8 ms·

Interface abusers

62 points by luu 11y ago

DatBear 11y ago
This is why I can't wait for Apple to introduce Force Touch. Do I press this lightly to do something completely different - does this app have that? Do I press it harder to do something else? Did I press it hard enough / lightly enough?
- wanderfowl 11y ago
  Yeah, even on the Apple watch it's pretty inconsistent. Things that should have a force touch option don't, and things that do, don't tell you. Apple's slipping way behind on this.
ape4 11y ago
Maybe be need a way of tells apps / devices / applications that I am trying do something exceptional so please show me the advanced menu. Perhaps a special "expert" icon is always visible or a convention like clicking in the bottom-left corner.
wcummings 11y ago
It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to see timestamps in iMessage on my phone.
- cm3 11y ago
  Or the time you sit in front of a dialog thinking it's installing the software only to realize there's a flat button you didn't think you have to press first when a flat button always just means "disabled". We're using designers that want to create art pieces when we need designers who should create usable interfaces. I don't want to hang the GUI on the wall to look at, I need to interact with it with as little guesswork as possible.
- leesalminen 11y ago
  Many of iOS' "flat" design choices have taken me an embarrassingly long time to figure out. Timestamps in iMessage are definitely one of them.
  - arrrg 11y ago
    I really don't think that has anything to do with flat design whatever that means. Apple is all about hiding non-essential information and functionality. Always has been. This is a consistent pattern you will be able to find in all their software if you pay a little attention. Basically, if Apple thinks something is a power user feature most users will not need then they have no qualms about not making it discoverable. They tend to even go a step further: they may outright hide it, making it impossible for users to ever be confused by it. I don't think that's a bad design pattern (depending on context and circumstances, obviously, as always), you just have to make the right judgement calls about what's important and has to be discoverable and what's not. This allows the software to be simple to most users while also having some depth for more advanced users. Like always in design it's all about making the right trade offs, though. The devil is in the details.
    - maxxxxx 11y ago
      How about putting the advanced options into a menu or make them somehow discoverable? I hate it when after years I found out that something was possible but I didn't know that I had to press option+shift+ctrl while standing on one foot. It's OK to make advanced features less prominent but don't hide them. On mobile apps it's even worse. Swipe up, left or right? Nobody knows.
- benihana 11y ago
  But once you know how to do it (it's swiping from right to left in a chat screen, by the way) it's a genius use of touch movement, right? I'm torn about this - it's annoying that it's hard to discover, but I also hate when an app gets all up in my face about how to use its features - I usually open an app (especially a utility app like iMessage) with a specific intent and having the app interrupt that intent to tell me about itself is annoying. I also have the perspective of being an engineer who builds interfaces. I think these are just hard problems and these kinds of pain points are inevitable as we continue exploring interfaces. I mean, the door is an interface that has been around since at least Egyptian times, and people still screw up affordance with it (how many times have you pulled a handle on a push door?)
  - wcummings 11y ago
    >But once you know how to do it (it's swiping from right to left in a chat screen, by the way) it's a genius use of touch movement, right? Why not always show the time, like WhatsApp does?
- swozey 11y ago
  I came from android (and am going back tomorrow) and I can't count the number of things that I couldn't figure out on my iPhone or its apps. I won't get into the apps, as thats an app developer thing mostly, but man, it took me googling after 2 months of frustration to find out to ignore a phone call (make it stop ringing so I can continue listening to spotify in my car) I had to hit the power button. On my Android I just swiped "ignore" or whatever it says.
- tuacker 11y ago
  When did you figure it out? The feature was only introduced in iOS7 two years ago almost do the day.
afarrell 11y ago
The company he refers to in the beginning is for cheaply sending remittances. http://www.sendwave.com/ http://www.sendwave.com/
kalleboo 11y ago
And this is going to get even more fun with "3D touch"
userbinator 11y ago
"the way you bring up the main menu is by pushing on the screen" I've never used one before, but does pushing the edge also work? Having used other devices with turn/push/pull knobs (like washing machines), that's what I'd probably try next.
- grhmc 11y ago
  Yes, you can hold the outside as if you're about to turn it, and push it in.
