The condescending UI | Hacker News Reader

The condescending UI

theverge.com

72 pointssuperchink76 comments

The Condescending Author

Talks about how he feels to smart for the UI, but doesn't bother looking up the substantial body of research explaining why it's useful to any user (novice to expert).

It's 2011. I thought HCI had some respect. Stuff like this seriously makes my throat clench a little bit.

Half the complaints cover things that help your subconscious have a better idea of what's going on, from z-order to spatial changes in windows. The other half cover adding more useful context to a window. Without the dressing, the address book is a list pane and a few text boxes. If it and other windows (say, iTunes) were plain controls-in-windows, you'll have to spend extra time figuring out which one is which.

But, this story isn't about UIs. He's building himself as a curmudgeon character (have a look at the author page). It's a new sort of mid-level ludditery. BeOS? Haiku? Fucking really? There are at least a half-dozen changes you can make to a stock ubuntu config (mostly turning off unity) fit that mold today. But it's not about getting somewhere he prefers, it's about complaining.

He even models his appearance on the late Paul Harvey.

http://img.timeinc.net/time/daily/2009/0903/harvey_0301.jpg

I feel like I am completely opposite of this dude. He hates dropshadows around windows. He hates the minimize-to-dock effect in OSX, saying it "wastes time". I just hit the minimize button and it took all of one second - one second in which my hindbrain was given a strong visual cue that I am switching out of one context. I use it regularly and I've never stopped to think about it.

I mean, a lot of the stuff he's saying feels "condescending"? It's all stuff that has preferences. You can change the size of icons. I mostly navigate my Mac's filesystem in the 3-column view.

He's bemoaning the fact that the OSX menu fades out when you leave it versus the System 3ish menus that just popped in and out. And honestly I can't say I notice the fade consciously either - but subconsciously I like it. It's instantly responsive when I ask for it, and it's got a nice slow visual effect as I'm done with it.

But then again, for all that I'm an artist with a bent towards minimalism, the OSX address book really doesn't bug me either. I quit using the iPad's calendar - but that's because it had a design directly taken from the revised OSX one, with that unusable-on-tablets row of tiny buttons for changing weeks. I really don't see supposed horrid UI sins like Calendar's torn page, it's just chrome that's vanished into the background.

He basically seems to be saying that all modern polish is crap and we should be happy with the looks that were pretty much required back in the 90s due to limitations. He disses new experiments like Metro as well, but really doesn't manage to articulate what his dream UI would be. Besides "oh god I wish I could use BeOS". Which looks... god, I feel like I'm using my Amiga when I look at that screenshot. Which I loved at the time but I've moved on.

Where do you draw the line when it comes to distracting details in UI? Is the level of detail in current Apple products perfect? Should they move towards more skeuomorphic designs or more typographical designs?

Honestly I am not a fan of the skeuomorphic stuff - that way lies the hundreds of ugly-ass mp3 player skins that look like some little physical device sitting on your desktop - but the Apple stuff has been relatively inoffensive. The version of iCal that I ditched is the one on the iPad, because it requires me to poke at tiny buttons on the bottom of the screen to go to next/previous month/day/week instead of just doing a nice easy swipe like every other iPad app trains me to do. (Or even like I can do in iCal on my Mac, if I'm interacting via the trackpad instead of my Wacom tablet!)

I think it's worth noting that the latest version of iBooks on the iPad has an option to drop the semi-skeuomorphic* borders. It's a thing they tried. I wouldn't be surprised to see the cute borders vanish sometime.

I'm also not a fan of PURELY TYPOGRAPHIC ui designs, as those require a TON of whitespace to work. There's a medium to be struck. Usually Apple does pretty well, I think; OSX as it stands now (Lion) is really, really good at quietly conveying information without screaming it.

Maybe I just have a different idea of what's pleasingly minimal than the author of the piece at hand. I dunno.

