Whatever Happened to UI Affordances?
shkspr.mobi
shkspr.mobi
The growing user hostility of UIs makes me want to stop developing software and even stop using computers. I started using computers because they made more sense to me than a lot of things. Now, I'm encountering these little moments of illogic and unreason every hour of the day.
It's not just beginners who need little cues. I'm deeply familiar with the APIs behind many of these monstrosities and yet I still find myself annoyed or momentarily confused by UIs that minimize, obscure, and hide in the name of Design.
https://grumpy.website/post/0VkVVuQ6t
There is no button to remove your card info. It had my old ZIP code and updating it wasn't working (it would still fail address verification). So to update the value, you are somehow expected to know to clear the field and then save, then enter the correct value and save a second time.
Except it doesn't work.[0] What does work is entering a different credit card, saving it, then reentering your original card with the correct ZIP code.[1] So bad design with no affordances and a broken help function, lead to a long-time customer wanting to unsubscribe out of frustration.
[0] Neither did the chat function to ask for help. I had to talk to a support person who told me how this was supposed to work. A phone call to support is an expensive cost to a business based on volume.
[1] Which made me think they were storing extra info using my card number as a key. And that's not great.
> Oh-oh. Drag-n-drop icon used for a dropdown menu - May 8, 2021
Also I agree with you -- perhaps the three lines represent a pictogram of a list (vertically stacked menu items?). And the triple dot version is either a compacted version of the same, or a vertical ellipsis?
I dream of a day when we go back to pagination. No, not just pagination numbers on the bottom of the page to flip through pages, but also the URL should reflect that and be able to share the 7th page with someone using a link.
You can also just go to any post, there will be no scrolling, too
but the site is misrepresenting the state. That user's state is still "muted," the red line indicates that it is a client side mute (so the user who checked the mute box can't hear them, but everyone else can) while the mute icon without a red line indicates that the other user has muted themselves; they're not transmitting audio.
There is a third state- Server Mutes turn the entire mute icon red and is a "far-end" mute. No one in the voice channel can hear that user and the user probably can't unmute themselves.
Looking more at the site I feel like the point it's trying to convey would be much stronger if it went for a quality over quantity approach and/or proposed solutions to some of these problems. A lot of them seem to almost intentionally miss the point of the UI.
For example, the airpods post[0] notes, "Want to listen to the podcast on your iPhone while playing a game on your iPad? Well tough luck using your AirPods for that," which is just completely false.
Sticking to posts like this[1][2] would lead to a much higher quality website imo.
[0]: https://grumpy.website/post/0VaJdRL-y
Unmuted -> The mic, no diagonal line.
User muted -> Red diagonal line.
Server muted -> Could be the muted icon with a lock next to it; or the diagonal red line replaced by vertical bars like a jail cell; or even a cross instead of a diagonal, maybe within a circle for further distinction.
Not slowly, or recently.
The big removal of affordances happened with IOS 7, and Jony Ive's "flat" UI aesthetic. Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini, former Apple UI researchers and champions of UI affordances, wrote an essay[1] complaining about this problem in 2015.
It seems like this era might be slowly _ending_ now that Ive is gone.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi...
"The new interface represents an almost violent departure from the long established standards that have been the hallmark of Apple software. Ease of Use has always been paramount to Apple, but after exploring the QuickTime 4.0 Player, the rationale behind Apple's recent 'Think Different' advertising campaign is now clear."
Scrolling in MacOS is one of my favourite things about the UI compared with various versions of Linux and Windows I've used. This is due to the two-finger swipe gesture being really well done and the scroll bar being available when needed.
I used Linux as my primary desktop non-stop for 19 years, and in the end the scrolling had got worse. The Ubuntu desktop weird scroll handle thing was awful. MacOS scrolling was so much more ergonomic than that it convinced me to switch. I still develop primarily on Linux, but prefer to do it over SSH even though I have a Lunux desktop when I want it.
