseconds earlier.
Or a window from a different app pops up (the app took a while to start), steals the Enter key press, interprets Enter as "Yes do [something]", and then does it (but I didn't want that!).
Why can't OS windows be click & mouse disabled for 2 seconds, after they open
But what I think you really mean is that people are often in a blame culture that strategically puts up responsibility defenses which distracts them from producing a good result and focuses them on red taping to cover their asses. It is quite possible in these organizational structures to produce absolute shit and tick all the boxes and get everything approved and make sure no one in the position of actually doing stuff gets blamed for anything.
Not saying that it's their personal fault that certain companies are that way, but it is possible to have some self respect and march back up to the manager and say hey this is shit and we should do a better design rather than waste time on this (ok, yes in a more articulate and respectful way) - if you think that risks your job then it's probably going to be more fruitful working somewhere else anyway. Disclaimer: yes I know real life has other restrictions that means not everyone can do this.
However, with dynamic display-based interfaces, you can do just that. Much as I tend to loathe Apple's design, the way they handle iPad shutdowns is quite good: first, you press a button; then, the entire display changes to focus on this task. If you want to shutdown, you then have to perform an entirely different gesture to confirm. This layering of visual feedback and input types escapes the control panel paradigm and correctly takes advantage of the freedom that act lends to better communicate with the user.
Unfortunately, doing so often means eschewing standards and best practices to find a solution that should work better for users. That is extremely difficult to get right; it's not very surprising that designers would purposely decide to use a flawed but known model instead.
We need to get it out of our heads that designers only do things because they're visually satisfying. They are making purposeful and critical decisions to meet a design objective.
They're essentially aestheticians, not designers. Yep, I hate them too.
The big takeaway is that humans shouldn’t be required to think like computers when they are interacting with one.
“Warning : Failed to load library” <ok>
Why did the library failed to load? Why are we being informed? Why does it say “Ok” when it is not ok?
As a lovely example. And on the regular you still have these problems. The daily wtf is full of current day examples.
Many graphic design refugees are interested in learning about usability, user research, heuristics, Fitts' Law, GOMS/KLM, etc. But it takes time and energy. I've found that some small companies with no established UX team start out gravitating to shiny portfolio examples and end up putting visual design (VX) folks in charge of interaction design which sometimes goes poorly e.g. https://medium.com/intercom-inside/the-dribbblisation-of-des...
It is kind of a tautology to say it but this hints at it being a human organizational social issue behind the pathology if it keeps cropping up.
I agree that good design is hard and often involves substantial work beyond just making something on the sheet.
I try to make myself interested in your problems. However, most of them seem really ''otherworldy'' to me or are in a domain I don't care about about. I became a programmer because I like the art of the trade, and I keep myself interested by writing interesting code.
It's not my job as a coder to care about your problem past what has been described to me. It is your job, as product lead, to care about the problem and design a sufficient information architecture, subdomain map, and other documentation to model your problem.
This goes both ways. It is not your job to care about my problems past how it impacts the product. I don't expect you to know or care about how we design the software or how it is implemented; whether we use snake or camelCase, if we use openssl or pgp, if we choose mysql or postgresql.
I just think it's important to outline that much of your comment can be applied in the inverse, and saying that "It's less work to become a mediocre programmer than to intimately understand the problem", is the same as saying "It's less work to become a mediocre product analyst than it is to intimately understand how to code".
I agree with your last point, it's important for every department to have humility and empathy for the problems of their peers. But, it's not a problem to be figured out by designers and coders; it's instead an issue that extends further and requires effort from everyone involved, and at every level, to support.
In particular, it is frequently the case where a product lead says something like “we need a way to...” and leaves the implementation open to discussion to all.
This often leads to a programmer, who is more deeply concerned with how that function will operate on the data, coming up with a “how about a button that...” and/or just implementing the button as a suggestion.
And then the UX architect and product lead, knowing that they don’t want to piss off this coder for fear of future pushback on their ideas, just caves and says “fine”.
That’s the most common scenario I’ve seen at larger companies. That, and having woefully inexperienced UX and UI designers in the first place.
You're spot on re: humility and empathy. I see so much hubris in programmers/computer people thinking they/we can fully understand the world's problems, much less solve them.
For starters, what context have you even experienced this in? From your description it sounds like both you and the programmer (or designer, as the case may be) are just doing this as a side project. Of course there's not going to be the incentive to follow-up and do the hard work of finding actual product-market fit if it was supposed to just be a fun learning experience from the beginning. Did you ever communicate with them what your expectations are, what the end goal is, how much of a time commitment you expect, and was the other person on the same page and equally invested in it? Also, why are you expecting the programmer to both figure out the nuances of the product and implement it? What is even your role in this, what do you bring to the table?
It sounds to me like you did not communicate well or did not set expectations properly about this project, and now you're blaming the other person for doing a bad/lazy job.
We don't have to go back to skeuomorphism of the old iphones, but whenever I use my phone I have no idea what's tappable and what's not. There's even this trend now of not making it obvious what's even a text box or what's not. It /looks/ nice, but it's infuriating to use. And then you have the weird gestures that are completely undiscoverable. Like pulling down from the top right to get the utility menu thing. I mean, yeah, I know it's there, but I never would have actually discovered that on my own. Also now there's this trend of just hiding everything to make an app look minimalistic and simple even though it's not. So I have no idea what it can even do when I look at it. And I /still/ have no idea how to properly line up apps side by side on my iPad. I mean I kind of do, but I constantly forget, and worse, once I do have them lined up, it's hard to get rid of them. It's all insanely undiscoverable.
I wish UX designers would realize it's not all about being pretty, you have to actually give people an idea of what things actually DO. All the clunky old interfaces with the bevelled buttons and huge scroll bars and stuff might have been ugly as sin, but at least they weren't a constant confusion.
The problem with flat UIs is that they're also in the middle of abandoning any conventions on what's interactable as well.
Ironically Windows circa 3.1 and definitely by 95 had this nailed: is it greyed out? 3D? You can interact with it. Not 3D? You can't. 3D but greyed out? It is contextually disabled.
Simple and clear at a glance. What that interface got wrong was the MDI motif - multiple document interface never really worked as well as Microsoft wanted, although if they'd made the leap of making it tiling by default they would've got there.
But it's not all bad; you can't put heaps of buttons on a mobile interface because of the limited screen size and lack of precision with pressing them, so some amount of 'magic' and hiding is necessary imo.
