Recognising a Bad User Interface at First Glance
hadermann.be
hadermann.be
‘If you are an X, then you have to fill in Y and Z. If you are not an X, please only fill in Z, unless Z=1, then you should fill Y too.’
This could be simplified considerably: "Fill in Z. If you are X or Z=1, fill in Y." Although I'm not surprised that refactoring boolean expressions is something that a lot of people seem to have trouble with.
In some cases it can be better to have a more human, relative notation, e.g. ‘within the last hour’, ‘yesterday’, ‘next week’…
Actually I really, really abhor this style of date formatting since e.g. seeing events all dated "yesterday" - possibly on different sites - make ordering/comparing them nearly impossible. Is ISO 8601 really beyond comprehension for most of the population?
The user interface is totally empty when starting out
Unless you mean completely empty (as in devoid of any buttons or other widgets), I don't think that's a bad thing. It's funny that it mentions adding an explicit instruction "Click ‘add contact’ to add your first contact." when the next point is "Visual clutter", since it could very well be the case that the users are confused because after removing that "Visual clutter", "add contact" doesn't even look like a button anymore! Incidentally, this trend of "flat" UI designs is another thing I loathe.
Am I the only one who thinks it's rather sad that, despite society spending great effort over the last few hundred years to improve literacy (which was quite successful), we're now dumbing-down software to encourage basically the opposite?
On the DHL website, if I am ordering a collection for a certain time, I have to choose if I want it for "tomorrow". If it's 23:00 BST from where I am accessing the website and I'm ordering the collection from a country in EEST, am I ordering the collection for one or two days from now?
This kind of sloppy UI from a company that does logistics (which is supposedly quite a precise thing) is utterly unacceptable.
The DHL website is a cornucopia of bad UI patterns.
Japan has a strange tradition of dates and times such as 7-3 2530. Tokyo TV schedules have values like that. "2530" means 0130 on the next day. Businesses that close after midnight may give their closing time as "2600". This comes from a strange combination of military time plus a historical tradition that days start at dawn. At least it's unambiguous.
It's so true though, if trying to scrutinize the history of a repo I find I frequently need to clone it locally just to access the info I need in any kind of decent interface.
Web developers should be using time elements, which include the ISO-8601 datetime.
If web developers do this, there's no reason you couldn't make a simple browser extension that allows you to toggle times from humanized to ISO-8601.
If you wanted, you could make a script to always display the expanded information.
A lot of websites do this, and I think it works out very well. It means you can hover over the time if you want something more precise, but the default level of information shown to you is minimized. This is useful for reducing clutter and information overload.
It really depends on what information you're trying to convey, and where it falls within the hierarchy.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/ti...
I'd say it depends what you're doing. It's easier to compare lengths of time than dates - the difference between "3 days ago" and "5 days ago" is more obvious than the difference between "01/07/2015" and "28/06/2015". That said, if you want to know what happened on a specific date (eg commits that happened on 28/06/2015) then the time passed isn't useful. Ideally you should be able to toggle between the two.
I find this quite annoying when I have to look up something I wrote months ago on HN.
Big corp's UX approach is almost always buzzword-driven, not customer-driven. :)
These are "product owners" who are themselves in satellite offices in other timezones...
No. It's the _only_ representation that makes sense and is easy to read everywhere. (Assuming you show it into the user timezone.)
Year -> Month -> Day -> Hour...
BIG -> Medium -> small -> smaller...
And because the year has 4 digits, you instantly know it's a year value.
There is nothing more infuriating than those silly "yesterday" "a week ago" and other cute time formatting. What if I wanted to know the precise hour, instead of a vague "yesterday"?
And don't get me started on the completely, utterly stupid "11/09/14". I'm French Canadian with many software configured halfway between US, Canadian and European standards. So when a software/website tries to be a smart-ass and gives me "11/09/14", It might be day-month-year, or year-month-day, or month-day-year. Yeah, fun times.