It doesn't take long using MacOS to develop an instinct for scrolling things with two-finger swipe, and scrolling is generally a very safe thing to do so trying it is harmless. The way swipe scrolling is independent of the focused window is just right, and the scrollbar which appears is easily grabbed on the occasions it's needed.
Disappearing scrollbars also violate the original Mac UI principles, which were based on an enormous amount of human factors research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(icon)
>The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) had a crash which the system decided was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box in Windows 9x that said "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." Since the classic Mac OS offered little memory protection, an application crash would often take down the entire system.
Unfortunately, the Mac's bomb dialog could cause naive users to jump up out of their seat and run away from the computer in terror, because they though it was going to explode!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQGX3J6DAGw&ab_channel=Caitl...
And Window's "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down" error message was just as bad: it could cause naive users to fear they might get arrested for accidentally doing something illegal!
I can’t imagine anybody - not even a total novice - running away from their computer upon seeing a cartoony image of a bomb. It reminds me of the made-up but often used story of terrified audiences running for the exits upon watching a film of a train for the first time.
The cultural recontextualization of stories like this in my lifetime has been one of the most fascinating aspects of our modern world for me.
Of course, as I get older, I've seen my own stories and stories about events I participated in get told, re-told, and twisted and exaggerated without absolutely any malice. We also all see how people misrepresent news stories, social policies, and scientific studies (with various degrees of malice). So I think I know almost exactly how the Film of Train anecdote happened.
1. Theater owner starts showing Train film. Stands outside and yells "Come inside and see the wonderous train show. This new 'cinema' is so real that audiences have been reportedly running for the exits in terror!"
2. It's an obvious exaggeration and a joke. Passerbys laugh, but are intrigued nonetheless.
3. Someone writes a newspaper story about the cinema and the train film. Includes the quote as directly attributed to the theater owner. Everyone reading is aware of the context and the situation and the implicit tone, and chuckles appropriately.
4. Story gets picked up in another newspaper but without the context and removes the quote and instead represents it as a factual retelling of what happened.
5. Years later, someone writing a book uses the newspaper as a primary source, and then a cascade of books repeat and propagate the "fact".
Perfectly reasonable sequence of events. But here's where things get even more interesting to me.
There are *dozens* of similar stories that we've all heard and took as gospel growing up that required one person to stop, ask "Wait, does this really hold up to scrutiny?" and the whole house of cards comes crashing down. I'm talking about the "NASA spent $10M to design a space pen, the russians used a pencil", "Water flushes in the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere", and the like.
But why did it only happen just now? What prevented people from being more introspective and curious about these subjects 10, 20, 30 years ago? I guess the answer is we needed the Internet to hit a certain critical mass for enough people with sense to be able to reach the rest of us, but I don't know.
Perhaps we should be asking, what subjects are we failing to be introspective about now, that will fall into this category 10, 20, 30 years in the future?
>>Almost every time, however, something unexpected would occur, causing her to panic and call her daughter for help.
>>"It could be almost anything," Widmar said. "She goes apeshit whenever a pop-up window comes up. And one time, she paged me because she got a message about accepting cookies. She was all freaked out because now she thought she was being charged for actual cookies."
https://www.theonion.com/getting-mom-onto-internet-a-sisyphe...
Yes, a satire article, but representative of how people reacted to such cryptic browser messages.
This part was pretty prophetic for 2002.
I once changed one buddy's autoexec.bat to prompt something like "illegal software detected, press [enter] to begin scan" and then repeatedly pipe a directory listing to null (causing the harddrive to make noises). He leaped up and unplugged his computer.
Retelling that story now, I feel just a bit of remorse.
--
Oh, another example, probably apocryphal.
At the dawn of cinema, audiences were said to recoil the first time they saw a disembodied head, like when you cutaway for a close up.