* I say semi-skeuomorphic because they don't change depending on how far you are in the book - if it did then it would actually be a pretty damn slick way of subtly delivering the same information as a scrollbar.

Typographical interfaces work well on mobile unless you're not a fan of navigation hierarchies

The OS X menu fade is a good example of a well thought-out UI animation.

Note that the menu does not fade in, since this would actually slow the user down.

Contrast this with certain other implementations.

Yeah, I'd never noticed it until this dude made me look at it. It's really, really nice! It also takes advantage of the way your brain works: you latch onto FAST changes, and kinda easily ignore slow ones. So when you open up a menu, BAM, hey, context switch time guys, here's a MENU. Then when you choose something or mouse out of the menu, it fades nice and slow - ignore me, I don't matter any more, your attention can go to the dialogue that just popped up because of fiddling with me, or back to whatever you were doing.

Command-option-M should probably use a faster animation than the yellow button. I never minimize so it doesn't really bother me.

Disclaimer: I'm on a UX team at Microsoft.

Regarding the transitions - often times an animated transition is used to mask program latency. Unminimizing a program can use an animation to mask the time it needs to possibly read from an on-disk cache. The use of them is especially evident on phones, which make heavy use of transition effects. Swoop ins and other animations will often give the program around 500 milliseconds before it has to be responsive. It gives the illusion of things working faster than they actually are. With larger memory stores and SSD's becoming more common, many of these animations are no longer absolutely necessary, but on older systems they help tremendously for the user experience.

Are there any other UI "hacks" for performance?

I've always thought that watching a bar fill up is much more satisfying than just a displayed X%.

> Chris Harrison at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, working with Zhiquan Yeo and Scott Hudson, has shown that animated pop-up download progress bars which use visual illusions make the process seem around 10 per cent faster than it really is.

Apple already uses a a basic visual trick of this kind in its Mac OS X operating system, but Harrison's research suggests such techniques could be used to greater effect.

From: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18754-visual-tricks-ca...

TL;DR -- Old man yells at cloud. (http://www.oldmanyells.com/omyac.jpg)

I can't believe The Verge, whose tech reviews have quickly become among the very best on the web, would post such an idiotic, pointless rant.

He doesn't like the genie effect in OS X. So change it! I did! It almost seems like he thinks that UIs should change themselves to suit him, rather than the other way around.

"...UIs should change themselves to suit him[the User], rather than the other way around"

Now here is a novel idea! :)

These interfaces have millions and millions of users, many of which are by no means experts with a computer, and may even only use it sparingly. The design has to be universal, and these cues make the interface that much easier to use across the general userbase.

Saying you don't like the interface because 'its condescending' is like saying you don't like your suit because it doesn't fit perfectly on you. The solution is to just go get it tailored, because that suit wasn't custom made to fit you. I also use win7 classic theme because I prefer it over the bells and whistles in Aero.

There's really no need to complain about what companies ship as the default. That's just the setting they feel will work best for the average user. Fine, you're not the average user. That's why they build settings to allow you to change shit. So fucking change it and you're fine.

> There's really no need to complain about what companies ship as the default. That's just the setting they feel will work best for the average user. Fine, you're not the average user. That's why they build settings to allow you to change shit. So fucking change it and you're fine.

I agree. This is what made the post really annoying for me. If you are really an expert user, in almost every case he mentioned; you can change the UI settings to suit your tastes.

That's why I hate OSX. I have plenty of real live humans to condescend to me in my life, I don't need inanimate machines to also treat my like I'm too stupid to live.

I've only just moved from XP to windows 7, so we'll see how that goes. So far not too many complaints, but you can definitely tell that they were pulling heavily from the OSX experience, much to my sadness.

(only mildly related)

God, I wish there was a widely-supported standard for animated PNGs. Those GIFs look like they're straight out of the 90s.

Yesyesyes, animated GIFs are the devil, but they're shockingly useful for certain tasks such as loading spinners.

I think what's cooler is that WebP now has support for lossless encoding and will soon support animation.