In contrast to my father, who gets off work and tries to do something with his computer and has an issue. It's simply faster for him to call me from my room and have me, whose invested tens of hours poking through all the pokable things already to solve his issue. Simply put, between working, commuting, being an adult, etc, my father had no real time to invest this time in pure discovery, when what little precious time he had as an adult had to be divied up in the most valuable way.
I see that now as an adult, free time is precious. You don't have the time to learn like you did as a kid, when you could just throw 8 hours at something. I barely find the time to play my guitar for a half hour a day between working and being exhausted after the working day. I can't imagine having to learn how to use a computer, at this age. I simply have no free time to invest in such with all the other things life throws at you to prioritize, and what free time I do have I'm mentally tapped at that point, and I fully expect in a few decades at this rate to become a technology dinosaur just like my parents and grandparents were.
A couple of examples getting in my way at the moment, the android (or nokia) phone app added a full screen "call your favorite contacts with just one tap" image to the favorites screen. I could do this until they added the obnoxious message, now I have to scroll down to even see them. The other would be netflix constantly AB testing me on whether to show the next episode button or jump back to the home screen, just make a decision, the constantly shifting interface is worse than either option.
In my opinion, my interfaces are getting worse rather than better. I feel like a few years ago, a lot of the major companies hit a tipping point with UI optimization and realized a LOT of what they were doing was unnecessary (and perhaps even costing the business money). Anything that didn't clearly serve a purpose got removed - streamlining for a few core usecases.
- Swipe from bottom to wake. - Swipe from bottom whilst inside an app, peaks all open apps, once let go it fully minimizes the app. During a peek you also see the number of unread notifications on the left. - Swipe from left to go back. - Swipe from bottom, then to the right to access the BlackBerry hub, which aggregates ALL emails/IMs/notifications in a single list (can be customized into groups). - Swipe from bottom left corner towards center hides on-screen-keyboard. - Top swipe displays app specific option/help/misc links. - 2-finger swipe from top revealed quick settings (wifi, flashlight, etc). No notifications here (they're in the hub)! - Not swiping, but it had a clean, single unified location for all app notification/permissions/etc which feels much easier than Android.
I feel if BlackBerry released the Q10 2-3 years earlier we would have had a totally different phone ecosystem today. I still miss it.
On the home screen, swiping down gave you the system quick settings, and in an app it gave you the app's settings, so the two-finger gesture was just a power-user shortcut to the system quick settings while in an app.
Swipe left to go back was very discoverable, and worked differently than iOS or Android, because the entire OS was built around the idea of stacks of pages. Swiping left was just pulling a page off the stack (fluidly animated and cancellable, and you could start anywhere on the screen). There was also a back button on the left-side of the toolbar that you could tap to do the same thing.
Swipe up and to the right to go to the notifications Hub was also discoverable. The Hub was the left-most page on the home screen, so "up-right" simply combined the gestures into one fluid gesture; it was also totally optional.
Swipe left to go back worked anywhere (you didn't have to start from the edge of the screen) and dynamically showed the page being pulled off the stack, so it was super discoverable. All of the swipe gestures worked this way—"peek" was core to the interaction model because it made users feel in control, and let them cancel an action by just dragging back to where they started.
The two-finger swipe from top was only to bring the system quick settings while in an app (the two-finger gesture was also only added late in the OS's life, at the behest of power users); the quick settings were available on the home screen with a single swipe. While in an app, a single swipe brings up the app's settings.
The only non-discoverable gesture was swiping the corner of the keyboard to dismiss it, and it was also totally useless. The advertised way to dismiss the keyboard was by long-pressing the space bar (there was an icon showing this).
It's a pity more haven't experienced the useful aspects of BB10's interface (10.3.2 IIRC was when it received a much appreciated UI appearance update, fwiw).
I've tried Android, iOS, Windows Phone and BB10 is still my favorite. Windows Phone in particular was surprising in how unintuitive various of the gestures were in comparison.
As a side note, on their phones with a physical keyboard (which featured touch detection on the surface of the entire key array) text interactions were much improved. Finessing text selections was particularly easy compared to using the touch-screen. Double-tapping the keys (without depressing them) brings up the loupe and from there one can hold down Shift while gliding around the keys to adjust the selection, much like a laptop with a touchpad.
512 x 342 x 1 bit color created some pretty fantastic usability.
I've wanted a modern consistent, monochrome interface for a while as a general computing interface.
I've been looking at the e-ink devices for inspiration.
Forced contrast, forced visibility, it all has to be apparent. I've been hacking lua for this holy grail for about 6 years now, before that in perl, then in C since around 2001 or so.
I've got foot pedals, midi controllers I use for general computing, lots of little hacks. Multiple 4k monitors in portrait mode, lots of hacking with arduino sensor packs. Still not there yet.
Interfacing is the current limitation in computing. I've got 128 cores, hundreds of gb of ram, and no good way to use it other than the current paradigms. There's gotta be something better
These things have huge resolution now and the user can pick their language; would it really kill them to write words over the little icons? If in English, perhaps "ANSWER", "HANG UP", "MUTE" and so on, but the magic of words is that it doesn't have to be those exact words ("HANG UP" and "END CALL" are completely different sets of words yet in the context of a phone call, mean the same thing to almost everyone - magic).
Words. They carry so much information. So much. I know, people want to find some magic picture that carries full meaning to all cultures, but there simply ain't no such picture and there never will be; there's no shame in using words. Please. Use words. I'd even happily take them in a language I don't even speak, so long as it used an alphabet I could read (or even not - I can read some common software related words in Japanese simply through having sounded them out a few times). For me at least, words are easy; the ever-changing mist of icon-style-du-jour is not.
But each time it gets updated while you're editing a field, it gets rid of the keyboard, and maybe of the info you just added.
It's extremely painful to use.
I had assumed you'd just tap the "answer" button, but that failed more often than not. It never would have occurred to me to swipe a minimum of 3cm, starting with the answer button, and I must assume this knowledge has spread to users by osmosis rather than discovery.
Typically it is a tap and drag in some direction, but the direction to drag for answer vs hang up is always different between OEMs.
So that's fun. :/
Having said that, text has an annoying feature of needing to be localized, and localization of button texts is tricky because you want a very short string, in order to not overflow, because you have very small screen estate on mobile.
(It doesn't also help that some native built-in components have APIs that show the icons only, without text)
There is no creativity any more. Everybody is too busy following apple
I want ugly buttons with clear text on them.
What I definitely don't want is four almost identical icons with nothing to tell me what any of them do, or swipe gestures that are impossible to discover, or (the worst) swipe gestures that expose icons.
And then, the absolute worst of all, the useless "upgrade" that offers zero additional functionality, but changes the location or design of all the icons of an app that you've already learned.