In the early 90's there was a prank Extension for Mac OS called "Radiation" and a partner application called "Trigger". Trigger would allow you to pop up a system alert dialog box over the Appletalk network on whichever machine had the Radiation extension installed, allowing some nice pranking opportunities. The default message was "The radiation shield on your Macintosh has failed. Please step back five feet." … It worked, and some people would literally jump away from their desk when they saw this message! Ahh, the good old days hahaha :)
(If you're still skeptical, I can probably dig up a copy of this software since I surely have it on an old disk somewhere, but of course I can't prove people moved away from the computer -- there's only my anecdote to go by here haha)
Happens to us all.
Oh yes, and I know of a real-life case of this. A friend of mine contacted me about that message when her browser crashed. She made it clear to me she was not on a porn site when it happened. Programmers for so long just didn't think about non-technical users, and lots of them still neglect to consider that was seems obvious to someone steeped in jargon and software conventions is completely meaningless to laypeople.
Whereas the Amiga would just instruct you to meditate on the error code:
Issues with today's UX are: more dark patterns, more people making apps easier (= more less experienced developers who don't understand UX), companies trying to "stand out" but hurting UX in the process (because they still want minimalism, and all of the good ways of standing out with minimalism are taken). In the author's case Android's share menu just happens to suck - he even shows Apple's menu, which is still minimalistic but actually clear.
In reality, their design is one more thing among the hundreds or thousands of things that a user manages, and should mostly serve to get other things done.
It's more about hubris than minimalism.
Perhaps some designers start out have this immature attitude, but professional designers I've worked with are user-centered, not self-centered. That's just a professional prerequisite, and what you learn in design school as well.
And in any case, you could just as easily say about programmers starting out that they too often believe "Their Magnificent Program is the One Thing" and ignore what users actually need as well.
In any case, when it does happen (to anyone), it's not hubris, just immaturity. If something seems like the best solution to you, it takes experience and perspective to realize it's not always the best solution to others. But people generally learn that fairly early on.
I think this is exactly the point I was making.
Unfortunately, unlike art, we can't ignore architecture or UI design.
As OP shows, iOS hinting at more content by partially showing the next item is a good example. You can very well create depth and hierarchy with minimal visual cues.
However, what has increased since flat design became the hottest shit ever (2013/2014) are downright malicious interaction patterns, no understanding of the platform (e.g button vs link), and an ever increasing lust for engagement. The design flavour is merely coincidental.
It's a win if the depth and shading was just noise, before. If it was signal, well, now you've got to find something to replace that with, or you're harming UX. And you've got less "bandwidth", if you will, to work with.
Option this, Ctrl that. Yes, they can be discovered socially and informationally, but that goes against intuitiveness.
Simplicity goes too far on the balance of, and in search for, advancement of design. Form + Function. Not an industrial beige box bucket of parts and not a confusing 2001 monolith, but something in the middle.
Now that I’ve said that, I do want to make it clear that I haven’t seen an excellent exemplar of flat design. I remain optimistic though.
The single largest problem is that when we took 3D buttons away, we got no icon for the idea that you some object is clickable. An icon does not need to be skeuomorphic, just unambiguous and easy to recognize, besides, it needs to exist to be useful. Flat design uses a high-contrast background to encode that, what is extremely ambiguous, but there's nothing prohibiting people from creating a better icon.
Finally, the perfect UI (and modernist building) will have no differentiation at all. An exercise in pure, platonic intellectual/aesthetic navel gazing.
You are starting to see the post-modernist reaction in some places in web design, but, as with architecture, I anticipate it will play with forms out of boredom rather than do the hard, self-abgenating work of drawing out the good ideas of the past and humbly driving them forward.
Perhaps I am too cynical.
[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41001.From_Bauhaus_to_Ou...
Windows 95 UI: It might be fuggly, but you know where the bodies are buried.
IKEA: We will show you how to assemble this sawdust into a crappy bookcase that doesn't sit square or level using line drawings and language inconsistently.
FlatUI: Physical products should delivered as a white box inside another white box without instructions. Tech support is an unnecessary expense.
----
There was once someone who knew.
It did have a useful purpose at one point for expert users, technicians, and engineers.