Then all we'll need is WebP support.

It'll be available soon as a plugin for Firefox, with Chrome following "shortly" thereafter.

It's possible to make animated GIFs that use more than 256 colors per frame (although they'll probably be bigger than a format designed for that sort of thing).

Technically, I believe, you're still limited to 255 colors per frame- you can just put two frames with two different sets of 255 colors on top of each other with 0 delay. :)

Not quite: Each image descriptor has its own Local Color Table, but the delays aren't set by the image descriptor, they're set by the Graphics Control Extension block, and you can have multiple image descriptors per GCE block. So the GIF can look something like: HDR(GCT) GCE(delay10) IMG(LCT) IMG(LCT) IMG(LCT) GCE(delay10) IMG(LCT) IMG(LCT) IMG(LCT) ..., with several image descriptors per frame, each with its own palette.

However, due to historical reasons (GIFs optimized for old browsers on slow computers), modern browsers sometimes insert a small delay between image descriptors even if they're in the same frame. I generally consider this a bug. However, there are many broken GIFs out there...

I'm of two minds about this:

I love emacs, precisely because it doesn't use any space reminding me what it can do, but I also love having reminders of what all the other software I'm forced to use in my day-to-day life (but not as often) can do.

In the end, though, I'm much more irritated with OS X's crappy file manager than I am with anything quite so broad as OS X being "too condescending".

Count your blessings. Nautilus, a Linux file manager, does not have open-on-hover.

I'm wary of the recommendations in this article. If someone repeating a fact you've heard elsewhere makes you feel patronized, you're an outlier. The greater portion of your users, unless you're in a niche field, will need that repetition. Moreover, if we live long enough to need that help ourselves, we can count ourselves lucky.

We are not necessarily our users.

Switching Windows 7 to the classic theme is not fleeing condescension, it’s nostalgia and has little to do with the topic at hand.

No. I haven’t used Windows 7, but I always switched XP/Vista to the classic theme because it takes up less space (fits a lot more minimized windows in the task bar, etc.), is less distracting, and makes it easier to judge colors in images or graphics (the big areas of blue really messes with fine color judgement). I also reverted to the “classic” start menu, switched the control panel wizard off, cut out all the auto helper doodads in MS Office, etc.

Speaking as someone who has always hated everything Windows stands for, I assure you there was no nostalgia involved

Well, then you should actually use Windows 7 and report back. It’s awesome.

I use Windows 7, and I configure the task bar to XP-style non-stacked oblong buttons, I use Classic Start Menu to get an XP style menu - I absolutely loathe the Vista and 7 start menus - and I've just about completely given up on Windows Explorer, and mostly moved my file management to Cygwin bash in the terminal.

My strategy for dealing with MS changing Windows is to use non-MS software and isolate myself from them.

Does the classic Start menu have a search box? I don't think I'd willingly give up the ability to just type what I want and not ha e to navigate those ridiculously long menus.

Yeah it does. It is a relief that the search actually finally works in win7 so no one has to care about the uselessly horrible menus and dialogs fixing the control panel.

On space constrained displays like laptops, I prefer the space maximizing Windows Classic theme, regardless of Windows version. I also like the thought that I'm not wasting any processing cycles on visual candy, even if it probably doesn't make much of a difference.

Processing cycles? Really?! I think I last heard that argument in 2000.

Wow, backwards luddites still going strong, eh?

Hah, kids these days. Come curl up next to my easychair and I'll tell you about having to change vacuum tubes in my PC...

I have to disagree very strongly with one of his suggestions: the differently sized buttons. The buttons have different sizes because they're used at different rates. You make things that are more often used bigger because it makes your interface faster: see Fitts's law.

