4 ms·

Also, in really well-designed UI of the past, every menu option had a hint in the status bar, every GUI element had a tool tip, that explained what will happen

by js8 7y ago

Also, in really well-designed UI of the past, every menu option had a hint in the status bar, every GUI element had a tool tip, that explained what will happen when you click on it. I find modern applications (especially mobile ones) much harder to discover and use. If you're a teen, you have plenty of time to experiment, but as an adult, I just want to get the work done. Yeah, you could say that I don't want to learn.. but I just want to learn bare minimum to get the job done. The application itself doesn't have to be minimalistic.

lazyjeff 7y ago
The original user interface components had a lot of detail, and focused on learnability. Look at the original scroll bars, they do quadruple duty: they tell you how long the document is, where you are in the document, let you jump to the area of the document you want, and let you scroll slowly. Modern scrollbars are a tiny strip that you have to keep poking at to make them visible; how is anyone going to learn to use that unless they already know about them? So many products have a short lifespan now, apps and websites, that it's not worth the time making them amazing. Anything good required someone to improve it over and over. I save links of cool projects I see on Hacker News and half of them stop working after a year. Almost none of them have their full original functionality after 5 years, and are full of broken links, crashing backends, and incompatibilities.
collyw 7y ago
Everything is prettier looking, but pretty icons without text are often meaningless.
bakuninsbart 7y ago
I think a major difference is also that for the teens of today, these apps are intuitive, if they are well designed. They take like 20 seconds to figure everything out. It is just us oldies who grew up with mouse and keyboard who have these problems.
- asjw 7y ago
  I think it's just dumbing down the options. It's recognition over recollection. It is well known that recognition is easier, and that's why consistency help so much. But used everywhere, as if it was the only available tool, it makes discoverability less safe, hence it reduces it. If street signs are well positioned I don't need to know the route, if there are no signs and I don't recognize the place, I'm doomed. If an app does one thing, it's easy to remember how to do that one thing. But if another app does the same thing in a different way, now I have to remember two things and recall from memory which one uses which way.
  - whoopdedo 7y ago
    It's always been recognition over recollection. Users don't want to learn how the computer works. They just want to get to their desired solution as quick as possible. So they'll pay attention long enough to learn the correct sequence of buttons to push that achieves that then stop there. Any change to that mechanical process, no matter how innate to the UI it is, will be seen as a disruption. I used to think that UX inertia was a quality for old people not comfortable with computers. I thought that a younger generation which grew up using computers would be more comfortable and not show the same monkey-see-monkey-do habits. I was wrong. I watched a teenager consistently prefer to delete by right-clicking and selecting "Cut" instead of pressing the delete key, even though he knew it was the same thing and would occasionally use the keyboard. But because the "Cut" command was the first thing he learned that made an item disappear that's what he does. This application has different actions if you drag with left-click or right-click; he frequently confuses them. He didn't know that you can select multiple items by holding down the shift key. This is an honors student who has been using computers his whole life. Other than students pursuing a computer career, this is the typical teenage computer user. It's not that the UI is too difficult or opaque. They simply don't care to learn more than a surface level understanding. The objective isn't to create a world of gurus. It's to improve quality of life for everyone. I'd certainly appreciate a computer that allows me to geek out to my hearts content, but I am not the target audience. And the thing about a well designed simplified interface is it's simpler and more efficient for everyone, including the gurus. The catch is a lot of simplified interfaces aren't so well designed.
Double_a_92 7y ago
I've read somewhere that to some degree apps do that on purpose. The users feel a sense of "pride" when they figure everything out which reduces incentive to switch to a competitor app. Also users can bond over the app while they explain eachother how it works and what little tricks there are. I think Snapchat was the example used in the article that I read.
- brokenmachine 7y ago
  That's an interesting take. It would certainly lessen the incentive to switch apps if it was difficult to learn the one you know.

by js8 7y ago

lazyjeff 7y ago

The original user interface components had a lot of detail, and focused on learnability. Look at the original scroll bars, they do quadruple duty: they tell you how long the document is, where you are in the document, let you jump to the area of the document you want, and let you scroll slowly. Modern scrollbars are a tiny strip that you have to keep poking at to make them visible; how is anyone going to learn to use that unless they already know about them? So many products have a short lifespan now, apps and websites, that it's not worth the time making them amazing. Anything good required someone to improve it over and over. I save links of cool projects I see on Hacker News and half of them stop working after a year. Almost none of them have their full original functionality after 5 years, and are full of broken links, crashing backends, and incompatibilities.

collyw 7y ago

Everything is prettier looking, but pretty icons without text are often meaningless.

bakuninsbart 7y ago

I think a major difference is also that for the teens of today, these apps are intuitive, if they are well designed. They take like 20 seconds to figure everything out. It is just us oldies who grew up with mouse and keyboard who have these problems.

asjw 7y ago
I think it's just dumbing down the options. It's recognition over recollection. It is well known that recognition is easier, and that's why consistency help so much. But used everywhere, as if it was the only available tool, it makes discoverability less safe, hence it reduces it. If street signs are well positioned I don't need to know the route, if there are no signs and I don't recognize the place, I'm doomed. If an app does one thing, it's easy to remember how to do that one thing. But if another app does the same thing in a different way, now I have to remember two things and recall from memory which one uses which way.
- whoopdedo 7y ago
  It's always been recognition over recollection. Users don't want to learn how the computer works. They just want to get to their desired solution as quick as possible. So they'll pay attention long enough to learn the correct sequence of buttons to push that achieves that then stop there. Any change to that mechanical process, no matter how innate to the UI it is, will be seen as a disruption. I used to think that UX inertia was a quality for old people not comfortable with computers. I thought that a younger generation which grew up using computers would be more comfortable and not show the same monkey-see-monkey-do habits. I was wrong. I watched a teenager consistently prefer to delete by right-clicking and selecting "Cut" instead of pressing the delete key, even though he knew it was the same thing and would occasionally use the keyboard. But because the "Cut" command was the first thing he learned that made an item disappear that's what he does. This application has different actions if you drag with left-click or right-click; he frequently confuses them. He didn't know that you can select multiple items by holding down the shift key. This is an honors student who has been using computers his whole life. Other than students pursuing a computer career, this is the typical teenage computer user. It's not that the UI is too difficult or opaque. They simply don't care to learn more than a surface level understanding. The objective isn't to create a world of gurus. It's to improve quality of life for everyone. I'd certainly appreciate a computer that allows me to geek out to my hearts content, but I am not the target audience. And the thing about a well designed simplified interface is it's simpler and more efficient for everyone, including the gurus. The catch is a lot of simplified interfaces aren't so well designed.

Double_a_92 7y ago

I've read somewhere that to some degree apps do that on purpose. The users feel a sense of "pride" when they figure everything out which reduces incentive to switch to a competitor app. Also users can bond over the app while they explain eachother how it works and what little tricks there are. I think Snapchat was the example used in the article that I read.

brokenmachine 7y ago
That's an interesting take. It would certainly lessen the incentive to switch apps if it was difficult to learn the one you know.