I don't care much about the process of how paper and bindings are made, I just want to be able to read my book. Most users prefer the software just do what they wanted it to do with minimal cognitive load. Users that can use the software spend less time calling support, and more time happily using the application. If we made software smarter, what benefit would gain vs dumbing it down?
I don't care much about the process of how paper and bindings are made, I just want to be able to read my book.
"I don't care much about the process of how sentences and grammar work, I just want to be able to know what the book says."
We force people to learn reading, writing, maths, and various other subjects in school because they have long-term advantages in improving the overall knowledge of society and empowering its population, despite many of them finding it useless and frustrating initially.
With the permeation of computers everywhere, perhaps the same should be true with their interfaces: they should not be dumbed-down or excessively hand-holding, nor have an entirely flat learning curve. Computers are powerful and immensely flexible machines, and in some ways I think it's a shame that we're taking away a lot of great opportunities for learning by making UIs that encourage their users to remain in a state of blissful ignorance...
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Absolutely! I have had to program date-related code, and I am familiar with the differences between US and European date formats, and I have never heard of ISO 8601 before today.
The average person from the US will assume that 2015-04-03 is March 4th, 2015, while a typical person from Europe will assume it's April 3rd, 2015. You're still thinking in the context of a computer programmer, not the context of a user.
No country, including the US, uses YYYY-DD-MM:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country
I'm a bit surprised that you "have had to program date-related code" and "have never heard of ISO 8601", because it is practically the standard for date formatting. I know non-programmers from different countries including US/UK/EU, and although they probably haven't heard of ISO 8601 either, they have absolutely no trouble understanding YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS. This is a very small sample size and probably not representative, but I doubt many people would attempt to parse it as YYYY-DD-MM.
Honestly, its perfectly ok for an application to use whatever standard date format - as long as its clear and consistent within the application - at least in the context of North America, where everything is a mishmash of whatever standards you can imagine.
Hell, .Net datetimes specifically allow you to output in whatever format the current OS default is set to (or you can choose your own).
Like the 4th of July?
1. Everyone I personally know would know that that meant 4/3.
2. 4/3 in US usage is April 3rd. As I understand it, it's March 4th in European usage, but you say they have no problem with YYYY-MM-DD. I tend to suspect that you sort of half-learned that "US dates are backwards from European dates" and then misapplied that lesson here.
British usage. For Germans, 4/3 means 1.33333. April 3rd is 3.4. here. If you do i18n, do NOT assume there is one consistent European convention. Either use ISO 8601 or a library that understands country conventions.
4/3/yyyy would be day month year.
People probably say "Tuesday the 3rd of April, 2015" instead of "Tuesday April the Third, 2015".
(Brit here.)
You could easily have the computer present to the user the option to fill Y only when the conditions are met (or something similar). Why leave it up to the user to decide with a confusing message box?
If I have to solve an equation to user your app, a) I won't, b) It's badly designed.
Hardly equation solving.
Checking the box disables the job title field.
You don't need to make user interfaces that behave like paper forms.
Postal codes are written with the space:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postal_codes_in_Canada
If you're already validating the format, how much effort would it take to recognize and accept the common variant which has the space in it? A [ ]? in the regex, and a strip spaces function call.
On the receipt: 9873-435-289-6372-9983
Go to their survey page
"Please enter the survey code without the dashes".
WTF? Left hand, please meet the right hand.
There's nothing worse than this, along with no alt-text on web pages. With font-icons being so common nowadays, designers want to remove all text and revert back to hieroglyphics.
Or rather:
You can design an icon that doesn't need to be localized. But unless you design for it, it very well may need to be localized.
Things like thumbs-up/down, any sort of animal icon... Even trash cans.
An owl connotates wisdom in many places - but in some parts of Asia it connotates stupidity instead.
I'd consider doing things just to make development a little easier at the expense of many users' ability to operate the UI is most certainly a bug and not a feature.
It's weird to me that Google fails, hard, on so many ui things.