Am I the only one who agrees? Obviously going back to something like BeOS is a little extreme, but fact is OS X Lion made things worse. I don't need LaunchPad or AirDrop or the AppStore, oh and thanks for hiding my Library folder and reversing my scroll direction, wtf. Now I'm looking at Windows 8 and the only thing that comes to my mind is: Why the hell would I want to install that on my PC? Tell me. My PC is not an iPhone! If this trend continues we all end up using Ubuntu without Unity sooner or later.

You know, that's the beauty of Linux: you can have your computer however you want it. Not only do you have more options--Unity, Gnome, KDE, LXDE, XMonad...etc--but they are also all more configurable. I really think most people would benefit from switching to Linux.

[my UI opinion] I find Ribbon to be extremely helpful both in having more functions available at a glance, and for teaching keyboard shortcuts (for example, hold alt in Word 2010).

Oh - a part of OSX that I find condescending is the inability to alt-tab between browser windows wie Windows(z.B. two Chrome windows, each with their own set of tabs). Is there a shortcut I'm missing?

In OS X, you command-tab between applications. You can command-tilde between windows in the same application. Mac OS X distinguishes between applications and windows; Windows doesn't.

Except that it behaves in a completely different way from CMD-Tab.

Cmd-Tab once, switch to the last activated app. Cmd-Tab again, switch back to the previous app.

Cmd-` once, switch to the next window in the current app. Cmd-` again, switch to the next window (not back to the previous one). This is incredibly frustrating, because usually when I'm doing this I want to switch back and forth between two open windows, not cycle through ALL of them! And I'm certainly not going to remember what "order" 5 windows are in.

Also, having to think consciously about whether a window you're working in is within the same application or not to decide which keyboard shortcut you should use makes the whole keyboard shortcut a frustrating experience in OSX. Windows did it right. Alt-Tab switches to the last viewed window, regardless of what application it belongs to. Simple. Elegant. Genius.

This is probably a matter of preference. Personally, the OS X way is often more elegant. When I am working with a lot of windows in a particular program (say, five text files) and have another application I want check in on (say, an instant message conversation), the OS X way is wonderful. Not having to worry about the IM window getting in the way of my documents saves me from a lot of confusion.

The OS X way definitely does add complexity to the UI, but I just think it is worth the trouble.

Usually when I'm doing work, I'm switching between different apps, copy/pasting stuff (graphics, sounds, text), moving files or just referencing something. I do this far more often than switching to an IM client (for which I just click on the bouncing icon in the dock, then alt-tab back to my work).

The problem is that I want to switch between a few windows that are not necessarily in the same application. In Windows (and Linux), it's a no-brainer. Alt-tab and I'm done. In Mac, I end up changing within the app when I want to change between apps and vice versa. I don't care if they're within the same app or not. I just want to do stuff between windows A and B and maybe C.

Example: I'm writing some code. I look something up in my browser. I also have a second window in my IDE with some more code I'm using as a template for what I'm building. In Windows or Linux, it's very easy to alt-tab between those 3 windows. Alt-tab, Alt-tab-tab. In Mac, I'm always fumbling with which is the right key combination to get the right kind of window switching and is this a text wrangler window or an xcode window? Aargh!

It's funny that they mention BeOS because I think it had a nice solution to keyboard app switching: Alt-tab switched programs (it had the same Mac-like app-centric design), and it looked somewhat like the traditional Windows. With Alt still pressed, you could use the up/down arrow keys to move within windows for that app. I wish I could find a screenshot of it.

I admit Mac OS X's behavior is unexpected if you are already a Windows user. Windows, incidentally, doesn't even have the "application" concept Mac OS X does--windows actually behave as separate application instances, and persistent applications require some type of separate status tray element to keep running without a window.

I don't think it's confusing being able to distinguish from a Photoshop window and a browser window, but I do think the cycling behavior between the two should be consistent.

Cmd + `

I do miss the older NeXTSTEP interface, and am finding Lion to be a real pain at times (e.g. Duplicate instead of Save As). It seems like adding the Launcher has also been a pain (no real improvement over just putting the App folder in the Dock set to List, Folder, Sort by Name). Some stuff is nicer like the Mission Control.