This[1] is what it looks like when the alarm goes off. (Swipe left to the "zzz" snooze icon or swipe right to the off icon). I can't always rely on muscle memory because I am not always consistent in which direction I put my phone down on the nightstand. This is not the best UI for a person who has just been woken out of sleep and still groggy.
1. https://www.androidpolice.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/nex...
Phone interfaces are a minefield for me for some reason. It's too easy to accidentally push a button you didn't realize was a button when you were trying to scroll down the screen but pressed it too hard when you did so. I run into lots of pitfalls like this. I grew up in the era where the OS interface was a "READY" prompt, so I've seen most of the paradigms out there over the years. Nothing has annoyed me as much in recent memory as having a touch-sensitive interface on a slick, compact phone with rounded edges that I desperately don't want to drop.
- most of those apps with the hidden interfaces have no business being on a pocket computer in the first place
If we stopped playing the game of maximising engagement, and returned to "practical usefulness" as the primary driver for application design, we'd probably make better apps.
The solution is:
1) Publish Human Interface Guidelines that detail a rich set of standard gestures, how various tappable elements MUST be marked, and how they SHOULD be arranged.
2) Publish abridged HIG for end-users as a part of user manual for the device/platform. Aim for closed-world reasoning, i.e. the user must be able to build a mental model of, "if I can't see this functionality here, here or here, it does not exist", and not "it may be hidden somewhere else".
3) Tell app developers to stick to the HIG or GTFO.
I know, wishful thinking.
The decay started long, long ago. The other day, someone commented on HN with a link to a piece of old Microsoft WinAPI documentation, I think Windows 95 era or older, where there was a side note on window styling and "escape hatches" that unfortunately had to be built in, because marketers are marketers and desperately want to fuck up usability to put branding on things. Back then, platforms already gave away too much control over styling to software vendors (where originally this control resided with end-user).
It's interesting that nowadays, with all the work gone into sandboxes and frameworks, nobody seems able to do that.
I recently got an Android 10 phone, from a vendor I had never heard of: Ulefone.
I was coming from a Sony Xperia compact running Android 8 - roughly the same hardware, except not rugged. I presume Sony polished Android a little bit more than Ulefone did, but even taking all that into account, Android 10 was full of shockingly bad UI "decisions".
First: the Do Not Disturb icon in the pull-down thingy is a but when enabled a appears in the top bar.
Second: Pulling down the pull-down thingy once displays a row of 6 icons with no labels. Pulling twice displays 5 columns of icons with labels. It takes extra planning to rearrange the widgets in 5-column mode such that I get the 6 I want in the first row but also a logical grouping in 5 columns.
Maybe these are Ulefone-isms, but whenever I trip over them I imagine how hard Steve Jobs would have fired someone who put this stuff in front of him.
Just yesterday, I wanted to make a normal voice call to someone I usually contact via WhatsApp. When on their contact page, I couldn't tell which icon would make a WhatsApp call and which would make a PSTN call. The WhatsApp phonecall option appeared with the phone's "phone" icon, and the PSTN option had no icon at all. Both had text saying "voice call".
Oh, and don't even get me started about my Android TV. FFS.
I noticed a lot of UI problems like this when my parents changed from Windows Phone to Android and I had to help them. There are a lot of small actions that make sense if you used Android in the past (since they've been slowly introduced) but are completely bonkers to anyone picking it up now:
- To reject a call, swipe the "Accept call" icon down (this one is particularly horrible); - To enable Wi-Fi, bluetooth, etc. swipe from the top; - To dismiss a notification, swipe it to the side.
Spotify on Android is pretty awful at this point. Now I can't tap and hold to get to the context menu anymore, now I have to use the triple dot button. Why remove that? Usability is also pretty terrible. Why can't I load the list view of an album I have saved? What the hell. Same with entire playlists that I have saved and downloaded.
Snapchat (I wish I didn't have to use it, but it's the main for of communication a lot of my peers use) keep changing things constantly when nothing was every broken. Over the past three years, they've changed the order and number of tabs they have at least four times.
Google Photos on Android is also annoying separated IMO. Give me an order by date and an order by album/folder. Please just load the folder structure. I assume they do things the way they do to maximize use of their cloud storage, so it is likely intentionally awful for local images.
The official Reddit app is absolutely awful and slow. Reddit Is Fun (third party app) is, and always will be, my favorite Reddit experience. Clean and fast.
That was kind of ranty, but I just wish UI's were simpler on mobile.
"When I came to Washington before World War II to head the electrical section of the Bureau of Ships, I found that one man was in charge of design, another of production, a third handled maintenance, while a fourth dealt with fiscal matters. The entire bureau operated that way. It didn’t make sense to me. Design problems showed up in production, production errors showed up in maintenance, and financial matters reached into all areas. I changed the system. I made one man responsible for his entire area of equipment—for design, production, maintenance, and contracting. If anything went wrong, I knew exactly at whom to point. I run my present organization on the same principle." -Admiral Rickover, creator of the US Nuclear Navy
the hang-up button in between the audio- and video- mute buttons results from the lack of responsibility described above. any single person would agree this is wrong, therefor no single person is in charge.
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/10/02/how-well-does-...
You need Steve Jobs at the top. What happens with DRIs today at Apple is complacency sets in since no one is complaining, feedback (demo days with Steve) is getting weaker and less threatening. And, shitty ideas get democratized and perpetuated since no one is there to put an end to it.
According to Propublica, part of the reason for the Fitzgerald crash was bad interface design. https://features.propublica.org/navy-uss-mccain-crash/navy-i...
good question. In the US, the nuclear navy is basically a separate organization. they are still in the military chain of command, but the nuclear portions are all separately: managed, manufactured, repaired, operated, trained, audited etc.
The thing the author doesn't seem to realize / acknowledge is that UI/UX design is about balancing enormous numbers of competing constraints and concerns. It's a human problem, and like most problems of this genre there is no "best" answer, only different sets of weights for different, often competing, concerns. Simplicity and ease of use are good things, but they are almost always at odds with flexibility and power...also good things. Do you make things bigger with more space so they're easier to see, or do you make them smaller so you can fit more things on the page? Do you use color so you can communicate more and catch the eye more quickly, or do you avoid that so that your app is friendly to colorblind users? (Yes, I know there are color schemes that can achieve both to a decent degree.)