Here's one example from the Gmail app on iOS, from the feedback screen.
The [done] button is where the [return] button usually is; and it's directly over the [send] button. So if you don't notice that return is now done, and tap it twice to get a new paragraph, you just sent your unfinished feedback.
I blame Google, but it could be Apple being stupid with the dreadful iOS keyboard.
> possible to get a pretty good impression of whether the user interface was thought about or rather just an afterthought.
I'm sure Google spends a lot of time and money on the UI. Which just makes it more frustrating to me. EG Chrome's (on iOS) address bar does not let you select and copy an address until the page has nearly finished loading. And to paste an url into the bar you don't tap the cursor but some mid-point of the address box - except it's flat UI so you just guess where to tap. Items in the burger menu take five seconds to become clickable.
Hah, the OP article does disable zoom. Disabled zoom is one of the frustrating things lately about iOS apps. Every time I try to show someone older than me something in a Skype chat, or (speaking of google) in a hangouts chat on the iPad... they cant read it - "Hang on... let me find my glasses."
Anyone know if there's a reason behind such a clunky interface change?
I disagree that too many characters or too much instruction is a sign of a bad interface.
For users trying to complete their desired task, an interface lacking instruction/explanation will often cause lower task completion rates and longer average task completion times than an interface with verbose instructions. This is especially true for new users.
Don't get me wrong: I dislike wordiness and consider myself an advocate for simplicity, minimalism, and concision – and that might be the author's sentiment. However, while bloated instruction may hinder task completion and user engagement, incomplete instruction will prevent it.
I believe more useful measures of good instruction are when it is presented, where it is presented, and how well it is understood by users.
For example, a well-designed mobile app avoids a text-heavy interface by disclosing the appropriate amount of instruction at the appropriate time. Limited screen real estate happens to be a handy constraint in this case, and transfers more instruction responsibility onto a well-designed onboarding wizard. That wizard will really only get one shot to educate users, usher them to their 'aha' moment as quickly as possible, and hold their hand through the few actions that strongly influence successful user engagement and retention.
However, I believe the author's sentiment was more focused on situations where programmers use instructions to avoid more complex display or validation logic. IE, less work to add some text than to properly display/hide form sections based on skip patterns.
"If you are an X, then you have to fill in Y and Z. If you are not an X, please only fill in Z, unless Z=1, then you should fill Y too." This is typical of programmers being ‘smart’ by avoiding some extra steps/code...
One of my current favorites is Rocksmith (guitar learning software), where upon exiting you are prompted with "Do you wish to continue? Yes/No". You as the user need to essentially state, "Yes, I would like to continue...exiting the program". This is right next to another menu option that I sometimes accidentally select which prompts me to "Quit", which in fact just brings up the "select profile" screen. It does boggle the mind how some things like this get all the way to production.
"Do you want to exit? <Yes> <No>" would improve what was presented, though, yes, "Do you want to exit? <Exit> <Don't Exit>" would be better. But it was the question more than the manner that the responses were presented that was the problem.
IDEs are horrible, horrible examples of interface design I can easily agree with that. However,
> Excel is the most unconstrained application most people know, and a lot of software starts out as an Excel sheet before growing up into ‘real’ software.
Usability comes first and foremost. If most people are familiar with Excel that means that the Excel interface language is a good language (if not the best). I don't care if it doesn't sate the desire for an "elegant" user interface. The fact is that nearly all users already know how to use the interface and are extremely proficient with it: what more could you possibly want out of an interface? Scrolly fiver-finger gestures and other complete shit that you don't need? YAGNI.
We make huge sales based on usability. Our bigger customers have historically placed us into a competition during our initial sales pitch. If the sale ends up in that situation we always win. Why? Because by the time customers are using our software to build toy/test solutions our competitors are still training the customer. Why? Because usability comes first and foremost, because our UX guys don't let pet peeves about Excel get in the way of making great and usable interfaces.
If you can "unconstrain" your solution enough to make it fit into a spreadsheet then I say, "go for it."