- ecopoesis 11y ago
  I don't get this criticism either. Maybe that's because it works just like an iDrive controller. Plus, it's not really pushing on the screen, it's moving the entire device.
ZeroGravitas 11y ago
Am I missing something, or does "turning off" a thermostat not really make that much sense? And therefore, a UI that made that easy and obvious, wouldn't really be that good a UI?
- dack 11y ago
  When a thermostat is on, it controls the temperature. If you don't want to control the temperature, would you not want to turn the thermostat off?
  - eterm 11y ago
    The post said he/she wanted to turn it off because they were too cold, which seems a strange response. Surely what they wanted was to adjust the thermostat temperature?
    - throwaway049 11y ago
      I think it was meant as 'turn off the AC' which would allow the room temp to equalize with the outside world. I'm used to stand alone AC units so I think in terms of 'turn it off to allow room temp to rise'.
  - Karunamon 11y ago
    Kind of like a light switch. The device is carrying out its function even when switched off.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  I turn off my HVAC frequently in the transition months between winter and summer. I would not buy a thermostat that did not allow me to do that, and this "feature" is yet another knock against Nest that will keep me from buying one.
  - rblatz 11y ago
    There are two easy ways to turn the nest off. Press the dial in and turn it off. Or from anywhere in the world from your phone. Also you can set it to heat/cool and set ranges where it will cool above x temperature and heat below y temperature.
eponeponepon 11y ago
Not ten minutes ago I had the same experience in a web browser on my desktop; it turns out that on this site, which I've been visiting regularly for years, there is a button (unlabelled) which brings up extra content related to that day's content. I only discovered this from a passing comment on a forum. My point is, it's not just touch interfaces that suffer from this assumption that the user will "just get" the thing you thought up in the shower this morning. Even a console application needs that moment of sanity checking - more than once I've sent out a script to users and found out weeks later that the one cool timesaving feature I was proud of just hadn't been used, because I hadn't told them about it, assuming instead that they'd connect the dots for themselves.
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal? I think everyone who reads it had that experience at some point. Going back through the archive for the bonuses you missed is half the fun!
  - eponeponepon 11y ago
    Spot on, yep :)
harperlee 11y ago
This is something that happens with HN, by the way. Links are not underscored, so it is not immediately obvious that you have to click on someone's name, the domain, the timestamp, or the comment count. I personally had this problem when the "link" link to a subthread disappeared.
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  HN shows underscores on hover, which at least lets you check if something is a link by mousing over it. But it falls apart on touch devices where hover doesn't exist.
emodendroket 11y ago
Some of this is going to shake itself out with time.
IshKebab 11y ago
I dunno, pushing the Nest was pretty obvious to me. Also I can't see why you'd want to turn it off totally. If you want the heating on permanently or off permanently just turn the temperature to an extreme value.
- TetOn 11y ago
  This was my take...the interface for turning it off is difficult to find because it was designed to be thus. The last thing most thermostat users want to do is to turn it off completely. Instead, they want to "turn it off" or "on" relative to local environmental conditions...and that's the dead-easy interface mentioned in the link: turning the big dial ring and having it respond both numerically and by color: I am going to get hotter or I am going to get colder. The click side of the interface is deliberately more obscure and meant for the administrator (for lack of a better term) and not the random temperature adjuster. TFA seems to be complaining that it's too difficult to find a feature that most thermostats elide completely. Every other model I've owned in the past could only be turned off by unplugging, which requires un-mounting the entire thing or powering down the furnace (or similar).
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    I have never owned a thermostat that did not have an "On/Fan/Off" switch. The only thermostats I have ever seen lacking those switches, besides the Nest, are the thermostats used in large central HVAC systems where the thermostat is actually controlling a local blower and air damper, not the actual system.
  - titanomachy 11y ago
    Not being able to turn off the device is a problem if it controls both AC and heating (not sure if the Nest does). What if you just want the room to be whatever temperature it is outside?
    - IshKebab 11y ago
      Nest only controls heating. If you want it unheated you just turn the temperature down.