A large group came along chanting "What does it mean?" louder and louder until it was a thunderous war-cry.
The one who knew was trying to shout the answer but he was whispering in a tornado.
Then, someone else said loudly: "I don't understand. Let's just get rid of it."
Most everyone said: "Yeah! It's useless!"
No one listened and now that that understanding is lost like the Antikythera mechanism and Damascus steel to the sands of time.
Revell must have super clear, most hand holdy instructions possible, for a process that is long and finicky and they assume people will patiently go all the way anyway.
And that’s not just model kits, other Japanese company take the same approach. Finicky and painfully long but clearly explained.
In comparison IKEA spent decades to make shorter, clearer to assemble furnitures, so they can get by with less explaination.
Current day IKEA furniture is way sturdier, easier and faster to deal with than any other flatpack company I’ve seen, Japanese companies included (and I went through a bunch recently…)
A friend of mine posted on her Instagram about a cabinet where she thought the drawer slides were messed up and she couldn't fit the drawers. I looked and just kind of guessed, "is it upside down?". Yep, that was the problem. Apparently the instructions or parts were unclear enough that it was possible to put the feet on the wrong end or something.
UIs should not be so plain and spartan that they are literally unusable sometimes. Every Single Button should look like a button, with way more detail than UI buttons have ever had before (why not have a ridiculous number of colors in gradients to make buttons truly beautiful?). When something is highlighted, I want it to be obvious and, again, beautiful (why not glow with photo-realistic lighting effects, for example, since we clearly have the ability and can spare the processing power?).
This. Aesthetics has overtaken usability. Back when it was web design, a good interface was defined as one that was easy to use first, pretty to look at second. During the rise of mobile interfaces, this got flipped. Now pretty to look at ranks highest, and easy to use is secondary.
Is this because of real-estate? Mobile screens are smaller, and something had to go.
The worst sins of the print-designer era may have been pretty bad, but I'd say the average actually got a lot worse when the new crowd took over. First for the Web, then for native when Web-trained designers started working there, too.
Skeuomorphism may have gone too far, but the pendulum seemed to swing back too far.
There was an example in a previous HN thread on this topic. For "save", they had a rounded rectangle and an arrow, and then a bunch of operations had something similar, but with the orientation and details of the two elements changed.
Or, another example that made an impression on me when OS X first came out, was when the basic window controls became circular, jewel like bubbles, only distinguished by color - instead of each having a distinctive pattern/symbol.
It's so easy to fall into the trap as a designer of applying a pleasing uniformity that undermines the user experience. Imagine the nuclear power plant controls with hundreds of identical switches in rows and columns. Or an aircraft.
Nothing would mean anything without the past providing context, so complaining about anachronism is paradoxically complaining that a meaning is too well established.
The letter A is thought to come originally from a diagrammatic ox head, but should we eliminate it because we no longer use it in relation to livestock?
Just because people don't like a floppy disk icon shouldn't count for anything unless it can be demonstrated there is in fact some other symbol that is more associated with saving.
This isn't just true for software. There are lots of things, even trivial kitchen items, where you can't appreciate just how badly designed they are until you've used them for a bit. It is infuriating!
In short, the app already affords you the ability to scroll to the right to view more options, but there's no signifier telling you this.
> The different interpretations of affordances, although closely related, can be a source of confusion in writing and conversation if the intended meaning is not made explicit and if the word is not used consistently. Even authoritative textbooks can be inconsistent in their use of the term.
Affordances have a specific meaning in design. Affordances themselves are subjective because they depend on prior user training. Signifiers are nonessential, supportive adjuncts to affordances to reduce cognitive load (fewer uncertainties and more clarity).
"PUSH" sign on a door that already had a door crash bar facing the observer. A crash bar already indicates it is both a door and opens outwards. A further signifier for a clear wall and door would be a faux door-jam around the perimeter of the door so that people can tell where the door is more easily. If a door blends-in completely to a wall, then any indication of it is an affordance.. it's additional, supportive cues that would signifiers. Putting bright orange around a "PUSH" sign or some aspect of an opaque doorway would likely make it a signifier.