These kinds of tradeoffs are lurking almost everywhere you look in UI/UX design, but this kind of nuance seems to be lost on the author. He only seems to see his set of priorities for a UI. Yes, there are plenty of cases where one thing is pretty objectively worse than another, but usually it's more subtle than that. I'm way more impressed with someone who can talk intelligently about the tradeoffs than I am with someone who fixates on something that very well might have been traded off and rant about it.
Everyone and their mother has an opinion on what they think is good design. I am thankful that as a developer I am not having to fight over pixel pushing.
As an example, my favourite pet peeve was using Visual Studio with old-school, upfront locking source control (like TFS), and then accidentally drag and dropping a file or folder due to lag in remote desktop, or a failing mouse which sent two click events in 1 ms or something. VS duly pre-emptively locks the 10k files in the folder you just dragged, and begins a 5 minute operation you'll have to somehow undo later, even though it should be fairly obvious from the click events that it was non-intentional.
Going back to the meeting example, surely solid, accurate taps in the center of the hang-up icon could be taken as intentional, but a kind of glancing, less accurate one needing confirmation?
Another instance of the same principle is that if an unexpected button/element appears and I click it in <30ms or whatever the fastest possible read+react time is, the click isn’t intentional and should be ignored or confirmed. This should scale over time based on user familiarity and speed.
This culminates at:
> as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. [HHGTG]
> if an unexpected button/element appears and I click it in <30ms
Easily solvable by locking the buttons for a few seconds (or less).
(I confess that the first time I encountered this I opened Task Manager and found and killed a Zoom.exe process all by keyboard, just on principle. That was when I discovered that Zoom has two processes so that the main one can restart the call if the call process crashes!)
But you know one potential factor for my never hitting it by accident? They use text labels (“Leave Call” / “End Call”) rather than an icon. Much easier to get right.
The more contextually 'intelligent' a system is, the harder it is for the user to model it, and ease of user modelling is often more important than reducing the number of interactions need to complete a task.
In this particular case, it wouldn't be possible to know if your keyboard sequence that quits a call would feature an unnecessary enter at the end or not.
In my experience designers are the worst people to hire for UX because they often sacrifice usability for aesthetics. Programmers fare a bit better (usable UI usually doesn't conflict with the code quality), still not perfect though. Casual users are probably best, with some education in usability of course.
If you happen to do design work and are looking for a job, I'd love to chat and see if there are any possibilities for collaboration. If you're interested, feel free to drop me a line at my username at google's mail service.
For this specific problem (Google Meet UX/UI) sure anyone agree with: don't put a destructive action that requires no confirmation (leaving the meeting) next to a common action (mute/unmute yourself). If designers don't get that right, sorry but they are not competent designers. It's like a programmer that, in order to "balance enormous numbers of competing constraints and concerns" decides to not escape user-provided HTML in the frontend. Well, that programmer is not a competent one.
I agree with this point, but if the designer had a phone call in mind (with a pre-pandemic mindset), then the design feels more reasonable.
In a one-on-one call, 'mute' is much closer in intent to 'hang up' - i.e. I am not currently participating in this call.
To underline this point, I think in general design suffers from a lot of bikeshedding at tech companies. There are likely many designs tucked away in discarded files that addressed this specific pain point, too, but were discarded at the request of some PM, or manager, or director. Then there's the process of user testing and experiment design that is used to validate UI/UX of products like this. This design may have actually tested well even if it wasn't the team's favorite... I've worked places where that data is used to override a designer's opinion.
Now apart from all that of course, Occam's razor probably applies as well I guess... perhaps this bit of UI was just poorly designed. But I see a lot of chatter on HN regularly about design being superfluous, subversive, unintuitive, "bad" when really I think many (most?) designers are unhappy with the designs that ship out as well.
> this particular problem is apparent even to a blockhead like me
> So it must be extremely obvious
"I'm not an expert, and even I can see that" sounds reasonable, but it's often used to disagree with experts. Whereas it's not unlikely that while it may look obvious to a layman, someone with more familiarity with a problem might know about non-obvious trade-offs that come with the "obvious" solution.
All of which doesn't necessarily relate to the article, the rest of which I'm going to read now - I just found it interesting, and wanted to share.
I accidentally left a meeting multiple times because the Google Meet icon order is reversed between Android and Web.
What were they thinking?
Using either order consistently would be better than changing the order between apps!
It's like the browser tab close button is on the right on Windows but left on macOS, which always annoys me.
This video shows it at 6:33 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI&t=6m33s
Not all UI elements should have the same visual weight
If you have 3 buttons, probably one of those buttons will be pressed 80% of the time, and the other buttons pressed less than 10% of the time. How do you style those buttons?
As a programmer, we like to think of the three buttons symmetrically. We want all the buttons to look the same and behave the same, because then they're easier to style and easier to reason about. Our instinct is to make a button class and then place all the buttons next to each other in a nice neat table.
To a user, the three buttons are different, and it should be obvious which one is the button you're expected to press most of the time. From the user's perspective, "Submit form" isn't really the same type of UI element as "reset form". The submit button should be big, bold, colorful and obvious. My eyes should naturally settle on it. The reset form button (if it exists) should be small and non-obvious. Its an advanced feature. It should be out of the way and most people should never notice it.
My email compose window has this problem. It has 3 buttons - "Send", "Save Draft" and "Discard". When I'm writing an email, I'm not choosing between 3 equivalent options. I hit send about 80% of the time I type an email. Once I've written an email, if I visually hunt for the obvious button on the screen, my eyes should naturally settle on "Send". Styling should make that obvious. But no - there are 3 buttons I have to choose from. They're all next to each other, and they're all styled in an identical manner. The interface makes users actively hunt for the "Send" action. This is bad UX.
When I first started developing software in the mid-late `90s I bought a book published by Apple called "Apple Human Interface Guidelines". I expected it to be a very technical book, but it felt more like an 5th grade level school book with lots of cartoonish illustrations and very simple language. At first I was very disappointed. I sped through it and felt I'd learned nothing.
After a few days I picked it up and went through it again. It only took about 10 minutes to read it. It explained how the GUI widgets were based on UIs that people were familiar with, like the old Radios in cars with push buttons that changed the radio station and check boxes used on printed forms and then it began to dawn on me just how brilliant that design was, and how well that book was written. So well most any 5th grader could understand it.
In my own software I've been tempted to use one of the many "Icon" galleries we have to choose from now but decided not too. I opted for simple links and buttons with short but descriptive words, like "Preferences" and "New Document" and "Reports".
There are icons for all of those, but my users don't need to learn what those stand for, and really don't want to. It's silly for me to expect them to learn the purpose of an icon in my app when every other app they use might implement them for a different purpose.