Cthulhu_ 11y ago
Read this the other day, relevant too; from an Apple UI/UX guy who just doesn't get it anymore either https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-apples-products-so-confusing-ignore-design-don-norman https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-apples-products-so-confus...
- rfrey 11y ago
  "An apple UI/UX guy" Cthulhu_ was likely understating on purpose, but this "Apple UI/UX guy" is Don Norman.
  - radiorental 11y ago
    With all due respect to Don (and I do have a lot of respect, he built the foundation upon which my career rests). He misses the larger picture. I'll simply point at Apple's market cap as to why Apple can afford to get away with form over function.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - rfrey 11y ago
      Absolutely, I didn't mean to issue an appeal to authority. I just thought there might be people who'd be interested in Don Norman's take, who wouldn't otherwise click through to Yet Another Apple Critique.
  - treerock 11y ago
    It's been years since I read Design of Everyday Things, but the lingering idea I've taken away is that beautiful products also work well. i.e. beauty and functionality are linked. Doesn't seem to match up with his statement "the fonts are pleasant to the eye, but difficult to read." Especially for something like a font, where the aesthetic and the utility are so difficult to separate.
    - TuringTest 11y ago
roldie 11y ago
The takeaway from this is that affordances are still important in UI design. Many sites/apps nowadays try to get away without it. Even having a tutorial during onboarding isn't really enough. Users often disregard them, so you need to make sure things are intuitive. As a UX guy, this is why you do user testing. Just yesterday I was conducting a test, and one user was getting upset at our onboarding tutorial "Just get me to the app, I don't care about this." Not a moment later, "Oh wait, how do I do this? Haha guess I should have read the tutorial." It was a lighthearted moment given the circumstance, but in the real world and in aggregate, it shows how to lose users.
- crystalmeph 11y ago
  It's not just mobile apps, it's everything. I write demo software and libraries to control sensors that are used in everything from university lab benchtop research to heavy automation. You can never trust that the user reads a word of the manual (well the heavy automation guys probably do, because there's real danger involved), so I do my best to make it so in the demo software, there's one button you need to press to start communicating with the sensor, and very clear options from there to change the sample rate, save data to a file, etc. In the APIs we provide for them to do their own programming, ideally they only have to declare a new instance of a single object, with the necessary configuration data passed in as explicit arguments to the constructors, and all the communication methods are immediately accessible from that class' API. There's not a lot of extra new classes to hold configuration data, etc., because then the user doesn't know which fields are necessary to set in those objects. Sometimes that means you get more parameters than you might like in a constructor, but it makes it a lot easier for the user because they know exactly what you require from them.
  - eponeponepon 11y ago
    (well the heavy automation guys probably do, because there's real danger involved) See, that's the risky mindset - not that I'm deriding you in any way, mind; we're all guilty of it! "They probably do" is the same as "they probably see what this button does", when they may perfectly well not even perceive that it is a button in the first place. Nobody's mind works in quite the same way as yours, or as mine, or as anyone else's.
carsongross 11y ago
There is a special place in hell for the flat-design folks who decided to remove drop-shadows/gradients from clickable elements on a screen.
- cm3 11y ago
  First we couldn't have 3d widgets, then we got them and designers took it away during the flat ui craze. These designers surely don't use what they design. What's worse is that everybody (KDE and GNOME) went with it drinking the kool-aid. Add on top of that that GNOME doesn't want you to use your own theme and do everything to unsupport or stifle custom themes. GNOME is following Apple's lead of "we know best". It's a sad day to be a GUI user. Look at the wasted vertical space in GNOME3 and tell me how that makes sense with widescreen displays that shrank in vertical size. Designers do not understand that 3d widgets serve a purpose. I wait for the day that designers make everyday tools all totally flat but at least there we have people without sight who will object. I remember when people complained Linux desktops were didn't have UI designers. If this is what it means to have designers, then I'd rather have my OS/2 GUI theme please. Designers gave us square toilet seats and rectangle table ware but our sitting organs and spoons do not match.
  - wlesieutre 11y ago
    Who needs 1200 vertical pixels? 1080 should be enough for everyone!

