How to tell if your UI sucks | Hacker News Reader

How to tell if your UI sucks

hscott.net

41 pointsblueintegral47 comments

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Actually it's very interesting to do that:

Mac: http://i.imgur.com/vuoxgiQ.png

Android: http://i.imgur.com/dvhj28G.png

iPhone: http://i.imgur.com/x98rzDH.png

Chromebook: http://i.imgur.com/I7RfPME.png

Linux: http://i.imgur.com/D29vt3n.png

Ubuntu: http://i.imgur.com/78sxDgV.png

Google: http://i.imgur.com/fVVbyFq.png

Facebook: http://i.imgur.com/HCFdFom.png

Twitter: http://i.imgur.com/BsdhdyN.png

And of course, Hacker News: http://i.imgur.com/vJAoT7R.png

Here is the album: http://imgur.com/a/sTlND

I think Chromebook wins there with "chromebook how to use"

The Mac one is definitely consistent with my experience. Took a while to memorize cmd-shift-4 for taking screenshots.

I can never remember if it's 3 or 4, and Alt, or Command, or Ctrl, or Shift, or a combination of, or...

Unfortunately it's a bit of all of them. There are multiple ways to take screenshots on a mac depending on what you're after:

Cmd-Shift-3: takes a full screen shot.

Cmd-Shift-4: gives you a crosshair to select a portion of the screen.

Cmd-Shift-4 + Space: gives you the crosshair, and pressing space allows you to select individual windows to screenshot.

All of the commands above will save the resulting screen shot to the desktop. If you add Alt to any of the commands, it instead saves the shot to the clipboard. (So the OSX equivalent to the "Print Screen" button in Windows is Cmd-Alt-Shift-3)

Then I recommend to use Preview.app's File->Take Screen Shot. Not as quick, but easy to remember.

Cool, didn't know about that. That's better than using Grab.app, which has the same functionality and also comes with Macs by default. In Preview, you can immediately manipulate the image or save in more exotic formats than TIFF (the only format allowed in Grab).

That's handy yet completely random. Would be nice if it was under the Apple menu.

It suffers greatly from the OS X modifier key disease. And there's what...like 4 different kinds of screenshots?

edit apparently there are 7 from reading the comments below.

Same here. I just mash various combos of shift, command, control, option, and 3 until it works.

"google how to search" as an autocomplete for google search makes my head hurt.

The requested URL /how-to-tell-if-your-ui-sucks/ was not found on this server.

Well, that's one way...

Sorry about that, stupid DreamHost disabled my site because they detected high load. I don't have any of my credentials with me, so it'll be a couple hours before it's back up. Use the Google cache for now. Sorry :/

Can't blame you! Happened to me with my very first popular post (on dreamhost too).

Lesson? Stay away from cheap shitty hosts like Dreamhost who will "help" you by disabling your site just when it gets successful. Assholes.

A self-hosted VPS from digitalocean or others costs barely anything and will never get miraculously switched off by dreamhost bofhs.

Yep, I think Dreamhost just lost me as a customer.

Yea, I've been slowing moving all of my websites off of dreamhost. One more to go and I'll be able to close my account.

They had really great service when I signed up 10 years ago. I've been completely frustrated with them for the past few weeks though - I've had at least 5 different customer support reps give me the same wrong instructions instead of recognizing and fixing the issue, followed by a manager who "helpfully" did it for me and completely broke the website. It's still offline...

How is this meaningful at all? Of course people knew how to do stuff in Windows 7 because it had, except for some minor and cosmetic changes, basically the same UI as Windows 95. Now with Windows 8 the actually re-designed stuff completely. Is that bad? Well, I myself had to Google a few basic things in the beginning as well, but once you know these basics everything else is rather straight forward.

PS: I'm not a full-time windows user. I use OS X and Linux mostly.

It's a clear sign the UX of Windows 8 is _different_ from Windows 7, but whether that's bad or not would have to depend on what your expectations are. If you want things to remain the same between Windows 7 and Windows 8, you're going to be disappointed. If you don't mind getting used to changes, it's probably not so bad.

That said, my personal experience with Windows 8.1 isn't great. It feels like a mix of 2 entirely different environments, one of which (modern UI) has no business on a desktop computer in my opinion. It makes for a confusing experience. I also strongly dislike the magic corners that allow you to switch between full-screen "apps" and the desktop, as well as the "charms bar". There's a lot to like as well, to be honest, but overall I wish they had stuck with the UX of Windows 7.

