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>UI is hard How many people are actually putting effort into their UIs? How many people do usability tests? I know Microsoft has done them before, but what abo

by huntie 8y ago

>UI is hard How many people are actually putting effort into their UIs? How many people do usability tests? I know Microsoft has done them before, but what about Slack? There are a lot of complaints here about their UI. I'm sure not many free software projects do usability tests. You can't just slap things together and hope for the best, you need to have tests, and you need to run the tests again when you make changes. We've already learned this with the software itself. I've been reading "Designing User Interfaces for Software" by Joseph Dumas from 1988. It enumerates common usability issues at the time, but many of them are still common. Inscrutable error messages, inconsistent terminology, unexpected interactions, the list goes on. These are solvable problems by they require a departure from "worse is better". I'm not sure that UI is hard, it seems like it just requires effort to be put forth.

c-smile 8y ago
> I know Microsoft has done them before And they added toggle switches to UWP (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/controls-and-patterns/controls-by-function#toggle-switch https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/controls...) that are usability disasters IMO. When such switch used alone you cannot tell in what state it is - you need to remember that "on the right - is on" (yet what about RTL environment?). While there is no such problem with old plain checkboxes.
b0rsuk 8y ago
I designed a very convenient interface for my otherwise extremely simple Chess program. In most chess games, keyboard interface works like this: one axis has labels 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; the other has a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h. Then you movie pieces by inputing stuff like b4 d5. This is AWFUL. You have to look at the border of of the chessboard to see which row and column your chess piece is in. It wasn't designed for humans to play, it was for keeping records of matches and tournaments. My interface works differently: each of your pieces having valid moves is assigned a key on keyboard. For example rooks could be labeled 1-8, others a-h. You select a piece to move simply by inputing its symbol. When that happens, spaces reachable with legal moves become labeled with symbols... You see where that goes. You look at a piece you want to move, read its symbol, then read the symbol of the place you want to move to. In each case you look at pieces or spaces that interest you, not at X and Y axis.

by huntie 8y ago

c-smile 8y ago

> I know Microsoft has done them before And they added toggle switches to UWP (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/controls-and-patterns/controls-by-function#toggle-switch https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/controls...) that are usability disasters IMO. When such switch used alone you cannot tell in what state it is - you need to remember that "on the right - is on" (yet what about RTL environment?). While there is no such problem with old plain checkboxes.

b0rsuk 8y ago

I designed a very convenient interface for my otherwise extremely simple Chess program. In most chess games, keyboard interface works like this: one axis has labels 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; the other has a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h. Then you movie pieces by inputing stuff like b4 d5. This is AWFUL. You have to look at the border of of the chessboard to see which row and column your chess piece is in. It wasn't designed for humans to play, it was for keeping records of matches and tournaments. My interface works differently: each of your pieces having valid moves is assigned a key on keyboard. For example rooks could be labeled 1-8, others a-h. You select a piece to move simply by inputing its symbol. When that happens, spaces reachable with legal moves become labeled with symbols... You see where that goes. You look at a piece you want to move, read its symbol, then read the symbol of the place you want to move to. In each case you look at pieces or spaces that interest you, not at X and Y axis.