62 points by luu 11y ago

This is why I can't wait for Apple to introduce Force Touch. Do I press this lightly to do something completely different - does this app have that? Do I press it harder to do something else? Did I press it hard enough / lightly enough?

wanderfowl 11y ago
Yeah, even on the Apple watch it's pretty inconsistent. Things that should have a force touch option don't, and things that do, don't tell you. Apple's slipping way behind on this.

ape4 11y ago

Maybe be need a way of tells apps / devices / applications that I am trying do something exceptional so please show me the advanced menu. Perhaps a special "expert" icon is always visible or a convention like clicking in the bottom-left corner.

wcummings 11y ago

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to see timestamps in iMessage on my phone.

cm3 11y ago
Or the time you sit in front of a dialog thinking it's installing the software only to realize there's a flat button you didn't think you have to press first when a flat button always just means "disabled". We're using designers that want to create art pieces when we need designers who should create usable interfaces. I don't want to hang the GUI on the wall to look at, I need to interact with it with as little guesswork as possible.
leesalminen 11y ago
Many of iOS' "flat" design choices have taken me an embarrassingly long time to figure out. Timestamps in iMessage are definitely one of them.
- arrrg 11y ago
  I really don't think that has anything to do with flat design whatever that means. Apple is all about hiding non-essential information and functionality. Always has been. This is a consistent pattern you will be able to find in all their software if you pay a little attention. Basically, if Apple thinks something is a power user feature most users will not need then they have no qualms about not making it discoverable. They tend to even go a step further: they may outright hide it, making it impossible for users to ever be confused by it. I don't think that's a bad design pattern (depending on context and circumstances, obviously, as always), you just have to make the right judgement calls about what's important and has to be discoverable and what's not. This allows the software to be simple to most users while also having some depth for more advanced users. Like always in design it's all about making the right trade offs, though. The devil is in the details.
  - maxxxxx 11y ago
    How about putting the advanced options into a menu or make them somehow discoverable? I hate it when after years I found out that something was possible but I didn't know that I had to press option+shift+ctrl while standing on one foot. It's OK to make advanced features less prominent but don't hide them. On mobile apps it's even worse. Swipe up, left or right? Nobody knows.
benihana 11y ago
But once you know how to do it (it's swiping from right to left in a chat screen, by the way) it's a genius use of touch movement, right? I'm torn about this - it's annoying that it's hard to discover, but I also hate when an app gets all up in my face about how to use its features - I usually open an app (especially a utility app like iMessage) with a specific intent and having the app interrupt that intent to tell me about itself is annoying. I also have the perspective of being an engineer who builds interfaces. I think these are just hard problems and these kinds of pain points are inevitable as we continue exploring interfaces. I mean, the door is an interface that has been around since at least Egyptian times, and people still screw up affordance with it (how many times have you pulled a handle on a push door?)
- wcummings 11y ago
  >But once you know how to do it (it's swiping from right to left in a chat screen, by the way) it's a genius use of touch movement, right? Why not always show the time, like WhatsApp does?
swozey 11y ago
I came from android (and am going back tomorrow) and I can't count the number of things that I couldn't figure out on my iPhone or its apps. I won't get into the apps, as thats an app developer thing mostly, but man, it took me googling after 2 months of frustration to find out to ignore a phone call (make it stop ringing so I can continue listening to spotify in my car) I had to hit the power button. On my Android I just swiped "ignore" or whatever it says.
tuacker 11y ago
When did you figure it out? The feature was only introduced in iOS7 two years ago almost do the day.

afarrell 11y ago

The company he refers to in the beginning is for cheaply sending remittances. http://www.sendwave.com/ http://www.sendwave.com/

kalleboo 11y ago

And this is going to get even more fun with "3D touch"

userbinator 11y ago

"the way you bring up the main menu is by pushing on the screen" I've never used one before, but does pushing the edge also work? Having used other devices with turn/push/pull knobs (like washing machines), that's what I'd probably try next.

grhmc 11y ago
Yes, you can hold the outside as if you're about to turn it, and push it in.
ecopoesis 11y ago
I don't get this criticism either. Maybe that's because it works just like an iDrive controller. Plus, it's not really pushing on the screen, it's moving the entire device.