Evidence from your link:
Human–Computer Interaction, Preece et al. (1994, p. 6): The authors explicitly define perceived affordances as being a subset of all affordances, but another meaning is used later in the same paragraph by talking about "good affordance."
Universal Principles of Design, Lidwell, Holden & Butler (2003, p. 20): The authors first explain that round wheels are better suited for rolling than square ones and therefore better afford (i.e. allow) rolling, but later state that a door handle "affords" (i.e. suggests) pulling, but not pushing.An affordance affords. It's in the word.
> pulling, but not pushing.
Because of prior ubiquitous, universal training. Something with a place for fingers to grasp must be for pulling because pushing needs no such requirements.
If you want to split concept hairs or justify common-sense, you're going to have to delve into linguistics.
Have a happy weekend.
If you present me with a blue rectangle on a black screen, it's still confusing and cognitively-loading what the hell it's for or if it does anything. There are no affordances, only questions.
If you present me with a blue rectangle with an outset, stippled border on a black screen, it's clearly a button. Without that border that meshes with familiar previous training, there's no way to know it was a button. That's an affordance.
If a highlight or animation were added to the blue rectangle that already had an affordance, that would be a signifier.
Affordances are major indicators of action potential while signifiers are minor, helpful reinforcers of affordances.
The messy, subjective discussion is: what happens when all signifiers are thrown away, and then affordances too? Baby/bathwater defenestration.
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/94265/whats-the-diffe...
It doesn't help that several apps implement their own, and some of them scroll horizontally while others scroll vertically.
Edit: apparently they're forcing apps to use the native share sheet in Android 12? https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/06/01/android-12-will-spe...
Doesn't "hint" at horizontal scrollability, just shows four apps as if that's all there is.
I've seen this trip up advanced users and parents alike.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=112301...
> We are not going to migrate to the system share sheet any time in the near future, so this bug itself is WontFix / WAI. We are also not likely to have an option to disable the chrome share sheet.
And yes, due to API changes you'll no longer be able to replace the system share sheet in Android 12, because it basically amounted to a loophole that shouldn't have existed.
> We had never actually intended to allow apps to replace the share dialog, that Intent is for apps to launch the share dialog.
Now I will have no choice but to eat the 2 seconds of loading every time I want to share something as it loads a set of irrelevant share targets that I will never use anyway.
I really wish that feature was configurable but you can't turn it off.
1980s/1990s-style graphical user interfaces were remarkable in terms of how much of the available screen real estate, CPU power, and memory they were willing to dedicate to the user interface. It reduced the visible content and available computing resources, but it made the UI very clear.
As much as I like multitouch, it isn't visually discoverable, even after you learn the basics of (tap, tap-and-hold, tap-and-drag, swipe). It's nice in a way that the whole of your tiny phone screen is used for content, but it can be frustrating trying to discover the control methods.
I used to miss that functionality quite a bit when using Windows, but I think I use window snapping more now.
I came to programming with VB6, and that was an era where even the trash "Teach Yourself Programming in 24 Hours" books made a big deal about tab order and mnemonics and cues like eclipses on buttons that launched new windows.
You are not supposed to find it.
Then in next iteration designers can tell management that only 0.3% of users use settings and then they can get rid of it all together.
Just like Mozilla and the settings to remove the top tab bar after you have enabled Tree Style Tabs or Sideberry.
I'm only partially joking here.
(I.e. a design that's appropriate in a tightly controlled homogenous environment might not be any good in a mixed one.)
I recently discovered the iPhone Notes app has an undo capability. There's no indication of it on any of the screens but you have to shake the phone. Shake to undo? Is that common now? How do you learn this stuff?
Apple's gestures have always been in that category for me though, including touch screen and touch pad gestures, though people used to them seem to love them. Meanwhile I'm just there like "So, how many fingers do I need to see my wifi toggle?"
