Comment by lxe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lxe | Hacker News Reader

Don Norman's gripe applies not only to the elderly. I think good usability benefits everyone, and I do sympathise with him when it comes to the direction Apple has been taking for the past 10 years or so.

I don't think it's aesthetics vs usability that's at the core here -- I don't think at all that aesthetics and usability are somehow mutually exclusive. I think it's simply the lack of focus on first principles outlined by Don Normal himself.

HCI used to be front and center in the collective minds of the Internet, but it slowly faded to the background. As an example, check out the dates on the articles referenced in the "Mystery Meat Navigation" Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_meat_navigation#Refere...

I think it's neat that our affordances are evolving (we don't need to have things looking exactly like physical buttons anymore for us to click on them). But at the same time, we should still apply ergonomic guidelines when designing interfaces, whether it's for the elderly, or not.

The problem is on most projects, the managers end up calling the shots on what's good design and the vast majority of them don't know what they are talking about and are just looking for whatever looks like Apple.

I used to think it was the designer-as-dictator that was the problem but now I believe it's the self-anointing-expert manager who believes design is merely intuition and not a rigorous field of engineering.

> whatever looks like Apple.

and IMHO apple's design went south post-jobs with ios 7.

The main problems that I didn't like:

- the flat look meant buttons didn't look like buttons anymore. This means that you didn't know what is actionable on the screen

- hiding stuff offscreen. This hiding of complexity also hides common uncomplicated actions and requires extra swiping and fiddling for routine actions.

regardless of the merits of apple design, believing the discipline of design is merely converging towards it is a pretty impoverished view of the field.

This can’t have been different in the past. Why were the UI’s so much more usable at the time?

-edit- thanks for that mystery meat link, now I have a name for that. -

My special gripe is removing text labels below abstract, monochrome icons. The Markup toolbar being a good example of this {expletives deleted}. That an how finder colour labels turned into tiny little dots.

John Siracusa's Mac OS X reviews, do a good job of documenting the downfall at least for Mac OS X (before it became the barf that is macos).

Here's a start

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2005/04/macosx-10-4/3/#mail-...

If I understand what you're saying, it's the macos UI that is degenerate?

I say that because the reliability with advanced hardware (power management, power per watt) has been famously rejoiced over increasingly with the M1 and M2 hardware and macos on it.

Personally I too get annoyed with the UI inflexibilities, prefer Asahi so i can just control the visual aspects.

(I've got an Airbook M2)

Windows became unusable for me around 8, now it's an ad-filled dumpster fire. I'm amazed at how quickly Asahi has developed hardware support, Linux isn't a serious option for me, yet, so I'm stuck with macos.

If somebody wants to port Haiku to the M2, with flawless hardware support, including accelerated video, and power management, that would be great, and probably no more than an hours work. Or port Mac OS X Panther/Tiger

{Rant starts, you can stop reading now }

I offer no solution, and this isn't really a criticism, but an observation:

Linux,... I'm glad it exists, but I've reached JWZ's CADT point. I'm amazed at all the hard work, but. I can't use it. It's always something, and I'm too "old" or lazy to care anymore.

I've used Linux since Slackware with kernel 1.2, I remember ipfwadm, I've configured XFree86 Modelines. I bought Caldera OpenLinux, that included Word Perfect (and let you play a game while it installed). Over the years, I've used RedHat, Fedora (Core), openSuse, Debian, Ubuntu, Mandrake, and more as a daily or sometimes daily driver.

The entire concept of a "distro" is just sort of absurd, 99% the same software - Linux Kernel, GNU+misc Userland, Xorg/Wayland, some sort of desktop or GUI toolkit, and all the same open source apps.

I don't care about package managers, or init systems, or kernel versions anymore. I don't know or want to know about the merits of FLapak Or Snaps, I just want to use the damn apps.

Now get off my lawn!

Air M2 too, and totally agree including old slackware etc

Also a longtime, off-and-on Linux user. Using old gaming laptops instead of Apple HW, though.

My latest thing has been Solus Linux. The hardware has "just worked", the package management is genuinely original, it has a stable rolling-release and definitely cleaner feeling than the Debian/Redhat landscape(I have not opened a command line for packages, not even once!), it has a MATE desktop(which they plan to switch over to XFCE, but it's basically the same to me - tried and true over bold and new) and the remaining bits of snowflake software work in a VM running whatever other OS.