While this article provides some metaphorical fish - I found the Design of everyday things helps you become a fisherman.
EDIT: Swapped the order of references.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Design-Everyday-Things-Revised-Expande...
[2] http://blog.codinghorror.com/recommended-reading-for-develop...
It's very strange (or sad) that the author doesn't mention heuristics in his post and talks about his conclusion as something "new": "it dawned on me that a trained eye can often spot unfriendly software a mile away." It may have "dawned on you", but it's nothing new.
It never ceases to amaze me, how oblivious of basic usability the people in IT are.
[1] Nielsen, J., and Molich, R. (1990). Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces, Proc. ACM CHI'90 Conf. (Seattle, WA, 1-5 April), 249-256.
First, be clear with your design and instructions. In my hasty password example - "Please create your password (6 or more characters, letters and numbers only)"
Then - if the user messes up, explain a bit... "Whoops, please only use letters and numbers"
So, so much nicer. :)
</rant>
When an app loses hours of your work, you start to wish you used an app that took more clicks to use but actually focused on the internals.
I'm making daily videos at Rate My App (.com) and the latest version of ScreenFlow 5 (screen capture software) is known for the best user interface, but in fact impossible to feel safe recording even the most basic videos with.
- Forces you to delete your videos with endless prompts or forcefully shut down the app if you do a File -> Rename...
- Let's you record a new project but will not actually save it if it recently had an issue (above), so you lose that one, as well
- Does not explain that clicking Remove in the infinite prompt actually deletes all the video content. Does not backup for you, either
- Doesn’t always show YouTube categories, but allows you to click Start Upload, in which case the uploads remain in the upload queue forever. Issues or errors with video sites are not mentioned, the upload just stays in the queue.
- Warns about uploading videos greater than 15 minutes long on YouTube even though you’re exporting a 5 second range
- Their most important feature, video actions (keyframes) don't work. Modifying one randomly modifies another one, so I stopped using it. This was a major bug until it deleted a 1.5 hour project of mine. Now, it seems minor.
I seriously disagree with this particular assertion. I find that "flat" design trends make things much less usable, and this is no exception. It is far easier to group things with visual references than with lack-of-visual-references. And it is far easier to find things like buttons if there are, say, actual indications that they are buttons.
And, one other thing. Layouts that have too much delineation degrade much more gracefully than layouts that have too little.
And its complement: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/fame.htm
[1]: http://interfacehallofshame.eu/www.iarchitect.com/tabs.htm
This is such a big problem, and such low hanging fruit, it sucks to see products fail to implement proper onboarding. I understand why... writing user interfaces is a pain in the ass. Onboarding is usually done after "finishing" the code (of course the code is never actually finished), so generally most programmers are probably so exhausted after writing the code that implementing an additional onboarding process seems like too much trouble, because "JUST SHIP IT!"
It's like the programmers do 95% of the work, then stop caring about the last 5%. But it just means that the 95% goes to waste.
You are correct that time offsets are used instead of timezone names. The most obvious reason for that is that many names are ambigious (EST is either UTC-5 or UTC+2, depending on whether you live around the US or around Egypt).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usability_testing#Hallway_test...
1) Nobody cares - nobody respects it; 2) People make posts saying " it dawned on me that a trained eye can often spot unfriendly software a mile away" as if this is something new!
[1] Nielsen, J., and Molich, R. (1990). Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces, Proc. ACM CHI'90 Conf. (Seattle, WA, 1-5 April), 249-256.
Along with the bizarre idea that the best interface of all is one that forces the user to write code of their own. Look folks, if everyone wanted to type then text adventures would still be top of the video game charts.
Many of the common alternatives are worse though, I prefer a shotgun full of buttons to many of the supposedly simpler systems unless they are very well thought out.
Good UI is very hard.
edit - to me, really good UI is simple shit like things that gather system stuff, then install while gathering user stuff. When that started coming in as standard with many linux installs, I almost wept ;)