All other things being equal, a different UI is a worse UI, since it forces users to discard what they've learned -- sometimes painfully, over many years -- and start back at square one. This is true of even terrible UIs, since those are the ones that force people to endure the greatest pain to learn them, and once people have gone through that pain they will do almost anything to avoid doing it again.

Users feel about UIs the way programmers feel about programming languages. Imagine if Matz announced tomorrow that he was throwing out all the syntax of Ruby as it is known today and redesigning it from scratch. Rubyists would be freaking out! And in the case of UIs it's worse, because at least the Rubyists could stick with their old interpreters; in the world of online apps, when an app changes its UI, the old UI just falls off the face of the earth. You have no choice but to deal with it.

This isn't to say that UIs should never change, just that in general they shouldn't change without a lot of thought and contemplation; smart designers should be biased towards continuity over novelty; and when change has to happen, it should happen incrementally rather than in the Windows 8 "big bang" style.

A different UI is not necessarily a worse UI. You are right in a different UI forces users to discard what they've learned. That means that the new UI has to a whole lot better than the old UI, to make it worth the pain of the learning process. Case in point, the mouse was a much different UI than what we had before, but it has been proven to be far superior, and worth the change. changing the UI just for the sake of change, that is bad for the user. Change it because it will be better (and not just marginally better)

Yes it is bad... Different design is ok. But if you are going to break with a paradigm, it better be for a good reason. And "its different" isn't good enough. Certain things in your UI should be obvious, intuitive, easy to find. You shouldn't have to go look them up in Google. IF you are going to change things so drastically, then do something to teach the user (or do you think they will read your mind?) You shouldn't be forcing your user to use Google to figure out how to use your UI, for simple things.

I realize Microsoft wanted to make closing apps more difficult, but the third item on the list is "how to find programs" You've done something horribly wrong if you have THIS many people asking that question.

All this article tells us is that Windows 8 is different from the previous versions of Windows that most users are familiar with. Windows 8 might suck [1], but the article doesn't in any way demonstrate that.

[1] FWIW I use Win 8 every day and had no problem adapting to it. I've been using and developing on Windows since NT 3.51.

The article does a fine demonstration. It points out that people are currently asking about some more esoteric features about win7. BUT they are asking about some fairly common features for win8. Features that should be EASY to figure out. Since people are asking about these features, then the UI sucks. This really isn't a comparison of Win7 vs Win8, and yeah the article could have shown a few more examples.

But seriously if you have to go to Google to look up how to close an App, there is something wrong with the UI. I understand Microsoft was trying to make it so that you don't need to shutdown or close apps, and that is why they are difficult to do. But sometimes you need to shutdown or close an app...

cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

How to Tell If Your Web Hosting Sucks

This is kind of funny. Screenshots require secret keys in every OS. Maybe this just shows how quickly people go to Google.

Finding system-wide keyboard commands is a tricky thing for any OS help system. In OS X, it's in the help for Finder, even though it's not a Finder function.

It's not really a surprise, Windows 8 is poorly designed to begin with for a desktop experience. This is not anecdotal - the OS sales have been poor, the executive at Microsoft who spearheaded the design was fired, and so on.

What's more surprising is how slowly (and I would say, stubbornly) Microsoft is moving to correct it. It's like they don't want to admit that Desktop and Mobile should have distinct UIs since they are used in distinct ways.

Your market decides what it wants, something Microsoft adhered to for years. Now it seems Microsoft has it in their heads that the market will adjust to them, even though the data is (thus far) proving the exact opposite.

Actually, that's not just some recent thing. That's the oldest business axiom in existence. "Find what people want, and sell it to them", not "Invent something that people may or may not want and wait for them to buy it".

Google's autocomplete feature uses your web history as part of it's algorithm for finding results, so perhaps Google just thinks you're an idiot. When I search for "windows 7 how do I " I get things like "windows 7 how do I make myself an administrator" and "windows 7 how do I create a restore point".

It seems possible (likely?) that Google are using your environment data too - an browser on OSX is likely looking for more basic information than a browser on Windows.

Regardless, this is a pretty rubbish test.

I got my results from searching in Incognito.