So the computer has finally gotten out of the way for me, at least until I do software development. But that's one of the things I bottle up in the VM, and the only associated hassle of that is the edit/test cycle, for which I just forgo IDE functions to do fast local editing and try not to rely on a fast iteration loop otherwise. I've learned that it mostly gets you to wrong answers faster and the insights need time anyway.

I'll take your special gripe and raise you one. My gripe is not being able to get rid of the icons in favor of the text labels. There's a reason alphabetic (and similar) writing systems won out over hieroglyphics, and why we don't use both today.

And this is not just Mac OS, it's Microsoft and an increasing amount of Windows-compatible software. I wouldn't mind the Ribbon half as much if I could just turn off the hieroglyphs, I mean the icons, and keep the text labels.

I think good usability benefits everyone

I'm not sure we can say this. There are tradeoffs when you can't make assumptions about your end user. Text that is comfortably large for someone with bad eyesight might not allow enough text for someone with better eyesight. Volumes for someone with poor hearing might be painful for someone with better hearing, etc. A company like Apple will always err towards the demo that isn't likely on a fixed income.

We've got companies actively removing usability from their products in order to chase fads - check out Youtube Shorts and how they don't have stuff like manual tracking or volume control at all.

Maybe your argument has some merit to it, but based on where we are, I don't think it needs to be worried about too much.

Companies don't remove usability just to chase fads. They do it to exploit users.

The lack of manual tracking on YouTube shorts, or (much earlier) Instagram reels? That's not a fad, that's a "feature" - it's meant to change the way you interact with and experience the content, forcing you into a paradigm that's optimal for the vendor.

Same with other usability and accessibility features of yore - the ones that disappear first are the ones giving users flexibility and control, because the point is to funnel users into specific, optimized workflows that are most profitable for the vendor.

The REASON they're chasing the fad is to change how you interact with the content in a way that's positive for them.

What do you mean by manual tracking? And how is there no volume control? Can't you just change the volume on your device?

> Can't you just change the volume on your device?

And this is the problem with YouTube shorts—they've been designed exclusively for the mobile experience without any consideration for desktop.

On desktop it's always been customary to allow adjusting the volume on each piece of media individually, because multitasking is not uncommon. Some people will want to be able to adjust the volume of YouTube independently from the volume of the video game they're playing at the same time. Or even just turn the volume down while still having full volume alerts from Slack.

I don't see it as a problem to make a mobile-first experience. A volume setting takes up screen real estate and is really not needed on mobile.

Perhaps it will be added to desktop Shorts as the product matures.

> A volume setting takes up screen real estate and is really not needed on mobile.

This is a solved problem: don't show the volume control on mobile. This is what YouTube already does for every other kind of video.

I agree, and that's what I just said. YouTube Shorts has not existed very long, but it could very well be on the roadmap to add a volume control to the desktop version.

That's the thing. _good_ usability that benefits everyone is not always trivial. Or cheap.

Having huge text everywhere or loud volume is not the same as having a good way to easily change text size or adjust the volume.

There's not really such a thing as usability that benefits everyone. Design is defined by tradeoffs; if you think you've found a perfect solution, you probably haven't fully understood the problem.

Many blind people rely on tactile paving bumps to navigate the urban environment. Those bumps are a literal pain in the ass for wheelchair users who have to roll over them. An ATM that is low enough for a wheelchair user to reach might be too low for a tall person with a stiff back. A computer interface that seems absurdly over-simplified to a power user might still be impossibly complex for a novice.

There's a simple solution to at least the text problem: software control. On most web browsers you can embiggen or ensmallen the font with Ctrl-Plus or Ctrl-Minus. And every app has a way of controlling audio volume, and often the OS and/or hardware that the app runs on can also control the audio. So I don't think that's an issue at all.

Everyone wants good usability, but what that means varies widely. When my vision was 20/5 (really, it was amazing), I wanted small text with lots of information on the screen so I could do more without context switching. Now that my vision is a pitiful 20/20 (how do people live this way), context switching with zoom is ideal on the phone and most of the time I'd rather use a laptop.

Interfaces cannot appeal to everyone. We can do better to make magnification universal, but that's not what the article means.

It's also funny to read this article as they think that older people want scooters. Most of the people who are experiencing problems are having issues with strength and balance. Scooters are the last thing they want.

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