Sometimes "a picture is worth a thousand words" is not a good thing. Sometimes just a word or two is a lot better.
Do all web forms have a left aligned button by default? I just realized they do on HN but if you'd asked me 5 minutes ago I'd have told you it was on the right.
No specific advantage has actually been attributed to either choice of order. What matters is (1) keeping the order consistent throughout an application, and (2) following the provided style guide for the platform you're developing on.
(Also, the order may need to be changed if the primary action is destructive, such as a "Reset" button.)
I did an extensive write-up about this topic if you're curious on more details: https://dev.to/sergix/ux-illuminating-intention-198k
Not even just an application. The whole phone needs to be consistent. Every app in it. Otherwise it's just repeatedly discovering and forgetting how to use each and every app's unique interpretation of what their average user wants and what their average user thinks is intuitive.
The biggest reason why consistency is more important than following platform guidelines is for cross-platform apps available on multiple devices that have different platform design guidelines. It's obviously not feasible (and I would argue not user-friendly either) to switch the order of action controls for the same app on different devices, especially when the app is available via a web interface as well as native.
For example I would think this makes much more sense:
Name [arp242 ]
Email [arp242@example.com ]
I have a HN account []
[Submit]
Name [arp242 ]
Email [arp242@example.com ]
I have a HN account []
[Submit]
This also works much better if you put the labels above the inputs:
Name
[arp242 ]
Email
[arp242@example.com ]
[] I have a HN account
[Submit]
[Submit]
And people read things from left-to-right; I find left-alignment almost always more natural; this is why most navigation sidebars are also on the left (which is often also inverted in websites using right-to-left scripts).
It's even worse if you also place a reset button; I would imagine more than a few people in a hurry will accidentally reset forms if it's placed on the left and has equal prominence to submit. Aas the article already mentioned, you probably shouldn't have a reset button at all, and most forms these days don't.
Anyway, I think "it goes forward in the procedure, in time" is overthinking these things too much in too abstract terms. Just put things where people's eyes and mouse cursor will naturally go for these kind of things will get you a long way.
All of that being said, consistency is also important, so if there's a system/platform where things are consistently on the right then sticking to that is usually more important.
Like spoken languages, the language of design changes over time, and what used to be normal can be quickly outdated (like the reset button on forms).
What is more "natural" is a pointless discussion anyway IMO; I regret phrasing it like that and I wish I could edit it. As I said, the key is to put things where people's eyes and mouse cursor will go, and that's rarely a "jump" to an entirely different place on the screen (on mobile this problem exists less because the screens are small). While it doesn't matter too much on narrow forms (less of a jump), on wide forms it's a bigger issue (or if it's placed to the right of the form inputs take).
Windows: "Right-align commit buttons in a single row across the bottom of the dialog box, but above the footnote area. Do this even if there is a single commit button (such as OK)."
Mac: "Any buttons in the bottom right of a dialog should dismiss the dialog. An action button, which initiates the dialog’s primary action, should be farthest to the right." (Also noteworthy: "Separate destructive buttons from nondestructive buttons.")
Having it on the left, imo, people might look there first but continue to scan to see what the other control is. When you finish reading a sentence of text in a paragraph, you certainly have the last word of it stick out, how is this different?
When forms were implemented, it was important to keep the behavior consistent with what people experienced in their OS.
Now that we have touch phones, the situation has changed, but the best practices have not.
I can't be the only one getting confused about this on a regular basis.
It's rare to see it solved cleanly. I try to avoid interface elements that attempt to combine these two roles entirely.
I quite like the way the Twitter "Follow" button works: when you click it the text changes to "Following", which I think is just clear enough, but only because it's a button that every Twitter uses frequently enough that they are likely to remember how it works.
This and "Your video is OFF" are states I care about when video conferencing because the reason to enter them is important.
There is perhaps a patent which prevents it for financial reasons.
[x] Mute microphone
(apparently HN doesn't permit the checkbox character)
I just check with Firefox which he was complaining about, and while it doesn't do this, it at least by default prompts you to confirm you want to close multiple tabs which should hopefully prevent you from quitting out by accident.
Oh man, I actually remapped quit on Firefox because this bit me too many times and Firefox kept removing ways to confirm quit. I will die on the hill that "confirm quit" is the correct behavior.
(I have, in fact, died on this hill enough times I may be outing my HN burner with this comment.)
browser.quitShortcut.disabled true
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821 (only took 21 years, jeez)
I can't imagine how often you need to delete everything from a file without using a text editor. I'm sure it's not that common that you need to give it a one-letter flag (instead of --remove or --delete) and put it right next to the fucking edit flag.
I really wonder if there is any script on any distro that uses this behavior. Most distros did go into the sane "let's split the crontab into many files" option.
> I will die on the hill that "confirm quit" is the correct behavior.
Google Chrome has a weird 'solution': on cmd-q press it popups a temporary overlay which reads "Hold cmd-q to quit"
By a decade or two, yes.
Right — Control-W should always¹ be ‘erase word’. Windows/IBM really mucked things up by stealing Control for GUI operations (among other things like conflating Tab with Next-Field because they're the same thing on punch cards).
¹ Okay, ‘end of transmission block’ is also acceptable.
Pictures are nice. And I get that they are maybe easier for i18n. But if it isn't completely clear what the picture is supposed to mean (and everybody seems to like their own) then it understanding what the heck to do can take some time.
I value my time.
I'm still looking for the "back" button on my Apple TV. I seem to be easily able to touch something that takes me to some unknown place and basically have to start over.
In a word, I would tell the FAANGs: don't re-invent UI. You're simply not good enough at it. Simple, repeatable and ugly is much preferable to confusing and pretty.
Determining which those are can be really hard depending on how your users use your app. And won't always be universal. The example of the "commonly used" closed window versus quit app... the destructiveness of the former is equivalent.
When one is a common action and the other causes more pain when performed accidentally, it's been more helpful to add an option to ask if that was the intended action than to retrain now-generations of users on keyboard commands. Cmd+Q/Cmd+W have been used this way since I was in diapers.
Try finding the menu item that brings back the app once you've quit.
And every browser has a way to reload tabs from the previous session. Both are equally destructive if the tab/s had state you were not finished with and don’t preserve that state when reopened. At least quit can be guarded with an “are you sure?” prompt out of the box.
> Try finding the menu item that brings back the app once you've quit.
The um... Dock or Taskbar or Start Menu or Spotlight or every other thing people use to launch apps every day?
Not if that tab was a google meet meeting.
The timer app has a similar UI, two buttons, one to repeat, and one to stop, spaced out. The problem: They are swapped!