Well, here we are. What the commercial didn’t cover was that you had to guess and poke semi-randomly to discover all the magic gestures and were never sure if you were missing something important because it’s right there, but invisible.
I have a "left-swipe-to-delete-from-list." That's the standard way that Apple has decreed that items should be deleted. They provide no affordance.
You can add an "Edit" button to the navbar, but that means you don't have room for other, more important (and frequently-used) items. In my case, this is a non-starter. I need the room for more important stuff.
So far, I have added the left-swipe, but no affordance. It relies on the fact that the platform standard is left-swipe to delete. I need to make sure that the screen shows a fairly standard list (not getting too fancy), so users that are trained on platform standard will know that they can left-swipe.
In some cases, affordances can actually interfere with usability.
I can develop my own affordance, but I am not sure what a suitable one would be.
Implied training is also a big part of usability. I think it was Tufte that talked about that. He has some really strange UIs that don't make sense, until you learn them, and then, you don't ever want to go back.
In my experience, train maps in Tokyo are like this. They are a fearsome mess, when you first look at them, but, once you understand them, they are marvelous.
Admittedly, it has been several years since I used an iPhone - but I don't remember it ever telling me that slide-to-delete was a thing. I literally had to ask on Twitter to find out - https://twitter.com/search?q=delete%20podcast%20from%3Aedent...
I agree that there are some things which work best hidden - pull to refresh, for example - but it needs to be consistent and explained.
The iPhone/touch paradigm never had such an easy on ramp for consumers. Or if it did, they dismantled it before I got on that ride.
Personally, I think this reflects pure hubris on the part of Apple, and it’s one reason that I have not owned a mac for 20 years.
It's a bit of a pain to implement, because I'd need to make sure that it only did it for displayed rows, and only once, but that's pretty cool.
Thanks!
Making your users learn a UI is stupid. You aren't building Autocad for the phone.
I disagree. It's pretty much how everything (not just software) works.
Driving is learning a UI. So is riding a bicycle, or a horse. Heck, using a toaster is learning a UI.
Every standard GUI has platform conventions. In fact, becoming familiar with these conventions is one of the most important tasks that we all do, when starting out.
It's also why so many of us get "fixed" on one or two platforms. I generally suggest to folks that are thinking of switching platforms, to consider just upgrading their device on their current platform, instead.
Many HN readers are probably quite used to bouncing around a dozen different UI systems, but that is quite rare. Most folks like to find their rut, and then furnish it.
One of the main bizarre design choices was making the address bar shrink as you add more tabs. It made me wonder if these designs reflect the diminution of sites visited in a modern internet user's session. Seems like we are moving from a mode of research-and-explore to residing in one of a few home bases (reddit, twitter, etc) and everything else is reached via Google search -> first result. Since information delivery is now so heavily tailored to a person's filter bubble, there's not as much need to stray. I'd love to read more about something like this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27559832
That's true regarding 'residing' in home bases. I still remember how much personalities each different forums of specific interests have, but that's mostly filled by subreddits now.
I still do old style internet search-and-explore, and that is also enhanced because I can tuck away my “everyday” tabs and tabs related to other subject and let the topic at hand dominate my browser, with as many tabs and windows as needed being opened with no worries about having to separate them out from the other stuff.
Tangent, but am I the only one who is really bothered by the update they made to the way you set a clock (eg for an alarm or appointment) a few years ago? It’s now only digits which I am supposed to scroll vertically, which is incredibly tedious; before, it was an actual analog clock I could drag around and it was awesome.
To this day I still don’t understand why they did this, it seemed to serve no purpose to get rid of the old UX.
Being able to put times in with a proper numeric keypad is a big usability improvement IMO.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21353920
Here it is, I knew I'd seen a nearly identical story before.
This is clearly a tradeoff. Either you tightly control the set of valid screen sizes (like iOS does) and guarantee that the affordance works across all devices. Or you allow for flexibility and accept that on some percentage of devices, this affordance will not work as intended.
