A new UI annoyance
plus.google.com
plus.google.com
1. Banner ads in footer that blink every time you scroll the page. The blinking makes me go nuts when reading a longer article. It gets my attention alright but I sure don't associate that brand positively in my mind.
2. Not being able to select text on an iPhone in safari. I really dont get this. Websites shoot themselves in the foot because often I want to share the article and quote a sentence or two. I don't because I can't select the text!
I suspect it is this way because double tap was reserved for zoom-to-fit in iPhone OS 1.0, and now we're stuck with it being that way.
When we had a redesign of our app, I decided that was one rule that could be left out (and only applied where needed).
This has always confounded me about advertising. Intrusive ads piss everybody off. Why does it happen so much?
Sponsorships for example are a good way to advertise your brand because you can sponsor things like hackathons and marathons that people see as healthy, happy events. Associate yourself with that. Shoving your logo in my face when I'm concentrating on something else is going to make me resent you. I even used to keep a .txt file of companies I'm avoiding because they annoyed me with their advertising.
1) It's easier to measure the increase in ad revenue than the decrease in brand value. Somebody tries out the shitty ads, sees income increase, and says, "Hey, free money!" Later on, execs are mystified about viewership declines.
2) The intrusive ads don't piss everybody off, just a sensitive fraction. They don't care if you resent them as long as enough yahoos keep watching and clicking.
I think G+ sees the cookie and forces a login. Google Groups does the same thing, and it drives me insane.
The worst offender was the HDR button in the iOS 5 Camera app. It just had an "HDR On" label at the top, which left me absolutely no way of knowing if that meant HDR was on right now or if touching that would turn HDR on.
I think the conclusion is that in a lot of cases there are no conclusion. There are no definite best practice, both can be justified and both are used pretty widely.
(PS: I just checked Vimeo, Youtube and Hulu. It seems that they tend to agree on showing pause when it's playing. However Hulu and Youtube both show the mute icon when it's muted, so they're not consistent regarding action vs. state. My point is that for video players, there seems to be a potential best practice here, but in general "action vs. state" is not clear-cut)
I put 'button' in quotes, though, to reflect a key difference: the mute/unmute control in VLC isn't actually a button; it's an icon without button styling sitting next to the volume slider, and this appears to be the case for other desktop media players as well. Since the presentation of the control is distinct, this might be less of an inconsistency with desktop players than with these web video players.
Still, there seems to be an increasing muddle between action and state in labeling UI controls, and that's not even considering functional controls that display arbitrary information unrelated to any current state, like icons for applications that display arbitrary content from a file created or accessed by that application (I'm looking at you, Windows Phone Photo app).
I really don't understand why there's so much wild experimentation with UIs in production software these days, but I do find my count of UI-related "WTF moments" going up every month.
The point is that it's common to have UI elements that can go one way or the other and it's often possible to justify either way.
As far as why there's a lot of experimentation, I think it's just because designers are trying to find the pattern that will make people go "wow, look at this, this is so cool/smart". Look for example at the praise Loren Brichter got for pull-to-refresh. (it was indeed cool and smart) I think a lot of people are experimenting to see if they can find the same kind of pattern that end up sprouting all over the place. I don't know if this is really something new though.
It just seems like there's a tendency for new versions of existing products to have in their release notes something along the lines of "added: entirely new grounds-up UI design, based on experimental concepts, that bears little resemblance to previous UI". E.g. Ubuntu Unity, Gnome 3, Windows 8; ironically, Apple currently offers the most conservative and predictable desktop UI among currently-shipping OSes.
This doesn't really relate to the state-vs.-action question directly, except that I thing both may be related to a current tendency to emphasize visual aesthetics over functional consistency.
The reason I've chosen this is that the actual button is changing its state (e.g. other toggles merely slide a box left or right with no color or label updates). This ultimately reflects the design principle of giving the user feedback. Clicking the toggle noticeably shows a change in state.
There's also some affordance in the design because of the coloring. This isn't perfect (as acknowledged in the comment about color blindness below), but it solves enough of the problem to be obvious. No interface is 100% perfect for every user, every test case, or extreme.
Here you have 3 buttons, so it's easy to know which one is selected, but he's talking about when this is used for two different views ("often the choice is not between turning a specific feature on or off, but between two different view, modes or whatever"), and when the styling makes it hard to know which one is "pressed".
Actually, the styling in the linked screenshot is not fantastic in that regard. If it had only two buttons, you would have to assume that the one that doesn't match the surrounding bar is the one that is not selected, but if you remove the bar, or change its color, you're out of luck.
Why cant I read the web without a public profile that includes my real-world first and last names?
I could try and logout, but this has certain implication on my Android phone I don't want, like possibly disconnecting Sync and Gmail etc.
Also, saying "you can, but..." is a weasely way to describe things. I think that having to do anything beyond clicking on a link in order to read a public webpage is an unacceptable barrier.
I use a Harmony remote which also retains state (eg it knows what is already on and on which inputs) and so sends the necessary codes to all devices such as if you want to stop playing a DVD and switch to a game console.
[off]on
rather than an opaque one...
[xxx]on
Here i think the Quija sliders really are a smart, intuitive solution
That's probably my single big annoyance in Sublime Text.
I think it's a fairly common UI pattern.
A good UI doesn't make you think in order to to understand what an element does.
A simple example: http://s33.beta.photobucket.com/user/hfsktr/media/temp_zps28... a media player that has the options in the image linked. Which is on and which is off? I usually guess that darker is selected but occasionally the lighter option is the one that is on.
When it is a binary question the selection is clear (or when there are other options to compare to). The few times I've seen the options is for something like styling in a game (classic/new).
Oh, I see, it could be a dipswitch style toggle where you can't tell which is toggled.
Here's an easier solution: use the damn platform widgets. It probably looks better than your custom solution and integrates with the rest of the OS better anyway.