For alarms, the biggest, most obvious button absolutely must be snooze, not stop. The plausible harm caused by accidentally stopping when you meant to snooze is very high: you miss an interview, final exam, court date, or are late to work one too many times. The plausible harm caused by accidentally snoozing when you meant to stop the alarm is orders of magnitude lower -- you are embarrassed when the alarm goes off somewhere quiet, maybe you get kicked out of the movie theater.
For timers, 90% of the time, you want to stop the timer. Another 5% of the time, you want to start the timer again for a different amount of time. (How often do you put something in the oven for 35 minutes and then discover it needs another 35 minutes? Usually you just need a few more minutes.). Only occasionally do you want to restart the exact timer you just finished. It's a nice feature to have, but it's appropriate to make it subtle.
The big fat red phone button means "click this button to achieve the state that is depicted on the button (hung up)".
Okay, so good so far, by clicking a button, you get whatever is pictured on it. Makes sense.
One would thus think that similarly, a picture of a muted microphone on a button means "click to mute" and a picture of an unmuted microphone on a button means "click to talk" and this is backwards from what they actually mean.
Yes, it's a bit inconsistent, but I can see why they make the buttons inconsistent within themselves rather than breaking user expectations.
This does not excuse the placement, though.
I was sharing my screen, then using the chat, muting, unmuting, and eventually went to unmute and was jacked out of the call, with not even a "Hey, are you sure you want to leave?"
The only way to get good design is to hire good designers. Money doesn't buy good design. This UI was shipped by Google. They have money.
So instead of Select message, click Delete you have Select message, click Move, select Trash folder. Sure it's not much, but I reckon the cumulative time wasted by that extra action has taken a couple days of my life over the past decades.
After selecting or hovering over a message, look for the button with a trash can icon. On Gmail’s desktop website, it’s currently the fourth button from the left in the toolbar (next to Report Spam). On Gmail for Android, or when hovering over a message on the desktop website, it’s the third button from the right (next to Archive).
This can be applied to anything: child rearing, writing, presenting, singing, dancing, pet-owning, coding, UI developing, ..., ..., ...
Without a formal educational foundation, people just do what they see. And the more people do without education, the more the overall result will stray from (perhaps) what is best.
In school we learned formal language grammar, and only if we were experienced and of some high profile (or having no audience) were we allowed to exercise "creative license" to break the rules.
It might kill some good creativity, but it would also kill bad/wrong creativity in user interfaces if there were fairly strict rules to follow.
Some of the coolest UIs also happen to be terrible to actually use. Same goes for books written with inconsistent typography, alignment, etc.
I only ever want to press one of these (Archive), yet I have to stop and squint and think each time to remember which is which. Can you guess correctly? [1]
(I've since realized that the Archive button is actually a banker's box. I nevertheless ended up enabling text labels to tell them apart.)
[1] http://www.rawinfopages.com/mac/sites/default/files/sites/de... (ignore the arrow)
https://www.alamy.com/control-room-of-nuclear-power-generati...
One of the older engineers explained that the key labeled "Run" used to be labeled "Execute". But apparently after a near fatal accident, management decided to change the label.
But a "leave meeting" button is used at least once per meeting by each participant, which may be more frequent than the mute or hide video buttons. It's appropriate to put it front and center where participants can easily find it.
I feel like what the author really wants here is a confirmation before leaving in case of accidental clicks.
The reset button can be used multiple times, same as the "enable/disable mic/cam", although arguably the latter WILL be used multiple times.
I believe it is more a matter of "multiple vs single" use that needs to be considered, or more like "on going vs finishing" actions when separating/grouping buttons.
> I believe it is more a matter of "multiple vs single" use that needs to be considered, or more like "on going vs finishing" actions when separating/grouping buttons
We could probably separate them along those lines, yes. But I don't think this relates much to the original article. It compared the "leave meeting" button, which we agree is an "exactly once per call" button, to the cancel/reset buttons, which are in the "hardly ever maybe never" category, and that's not a fair comparison. My point is that while we can find ways to distinguish the "leave meeting" button from mute and hide, it's not appropriate to give it the same treatment as a cancel/reset button should get.
Eg. Don't put the "Sound Hawaiian missle alert button" next to the "Test sound Hawaiian missile alert button".
You cannot disable the autohide and it reflows the whole thing for no apparent reason. Usability is yet again at a loss.
I loved this one comparison I read about it. It went:
> Imagine I'm driving on a highway and suddenly I see that the exit I want to take is really close so I have to change lanes. But the maker of the car made it so I first have to take out the steering wheel out of the glovebox to make a turn. That is how it feels to use Google Meet's UI with the mute button hidden away.
Before that change we had colleagues complaining that they couldn't find the buttons. Now we have others complaining that the bar is always visible.
In my new car, the phone menu lists all recent phone calls without grouping them by contact, so if I want to use the fancy controls on my steering to call someone I have to scroll and scroll.
Another example from the physical world. Recently I found the buttons for all 15 floors selected (probably a kid thought it was funny) and I had to wait on every damn floor. No way to cancel them. And it's such an easy thing to predict, there can nr max 5-6 people in the elevator at any time, so why should you be able to select more than 5-6 floors at a time? And no way to cancel of course.
And almost every software or device has those issues, and like the author I sometimes have to ask myself, am I the crazy one here, how can everyone else live with this? I believe most ordinary folk will believe it's there fault when things don't work as expected and their lack of expertise or handiness instead of blaming the interface. Or by learning the nuances and quirks of a system they consider themselves as skilled and knowledgeable.
Like the buttons in the lobby.
And even if "filling in the whole form again from the beginning" was a real use-case worth catering for, the reset button would make more sense the beginning of the form (and it wouldn't be such a footgun there!)
Obviously, the Submit button should be over on the left, just under the main form, where the user will visit it in due course after dealing with the other widgets, and the Reset button should be way over on the right, where it is less likely to be hit by accident.
how many times ive accidentally closed a pr or merged before i was ready because the big green "merge" button
it seems everywhere we are designing very pretty ui's that are usability nightmares...
So, there is one plausible intuitive argument for why his preferred way would be better. Does that make his preferred way "obviously" better?
Here's another plausible intuitive argument. In left-to-right languages, right is forward. Left is backward. Submit is forward. Reset is backward. Putting submit on the right and reset on the left caters to our established instincts for going forward when things are satisfactory and back when things need to be redone.
Now we have two arguments pointing in opposite directions, which should not be surprising, because arguments of this kind are far from conclusive. They don't make anything "obvious."