Side note, I personally hate sideways scrolling stuff 99% of the time. I can't imagine I'm alone.
https://developer.android.com/training/sharing/send https://developer.android.com/images/training/sharing/shares...
There's some intent: links on https://paul.kinlan.me/sharing-natively-on-android-from-the-... that you can use to trigger it. The first one there doesn't work for me, but the second one does.
intent:#Intent;action=android.intent.action.SEND;type=text/plain;endAnother book I'd recommend to anyone interested in this sort of thing js Spence's Information Visualisation: Design for Interaction. I also had the pleasure of the author's course at university, apart from anything else it was an excellent sort of 'something a bit different to think about', that I often recall when I'm frustrated by things (as in the submission), and perhaps more often should when working on frontendy things.
I used to program nuclear power plants, destroyers, air traffic control, etc. UI design by engineers not artists.
Here's an interesting question. What will people in 50 years think of today's UI fashions?
Same thing with UI I guess.
Music generally is what people want to listen to for its own sake.
UI is disconnected from what people want; everybody wants to do something, and UI is how you get there. As is in-app advertising, electricity, and so on.
And not only is UI tied to other things that aren't available a la carte, but the whole package is frequently chosen by someone (corporate software) who will never experience the UI and didn't talk to anyone who will on the subject.
So I think it's a fallacy to assert that UI is in general what the public prefers. The same fallacy as saying consumers want binding arbitration, or melamine in their milk, or surveillance advertising.
In recent years, a lot of this has gone out the window and each dev house seems to invent their own paradigms and complete UI toolkits, so while there are similarities, they are few. The cohesive, simple nature of software UI is generally a thing of the past, that most of us who experienced it are quite nostalgic for.
Generally speaking, most application UX problems were "solved" ~30 years ago, and every time someone tries to reinvent the wheel, they miss subtle, important aspects of those earlier solutions. Like the importance of consistency across time, and "principle of least surprise", and things like that. I can really go on and on ad nauseam about this because it's a huge pet peeve of mine. I cannot stand having to relearn major aspects of how to use the same software, the same OS, every 6mo because some company decided it's time to completely overhaul their design/UI, for Reasons™.
[0] http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf
Is this implying there's more to the comment if I side-swipe?
Hrm. I think it's bugged.
Software no longer serves the user, but is the user that serves the company behind the software.
Ideally all doors would swing both ways.
Put another way, it may well be some sort of Dunning-Kruger arrogance that the self-esteem crowd foists on the rest of us without our permission.
What‘s a discoverable UI? Does it count to have options in a context menu? That’s very discoverable to someone like me, much less for some of my less computer-savvy relatives. A toolbar with unlabeled icons is not that different in that regard. I think it really boils down to how familiar someone is with the UI already and half of the solution is being willing to familiarize themselves with it.
Every Google app has a different share UI. If I hit share in YouTube, the panels scrolls vertically. Google Drive's share looks different, but also shares vertically.
Google Chrome's share panel looks identical to Drive, but behaves completely differently.
So, I'd say that I'm very familiar with Android's UI - but I don't think Google is.
A disjointed company produces a disjointed product. Mind you, this might be well be a deliberate choice made by people cleverer than me.
I see a complaint, "Hmmm. It didn't have the share destination that I wanted" yet the author never states what option they were looking for.
I would agree that, via the screenshot, the default options are all over the place and not prioritized well. However, the "Copy link" option is clearly visible. Being a website, I'm fundamentally unclear about what share option the writer could want beyond the ability to copy the url.
But the actual destination is irrelevant. How was I (or any user unfamiliar with the interface) supposed to intuit that the panel was horizontally scrollable.
From the article:
> There's no scrollbar, no handle, no "more" icon, nothing.
...
> I tried swiping it up - that's what I've learned most panels do in Android. But it did nothing. So I gave up.
...
> my thumb slipped transversely (...) The fucking thing was a horizontal slider!