ZeroGravitas 11y ago

Am I missing something, or does "turning off" a thermostat not really make that much sense? And therefore, a UI that made that easy and obvious, wouldn't really be that good a UI?

dack 11y ago
When a thermostat is on, it controls the temperature. If you don't want to control the temperature, would you not want to turn the thermostat off?
- eterm 11y ago
  The post said he/she wanted to turn it off because they were too cold, which seems a strange response. Surely what they wanted was to adjust the thermostat temperature?
  - throwaway049 11y ago
    I think it was meant as 'turn off the AC' which would allow the room temp to equalize with the outside world. I'm used to stand alone AC units so I think in terms of 'turn it off to allow room temp to rise'.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  Kind of like a light switch. The device is carrying out its function even when switched off.
vonmoltke 11y ago
I turn off my HVAC frequently in the transition months between winter and summer. I would not buy a thermostat that did not allow me to do that, and this "feature" is yet another knock against Nest that will keep me from buying one.
- rblatz 11y ago
  There are two easy ways to turn the nest off. Press the dial in and turn it off. Or from anywhere in the world from your phone. Also you can set it to heat/cool and set ranges where it will cool above x temperature and heat below y temperature.

eponeponepon 11y ago

Not ten minutes ago I had the same experience in a web browser on my desktop; it turns out that on this site, which I've been visiting regularly for years, there is a button (unlabelled) which brings up extra content related to that day's content. I only discovered this from a passing comment on a forum. My point is, it's not just touch interfaces that suffer from this assumption that the user will "just get" the thing you thought up in the shower this morning. Even a console application needs that moment of sanity checking - more than once I've sent out a script to users and found out weeks later that the one cool timesaving feature I was proud of just hadn't been used, because I hadn't told them about it, assuming instead that they'd connect the dots for themselves.

wlesieutre 11y ago
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal? I think everyone who reads it had that experience at some point. Going back through the archive for the bonuses you missed is half the fun!
- eponeponepon 11y ago
  Spot on, yep :)

harperlee 11y ago

This is something that happens with HN, by the way. Links are not underscored, so it is not immediately obvious that you have to click on someone's name, the domain, the timestamp, or the comment count. I personally had this problem when the "link" link to a subthread disappeared.

wlesieutre 11y ago
HN shows underscores on hover, which at least lets you check if something is a link by mousing over it. But it falls apart on touch devices where hover doesn't exist.

emodendroket 11y ago

Some of this is going to shake itself out with time.

IshKebab 11y ago

I dunno, pushing the Nest was pretty obvious to me. Also I can't see why you'd want to turn it off totally. If you want the heating on permanently or off permanently just turn the temperature to an extreme value.

TetOn 11y ago
This was my take...the interface for turning it off is difficult to find because it was designed to be thus. The last thing most thermostat users want to do is to turn it off completely. Instead, they want to "turn it off" or "on" relative to local environmental conditions...and that's the dead-easy interface mentioned in the link: turning the big dial ring and having it respond both numerically and by color: I am going to get hotter or I am going to get colder. The click side of the interface is deliberately more obscure and meant for the administrator (for lack of a better term) and not the random temperature adjuster. TFA seems to be complaining that it's too difficult to find a feature that most thermostats elide completely. Every other model I've owned in the past could only be turned off by unplugging, which requires un-mounting the entire thing or powering down the furnace (or similar).
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  I have never owned a thermostat that did not have an "On/Fan/Off" switch. The only thermostats I have ever seen lacking those switches, besides the Nest, are the thermostats used in large central HVAC systems where the thermostat is actually controlling a local blower and air damper, not the actual system.
- titanomachy 11y ago
  Not being able to turn off the device is a problem if it controls both AC and heating (not sure if the Nest does). What if you just want the room to be whatever temperature it is outside?
  - IshKebab 11y ago
    Nest only controls heating. If you want it unheated you just turn the temperature down.