> Does my “obviously” come across as superior and condescending? Honestly, it comes from a place of humility. My thinking is like this:
His thinking does not take into account 1) how weak his initial argument was, and 2) that every domain contains some truths that are obvious with deeper thought and experience but are counterintuitive to most beginners.
When you add stress to the situation, I can never tell if it's swipe up or swipe down. Just put the words "Answer" or "Hang up" on the screen!
Context: Android.
Also, there is a book by Eric Meyers and Sarah w.b, Designing for Real Life. Highly recommended for dealing with these issues.
1) I am paid for design so leaving it as it is cannot be an option, I need to change something
2) I want to make something objectively better but this would make it too different than the other existing products
3) I can make it better but my existing users would prefer things to be left alone
4) I don't understand that just because that crazy new design works for Google doesn't mean it makes sense for me
5) Everyone has an opinion on design without necessarily any cost to that opinion
6) Marketing need to have some control over branding and the line is not usually clear
7) The reasoning behind design decisions is often lost over time so somebody breaks something to make it look good
8) Need to optmise for multiple devices = compromise
9) Things need a freshen up to stay competitive even if they are functionally acceptable otherwise we look out of date and people won't use us
10) The line between pretty and functional is not the same for each person/company product.
I could go on but you'll be pleased to hear that I won't!
(edit - formatting)
This comes down to terminology, and also context. I feel there should be a single button that reflects the desire to "just get out of where ever I am now", with a safe, sensible action happening as the next step.
> One of the starting points of the modern UX discipline was the application of psychology to industrial design in the 1940s. During World War II, Alphonse Chapanis (among others) worked to understand why pilot errors caused a large number of B-17 bomber crashes during landings. He noticed that the lever that pilots used to lower the landing gear and the one that lowered the wing flaps were identical and differentiated only by placement. This similarity caused pilots to mix the two up, especially in high-stress moments such as landing a plane. Chapanis helped redesign the controls on the B-17 bomber to avoid pilot error by changing the shape of one of the two levers, so pilots could quickly tell which lever they had in hand.
Or MacOS.
I disagree with this one almost entirely though. Keyboard shortcuts are for power users. Memorizing easy key combos for common tasks is the whole point, and they’re designed for touch-typists. There is a semantic reason behind mapping ctrl-q to “quit” and ctrl-w to “close window”. They use different fingers, and they are both used from “home position,” I.e. it’s not a hand shift and ring finger reach like ctrl-tab vs ctrl-~ is. That’s a better example of bad mapping IMO.
Good design should prevent you from closing a window or application that has unsaved changes without a confirmation dialog. Good design should make it easy to restore your last “saved” state for both, e.g. Chrome’s ctrl-shift-w to reopen closed tabs, and most browsers’ “reload all open tabs/windows on launch.”
Human Interaction Engineers should be dictating this instead; with a focus on making information easy to parse, for humans and machines. For placing action widgets in locations that reduce errors.
Fixing the fact that the hangup button is next to the ducking mute button does not help your salary/bonus.
This has always been true at Google. If Google management thought that was a problem, they've had 15+ years to fix it.
Issue closed. Works as designed.
The main things I've seen:
1. The age range of users is 5 years and older.
2. Parts of the UI is on a panel that is overlaid on the presenters video feed. This panel appears and disappears based on mouse input over the main presenter area. If a child needs to 'raise hand' or 'mute/unmute' they need to mouse the mouse then Mose the mouse to the correct button and click it.
3. The layout of the video feeds on the right of it could be better also.
4. There are no shortcuts attached to the raise/lower hand button.
Watching and helping my daughter has been an eye-opening experience. It must be so difficult for people with mobility issues to use these tools...
Oh and also just switched from Android to iPhone. And the top search result in the app store is often not what I searched for (sometimes it is though), but a promoted app. Maybe it is clear when you don't use dark mode but if you're new to an ecosystem it would be nice if the top result is the correct one (and not a crappy result with a slightly discolored background tile behind it). Also, the app store opened to some page with no search the first time. Turns out there are tabs at the very bottom (where your thumb hoovers when reading the rest of the screen), one of them is search. Do people browse the app store like a magazine?
Oh and please Apple, keep correcting my .nl email address to .nul in email-address fields, sure, you know better what tld I must mean. Thankfully it does stay correct after about 1-5 tries (it really varies!).
Oh and try adding an app to a folder in the bottom panel/tray (the 4 apps arbitrarily placed below the 3 dots that don't move with the desktops because... you may still want them there on the next desktop?), it does not work, one must drag the folder above the dots, add the app and drag it back.
Many things are not intuitive, thank god I found the yellow square with "Sets" as title when you open it (it's right below the gray rectangle with "No material available" on it). It has a flashy 14 animation. Sweet. It contains some tips, together with some stuff picked by a person named Genius, those tips are useful.
Many things are nice indeed, but some things are just... how does this come into existence? What path did this feature follow to become... like this...
Overall though, I really like the iPhone.
Oh my fucking god, the number of times I've been bit by this and had hundreds of tabs closed from under me because the shortcut I press hundreds of times per day is right next to the "close everything with no confirmation". Yes, if you click the X button to close the window you are treated to an "are you sure" dialog. But if you accidentally hit Ctrl-Q that doesn't happen.
Sounds like we'll be able to disable it altogether in newer versions of Firefox.
1. It is slow. It heats my laptop and phone.
2. UI elements appear/disappear, slide-in/slide-out based on mouse hover.
3. There is no native app.
4. It is horribly feature deficient. Look at what use-cases Zoom supports. Meet probably supports less features than Zoom's initial PoC.
5. The videos are tied to the presentation.
6. There is no overlay mode.
7. There is no remote control mode.
8. There is no handover between mobile and PC.
9. There is no way to call somebody.
10. There is no way to share a tablet or phone screen, while you are connecting using a PC.
It just infuriates me to no end being forced to use this piece of trash software at work. I genuinely wonder what the Google Meet dev team uses for video conferencing? Do they not know that it is so crappy? Are they using Zoom to collaborate??
Edit: I didn't notice 9 initially, that one is actually a must
> So you'd have a bunch of form widgets, and then, at the bottom, a Submit button, and next to it, a Reset button.
> Even as an innocent youth, I realized this was a bad design. It is just setting people up for failure… Obviously, the Submit button should be over on the left, just under the main form, where the user will visit it in due course after dealing with the other widgets, and the Reset button should be way over on the right
Dead wrong. Most people are right-handed. The mouse cursor spends most of its time on the right side of the screen. That’s why the scroll bar is always on the right and why the HIG says the confirmation button is on the right. Cancel/reset/destructive button is on the left.