Google can still use your web history even if you're in Incogito mode if you've logged in to any of their services. http://www.cbronline.com/blogs/technology/how_secret_is_g

EDIT: Also, your conclusion:

"Over time, these autocomplete suggetions will change, but for now it’s clear that a lot of people using Windows 8 don’t know how to do the tasks they are familiar with in Windows 7."

Why are you assuming that they're Windows 7 users who are now unable to do tasks after an upgrade? What if the Windows 8 users are people who are new to Windows?

It's certainly a possibility, but my guess is that based on windows' pretty crazy market penetration (I don't think I've ever met anyone who's _never_ used a windows machine at least at work or school), and the fact that most switching is going the other direction (away from windows), the number of people "new to windows in general" is not worth considering.....but that's just a guess.

EDIT: I guess I'm not considering people who are just buying their first computer, and that that computer is a windows 8 machine......I would be really curious to see the numbers for OS breakdowns for "first time computer buyers", and how many of these were people who genuinely never had their own vs. adults who previously used machines owned by their parents.....I'd imagine this number is also pretty small these days....

I agree. I imagine most first-time Windows users are children shown the ropes by their parents who are thus less likely to search when they can't figure something out, while a large portion of first-time OS X users are teenagers or adults moving away from Windows who often don't have or want someone to guide them through the OS every step of the way and who are thus more likely to search for solutions to their problems.

an browser on OSX is likely looking for more basic information than a browser on Windows

What's the reason for thinking that?

Let's give OP the benefit of the doubt and assume they don't mean to imply OS X users are inherently or on average less tech-savvy or intelligent than Windows users, because that's ridiculous. From http://flowingdata.com/2011/04/26/mac-vs-pc-people/:

> Mac people are 21% more likely than PC people to consider themselves computer-savvy gearheads.

> 54% of PC people have completed a four-year college degree or higher. The same can be said for 67% of Mac people.

Obviously this is "just" a survey, but it's one with 388,000 users participating, and I haven't seen any other surveys or research that concludes the opposite.

So, let's assume their reasoning is that there are more people switching from Windows to OS X than the other way around, that these people are not very familiar yet with their new OS, and that these OS X users will thus search more basic "how do I do X?" queries than Windows users, most of whom have been using the OS for years. Makes sense to me.

Those results tell more about which one is recent UI than the bad UI. When I moved to OSX from windows I did all those searches on google for Mac.

I wrote an article on how to analyse your Google logs for Question queries. Worth a look in the same vein.

http://www.webdistortion.com/2010/07/24/segmenting-question-...

But this isn't representative of problems people had with Windows 7 when it launched, it's problems people are having with it now.

I'd be interested to see what Windows 8's search terms look like in another 30 months, when it's the same age Windows 7 is now.

To some extent, sure, but I've been a Windows user since 3.1 and I had to Google some of the items on the list of Windows 8 searches. Specifically, I had to find a YouTube video that demonstrated how to shut down the computer. I still haven't figured out how to close a "new UI" app.

> I still haven't figured out how to close a "new UI" app

The ancient alt+f4 keyboard "shortcut" still seems to work as with other apps. Not exactly intuitive though.

Perhaps the intention is that they don't close as-such, like on a mobile device where things seem to hang around until the OOM monitor kills something gracefully (so it can save state and restore back to as it was as if not closed when next requested) when more memory is needed by active apps.

Aha! I should have thought of alt+f4.

The reason it becomes a problem for me is that once I have a handful of apps open, it gets frustrating to use the hot corners to flip through open apps and find the one I actually want, past the multiple programs that I'm done with.

On a touchscreen, you swipe top to bottom. On a non-touch device, you update to 8.1 update 1 and there's a close button in the top right. Admittedly, that close button should have been in there in 8.0 for non-touch pc's.

More like "How to tell your hosting sucks". 503 Errors, nothing is loading.

I've tried this with a couple of other sites that are well known but certainly less so than facebook and twitter. Poor results if any. I'm not sure how practical this is for anyone that's not an absolute giant.

I'm lookin' at you, Vista-fied version of Office!

(Googling too many things that should be simple in the twisted version of Office that came out with the horrible ribbon thing)

I actually like the ribbon. It is a rather elegant solution to a very hard problem, and overall much better than a sea of dropdown menus.

Now, if they only could group options to match my mental model of text editing...

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