I often think of what OS X would be like if Apple assumed only Pro users would use it and everyone else would be on iOS.

"I often think of what OS X would be like if Apple assumed only Pro users would use it and everyone else would be on iOS."

It's an interesting thought but quite feasible. Open up any Apple "Pro" app like Logic Studio, Aperture or (more recently) Final Cut Pro X. The look and feel is quite different than the rest of OS X. Things are smaller and far less intuitive (they are hidden away). Apple knows that amateurs will stick with Garageband, iPhoto and iMovie, all of which feature large, intuitive interfaces. I like that they are not afraid to make their "Pro" apps heavy-duty.

I feel this guy's pain every time I have to wait half a second for a dialog to "scroll" into place on OS X instead of just appearing, damn it.

I think you mean the Lion animations. Disable them with:

  defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool no

Other tweaks:

  defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -bool yes # disable 3D dock
  defaults write com.apple.dock no-bouncing -bool yes # disable bouncing dock icons
  defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool yes # disable window shadows on screenshots

This is the foundation of my primary complaint with Apple's interfaces: by constantly assuming that you don't know how to use a computer, they make it impossible to learn. We here are all fine with our OSX boxes, because we already know how to use computers, but there are millions of people out there that started knowing nothing and have ended up knowing nothing.

Is it a bad thing if you don't need to know anything?

The article's comment about the Ribbon in Office/Windows 8 "assuming [you] don't know how to use a menu, a key command, or a honest-to-goodness toolbar" is silly. Menus and toolbars make things more hidden, more modal, less discoverable, and key commands are still there. What's the problem?

This part hit me as well: complain much?

I love the Ribbon interface!

If the point of design is to reduce the total number of clicks required to get to your goal, reduce the total amount of clutter and get as many useful elements in front of the user when they need it (without hunting/searching through menus and help files) than I think Ribbon is fantastic. Of course, it takes adjusting to, if all you're used to is hunting through menus.

If the point of design is to make you feel intellectual and special because you know how to use this set of tools and there's no tutorial, than why are you using a GUI at all?

He constantly expresses his love for Windows 95 and older Mac distributions.

One has to wonder why he didn't just profess his undying love for command line operating systems. No animations, no curved edges, no tutorials, no help.

Just you and the computer.

I'm chalking this up to: "GET OFF MAH LAWN"

(How dare my calendar look like a real calendar! This is a computer, dammit, I expect black screen terminal and green letters!)

You really shouldn't have to 'learn' anything to do routine tasks on a computer - it should be intuitive.

If the normals can do everything they want with their computers while still 'knowing nothing', that's a success, not something to grouse about.

Just an FYI - when someone says "intuitive" in relation to user interface they usually mean "discoverable".

GUI's are usually somewhat discoverable (you can fiddle around and often figure something out) whereas a CLI tends to require study before it is useful (and thus why things like very well written manpages with examples are great).

The better a GUI is at allowing the user to make assumptions that are accurate is the closest I think you can get to "intuitive". That's the product of a lot of good design decisions.

The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned. We should be making it easy for the users to learn, rather than forcing them into a stilted, toy-like environment.

Anyone who believes that the nipple is an intuitive interface and doesn't require learning time has never been with a mother trying to breastfeed a newborn in its first weeks of life.

There is no such thing as an intuitive interface, only some that are easier to learn than others.

Online user interfaces are intuitive when they match well with the offline interfaces you're already familiar with, so no additional learning is necessary.

This is why buttons look like buttons, and change appearance when pressed. This is why things that are above other things have drop shadows.

You might be smart and experienced enough not to need such 'toy-like' visual cues, but computers aren't just for you.

How do you go from being a "normal" to being an expert? Learning. It's much, much harder to do that on one of today's macs. Of course, if you're suggesting that we don't need experts, that's something else entirely.