There’s more than one “The HIG”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_interface_guidelines#Exa...
I suppose user testing would prove things one way or the other, but my money's on right.
The best performing option was where the buttons were left aligned.
See: https://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?571
But agreed, if you can test your designs with users then you should.
Ooof. Where's that user interface? Oh right, it pops up if I hover near the bottom of the Meet tab. Oh, right, I have to hover, then click the little webcam item, then click the little mic icon, but not click the little red thing between them -- BETWEEN THEM!!! -- that looks like the receiver from a 1970-vintage telephone 500 set. What is this, a Peter Sellers political movie with a way to call the Kremlin?
"Sorry, could you repeat the question?"
It really is horrible design.
Here's the problem - you touch ANYTHING in the phone app and it will dial the phone.
My mother used to have all kinds of problems with this.
Why is butt-dialing a thing on an iphone? Billions of dollars of development and I still get into the phone app and I have to keep my hands off the screen and tap carefully not to screw up.
I'm listening to a voicemail - whoops I am calling them back right now!!! argh.
What is this unknown number? Wait, I DON"T WANT TO CALL IT!
The solution is simple: a setting that lets you confirm before calling. Just like when you tap what looks like a phone number in everything OUTSIDE the phone app.
Example: https://pixfeeds.com/images/technology/phones/1280-458994239...
I’m quite positive this is a byproduct of the product->design->engineering waterfall, because while we say we are agile, nothing really gets iterated on once an engineer starts coding. If it isn’t caught in the wireframe phase, it’ll take a redesign to address.
I feel like on a Mac this is just about every single application. I actually thought this was an OS level shortcut and not something implemented by the applications themselves. Maybe it's offered out of the box but can be overridden? I'm not an Mac app dev so not sure how that all works.
I have accidentally hit the command-Q instead of command-W and it is very frustrating. I appreciate those apps that ask you to confirm quitting.
Yeah, there are countries that use keyboards where Q and W are apart, but that's not common.
We could, and I cannot stress this enough, just do a better job with the buttons.
They changed their interface last year to add a "hide this song" option in the menu _right where add to playlist used to be_. While hide song is useful, why is it very high up in the menu (when you have to scroll for other options that are more frequently used) _and why is it where the most used button, add to playlist was_. It totally broke my muscle memory for no good reason.
Can't tell you how many times I hit the big, highlighted telephone icon - exactly what you hit on every other platform since the dawn of time to accept an incoming call - only to instead reject it.
[1] https://www.lync.se/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/image-6.png
1: This field requires a lot skill.
2: I am not skilled in this field.
3: It's obvious to me <observation that might require skill in domain>.
And then there's no appeal to an expert in the field, or observed behavior.
It's fair that sometimes negative effects are obvious, and if the writer was observing the deleterious effects of the button placement, I could see where they're coming from.
But recognizing when it's wrong, not so much.
I'm amazed at how big companies, with UX designers and researchers being paid big salaries, seems to produce confusing designs.
Is it because management is pushing "shinyness" at all cost or is it because what works in terms of UX doesn't look "sleek" enough?
I have had this bite me SO many times; hanging up on calls without meaning to. That misfeature, all by itself, is enough to make me want to avoid the entire app.
Obviously this matters only if your W and Q are next to each other on your keyboard, for your region, locale, custom keyboard layout.
A prompt saying "are you sure" is obnoxious. But I wouldn't mind if big scary operations required me to click and hold for 1 second instead of just tapping the thing.
https://uxplanet.org/design-principle-error-forgiveness-1495...
But it wasn't, and now I can't unsee those icons either, even though I don't use them!
That the order of 'search result type'(web/images/maps) changes every time and you can't rely on your muscle memory has been pointed out for years now.
What really gets me is the touch bar on macbooks where I touch it by mistake when typing numbers, sending all my windows dancing around. Drives me up the wall. Leave more space there, Apple! Or just get rid of that stupid touch screen gimmick.
https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/4668/as-images.apple...
It's perfect.
As a bonus tip, remapping double click to right click (also a setting in Cinnamon, don't need external software for this) also makes it way nicer to use (I never use the right click menu - after all, the buttons I regularly need are already right there and there's another button on the left for opening the menu, or you can use alt+space+t).
https://old.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/comments/jjzr8l/homoge...
No one builds good UIs anymore.
Red is a double-edged sword: it has been identified as attention in nature (danger and attraction), so psychologically speaking it might warn AND nonintentional lead a user to a perceived action.
What is the solution? Would you put it opposite to each other prompting the user to become frustrated when they cannot find the button to hang up? (X) closing the app does not imply hanging up. This is not a life or death situation (unlike healthcare), so at least offer some explanation of why it was designed that way or offer an alternative solution.
Have you ever watched a "normal" person try to complete a task on a computer? They routinely click the wrong mouse buttons (or double/single click when they should single/double click), close windows, press in the wrong places in the GUI, and generally fumble around until they get the task done. But they don't get exasperated, because they have been conditioned to expect that computers are confusing, and they persist on with their work. And that's why "normal" people think that computers are mysterious complicated beasts.
Because the UX sucks. Everywhere.
It's just not the same pattern for roads and railways, but that's fine.
We have a site dealing with finance for a East Asia audience. It's original audience was Europe with a blue theme (signifies trust etc) and it got extended to Asia (english speaking still). So we just themed it by changing the branding colors to the East Asia organizations color. Which is... red signifying prosperity. As in 10 shades of red.
The site has the typical warning/alert/error message feedback in forms/charts etc... in different reds/oranges/etc. I spent a bit of time trying to find a Asia focused UX guide on color for alerts/errors without luck. Does anyone have suggestions? I've asked a few different culturally native Asians from various countries and just get resigned shrugs.
Note: The messages have icons/text to go with them so it's not a total disaster but it is hard to figure out
In the Neanderthal world, red means "good" or "go" and green means "danger" or "stop".
This is because red is the color of good meat and green is the color of bad meat.
In a remarkable HN coincidence, I was trying to remember the name of this series when I ran across kleer001's comment on "At Home with Our Ancient Cousins, the Neanderthals", also on the HN home page right now:
I am Canadian, and being able to read Canadian locales referenced in his books as places that I have been and are aware-of is a rare treat in Sci-Fi.
I highly encourage any SciFi fan to read his works.
RED = FIRE => RUN AWAY WHILE YOU STILL CAN
Blue is the color of danger because it means "confirm changes". Blue is the color of the abyss, and aliens would agree on this.
I've detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26395513 now.