Cthulhu_ 11y ago

Read this the other day, relevant too; from an Apple UI/UX guy who just doesn't get it anymore either https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-apples-products-so-confusing-ignore-design-don-norman https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-apples-products-so-confus...

rfrey 11y ago
"An apple UI/UX guy" Cthulhu_ was likely understating on purpose, but this "Apple UI/UX guy" is Don Norman.
- radiorental 11y ago
  With all due respect to Don (and I do have a lot of respect, he built the foundation upon which my career rests). He misses the larger picture. I'll simply point at Apple's market cap as to why Apple can afford to get away with form over function.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - rfrey 11y ago
    Absolutely, I didn't mean to issue an appeal to authority. I just thought there might be people who'd be interested in Don Norman's take, who wouldn't otherwise click through to Yet Another Apple Critique.
- treerock 11y ago
  It's been years since I read Design of Everyday Things, but the lingering idea I've taken away is that beautiful products also work well. i.e. beauty and functionality are linked. Doesn't seem to match up with his statement "the fonts are pleasant to the eye, but difficult to read." Especially for something like a font, where the aesthetic and the utility are so difficult to separate.
  - TuringTest 11y ago

roldie 11y ago

The takeaway from this is that affordances are still important in UI design. Many sites/apps nowadays try to get away without it. Even having a tutorial during onboarding isn't really enough. Users often disregard them, so you need to make sure things are intuitive. As a UX guy, this is why you do user testing. Just yesterday I was conducting a test, and one user was getting upset at our onboarding tutorial "Just get me to the app, I don't care about this." Not a moment later, "Oh wait, how do I do this? Haha guess I should have read the tutorial." It was a lighthearted moment given the circumstance, but in the real world and in aggregate, it shows how to lose users.

crystalmeph 11y ago
It's not just mobile apps, it's everything. I write demo software and libraries to control sensors that are used in everything from university lab benchtop research to heavy automation. You can never trust that the user reads a word of the manual (well the heavy automation guys probably do, because there's real danger involved), so I do my best to make it so in the demo software, there's one button you need to press to start communicating with the sensor, and very clear options from there to change the sample rate, save data to a file, etc. In the APIs we provide for them to do their own programming, ideally they only have to declare a new instance of a single object, with the necessary configuration data passed in as explicit arguments to the constructors, and all the communication methods are immediately accessible from that class' API. There's not a lot of extra new classes to hold configuration data, etc., because then the user doesn't know which fields are necessary to set in those objects. Sometimes that means you get more parameters than you might like in a constructor, but it makes it a lot easier for the user because they know exactly what you require from them.
- eponeponepon 11y ago
  (well the heavy automation guys probably do, because there's real danger involved) See, that's the risky mindset - not that I'm deriding you in any way, mind; we're all guilty of it! "They probably do" is the same as "they probably see what this button does", when they may perfectly well not even perceive that it is a button in the first place. Nobody's mind works in quite the same way as yours, or as mine, or as anyone else's.

carsongross 11y ago

There is a special place in hell for the flat-design folks who decided to remove drop-shadows/gradients from clickable elements on a screen.

cm3 11y ago
First we couldn't have 3d widgets, then we got them and designers took it away during the flat ui craze. These designers surely don't use what they design. What's worse is that everybody (KDE and GNOME) went with it drinking the kool-aid. Add on top of that that GNOME doesn't want you to use your own theme and do everything to unsupport or stifle custom themes. GNOME is following Apple's lead of "we know best". It's a sad day to be a GUI user. Look at the wasted vertical space in GNOME3 and tell me how that makes sense with widescreen displays that shrank in vertical size. Designers do not understand that 3d widgets serve a purpose. I wait for the day that designers make everyday tools all totally flat but at least there we have people without sight who will object. I remember when people complained Linux desktops were didn't have UI designers. If this is what it means to have designers, then I'd rather have my OS/2 GUI theme please. Designers gave us square toilet seats and rectangle table ware but our sitting organs and spoons do not match.
- wlesieutre 11y ago
  Who needs 1200 vertical pixels? 1080 should be enough for everyone!