I've found the OSX alternates between being overly childish (the shiny dock) and hiding functionality behind overly complex "shortcuts". You want to copy a section of the screen to the clipboard? Why, that's ⌘^⇧4! Never mind that my keyboard lacks symbols on the keys, so I'm left guessing what rubbish like ⌥ means.

That command has been around since OS 9 and probably before. Have similar commands with the same level of utility (copying a selectable section of the screen) and the same keystroke been around in Windows/X11 for that length of time?

Would you also suggest that vi change it's commands so that they're easier to use?

Historical inertia matters, especially with muscle memory things like key combos.

You can keep the old one while putting new ones in place. I'm sure no one is jumping at the opportunity to reuse ⌘^⇧4 once Apple moves away from it.

I don't use Apples much but I'm pretty sure that the keyboard has a ⌥ symbol on the option button.

It hasn't since the days of the translucent frame with white keys.

That functionality is by no means hidden behind the keyboard shortcut. You can just as easily use /Applications/Utilities/Grab.app (whose app icon is a window behind scissors) and choose the "Selection" option from the "Capture" menu.

Interesting. I've been using OS X for about six months and never found that. I tried several permutations of "screen shot", "screen capture", etc. in Spotlight without finding it.

The application looks to be separate from the OS X core screenshot feature; it has completely different shortcuts, styling and functionality.

This whole article just comes off as tech hipsterism to me. It's like being nostalgic for cassette tapes and conveniently forgetting how bad they sounded, how quickly they wore out, or how often a tape deck would ruin them for you. Put BeOS, NeXT or Windows Clasisc side-by-side with Windows 7 or OSX and let people choose which one they prefer. My guess is the vast majority will opt for the more modern, condescending, GUIs because they look nicer and are easier to use. The author should probably check out GNUStep or blackbox if he wants something less mainstream. Is CDE still available?

I have to disagree with your assessment of cassette tape technology. Having overlapped the usage of tapes, CDs, and MP3 players for about 5 years, I can say that yes, tapes sound worse than CDs, but it takes a lot of effort to wear them out, and it was rare that a tape deck would eat your tape.

This is a better article about skeuomorphism for those interested: http://www.andymangold.com/skeuomorphism-the-opiate-of-the-p...

PS - Skeuomorphism definition: "Strictly speaking it means retaining design features from earlier designs when those features previously had a specific reason for being that way, but do not any longer." - http://madebymany.com/blog/apples-aesthetic-dichotomy

I like the brochure thing. I think it takes into account the human nature of the users and their feelings. It's design that lets us feel connection with the program.

I much rather prefer comfortable textured armchairs than soulless straight chairs of Bauhaus' spirit. I think what Metro and other "minimalists" forget to remember is that computer screen is a canvas, a medium. You shouldn't force user to think like a machine, but rather force the machine to think like a human.

I just wonder when there will be someone who creates usable interfaces for everyday products like microwaves, dvrs, and thermostats. Well I guess Nest (www.nest.com) actually designed a pretty decent thermostat, is this the next revolution?

He has some points to make for power users, but I like reactive buttons and just an animated UI overall because it lets me know things are working. I would hate a UI that doesn't seem different when the computer is frozen or sluggish.

Nothing wrong with what Paul said - he is just not the targeted user.

I think the author is going over the top criticizing drop shadows and such. But I can see what he means when he talks about minimize animations and the godforsaken Windows troubleshooting wizard. I've never experienced a single instance where the Windows troubleshooting wizard helped me solve a problem any more complicated than "Is the printer really plugged in?" If it wants to hold my hands, at least it should steer me in the right direction!

It's OK for software to act like a kindergarten teacher from time to time, if it actually delivers enough value to justify it. For example, painting the chrome of a focused window in brighter colors helps the user tell which window is in focus. But when the "childish" feature adds nothing but inconvenience, that's when people start getting annoyed.

Disclaimer: I'm quite fond of Windows 7 Aero, though I always make those oversized, over-detailed icons way smaller than they are by default.

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