38 ms·

The Obvious UI Is Often the Best UI

241 points by keyle 7y ago

pidge 7y ago
Sometimes a word is worth a thousand icons. https://blog.codinghorror.com/sometimes-a-word-is-worth-a-thousand-icons/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/sometimes-a-word-is-worth-a-th...
- teddyh 7y ago
  But I don’t know what “BT” does, either.
  - mark-r 7y ago
    When I saw your comment my first thought was "Bluetooth" but in the context of the article, I can't figure it out either. The Microsoft Word example is terrible too. The ribbon didn't fix anything, there's still too much to fit on screen at once. The old menus and toolbars were at least scannable, since everything lined up; the ribbon requires much more hunting to find what you need.
    - Someone1234 7y ago
      The Ribbon is context aware, unlike the old toolbars. So if you're in a graph, you'll see the graph design Ribbon, if you're not then you won't. This gives users less they need to scan and or ignore. Is the Ribbon a panacea? Absolutely not. But I'd respectful disagree with anyone who claims it is "just as bad" as the old toolbars. They made a lot of accessibility improvements and reduce the training curve substantially.
      - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
        Maybe it's much better for someone using Office daily. Having seen quite a few who are occasional users struggle with the Ribbon it sure seems like they find it worse. With an old static toolbar they could at least hunt and (eventually) click. With the intermittent context awareness they were searching something that was often simply not there at the moment. I had a relative who ran a mailmerge to print some address labels once a month, which apart from the odd letter was all he did with Word. Without fail after Word 2007 (IIRC the one the Ribbon arrived in) I'd get a monthly call, that usually became long and painful, trying to let him print his labels. Few months later, I visited and put back his old copy of 2003. :)
        fireattack 7y ago
        What stops them to "hunt" with the Ribbon?
        mark-r 7y ago
        As I said, nothing lines up on the ribbon so hunting is harder.
      - stan_rogers 7y ago
        I'll go along with saying it's not "just as bad"; it's far, far worse, especially when training. Disappearing things are incredibly disorienting to non-expert users.
        Someone1234 7y ago
        It is worth stating that in neither case does it function without a relevant item selected. Meaning with the graph design toolbar, it would be visible, but do absolutely nothing until a graph is selected. With the Ribben it appears when the graph is selected. I don't see how a disabled toolbar, with no clue how to enable it, helps with user training or clarity.
        osel 7y ago
        The disabled toolbar is easier because it still gives context and confidence you are looking in the right place. 'This is what I want...hmm...how do I make it work?' is a far easier process than 'I can't find what I want...where on earth is it?..does it even exist?'
        CuriouslyC 7y ago
        And that waste of screen real estate necessitates other design tradeoffs that are more sub optimal than the ribbon.
  - mrec 7y ago
    My guess would be "BitTorrent", given that it's next to "url" and apparently in the context of some sort of media player.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  I remember when I was first thinking about designing good pages, I picked up a book called something like "Ugly Websites" and it was drilled into my head that "mystery meat navigation" is always a bad idea. And that late 90's advice still holds true. Though I am seeing a lot of it lately.
  - d3ld0t 7y ago
    web pages that suck by vincent flanders
- sixstringtheory 7y ago
  Somewhat related: I often say that CLIs are GUIs. Letters are pictures to which we've assigned meaning, just like icons. They are just simpler and less ambiguous, and we're all taught a standardized usage from a very early age to the point that it becomes embedded in our brains for highly efficient processing.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  There's a recent phenomenon, where no link I click on a page posted into an HN comment works. Are we all getting old?
teddyh 7y ago
A.k.a. the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
It's like modern developers are slowly rediscovering things we knew when the Macintosh was released in 1984. Maybe in a few decades we can have computers that don't suck again.
- jbverschoor 7y ago
  Hallelujah
- cobalt 7y ago
  nah, we'll just do it all again.
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    waves and roundabouts
- jcadam 7y ago
  The OS X GUI was (and still is) a big step down from OS 9.
  - machello13 7y ago
    How so?
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      Probably the biggest one is that there was no more spacial file manager.
      - Fnoord 7y ago
        Have you tried Finder in combination with say Amethyst?
      - machello13 7y ago
        Do you have a link to more info on this? As someone who's never used OS 9 I have no idea what a spacial file manager is and would love to learn.
hacknat 7y ago
So true. So many designers try to be too clever, and bad UI is the end-result. Non-obvious design is excusable proportional to how-often I'm going to use something AND how many steps it takes away from me. Non-obvious design is really only good when it saves people time, but people will only put up with time-saving UI when they are going to be using a UI often. For example, Spotify's UI is a little counter-intuitive at first, but I use it so frequently that it's okay and I know how it works now.
- gnud 7y ago
  Spotify are masters at hiding information. The only way to actually see full track names or artist lists is to wait for it to scroll by in the 'currently playing' view - you can't see the full name of the song before you play it. There's no way to see label or release year. There's no way to see a readable version of the cover art. I could go on.
  - sushisource 7y ago
    Agreed. Spotify's UI looks nice. That's pretty much the only nice thing I can say about it. This thread I think highlights the absolute dumpster fire that is the insane design choices they've made: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Linux/adding-an-album-to-the-queue-adds-it-to-the-front-of-the-queue/td-p/2910397 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Linux/adding-an-alb...
    - ThalesX 7y ago
      As I was reading this wonderful thread on mobile, I got a hilarious popup asking me to rate my experience and scrolling my page all the way to the top. Hilarious! On the plus side, their metrics will show them I now visited the web site two times as I intend to go back and continue reading. That’s engagement for ya! Edit: there was only one reply left :(
_0o6v 7y ago
Kind of funny that this is written by Google, responsible for some of the strangest UX decisions. Just look at Gmail. In the single email view there are 5 different toolbars, at different levels of hierarchy. Why is forward at one level, but archive at another? Why are there two sets of drop down menus? Maps is another disaster. Watching my relatively non-technical partner attempt to navigate Maps is quite eye-opening - different panes sliding in and out, Navigation, Places and Maps often conceptually colliding with each other leading to all sorts of confusion (unless you're very familiar with the Google suite of products).
- dmix 7y ago
  The adwords management app might be one of the worst designed pieces of business software I've ever used. Google Analytics was also full of strange decisions and unnecessary complexity. I guess they don't get the good designers on their B2B stuff either. If I was in charge of the gmail team my first goal would be making it faster. It always feels clunky when you need to open gmail.
  - mook 7y ago
    > Google Analytics was also full of strange decisions and unnecessary complexity. Presumably, Google Analytics would be big on dogfooding… which is probably a sign that analytics-driven development isn't quite as useful as it's been touted to be. It's probably got great engagement metrics though!
    - anoncake 7y ago
      A sign and possibly a reason.
- ben_jones 7y ago
  > After analyzing the user engagement statistics of apps that switched from semi-hidden navigation within hamburger menus to more visible bottom navigation bars, and apps that switched from more exposed to semi-hidden navigation, Wroblewski saw a trend. “Navigation is the manifestation of what is possible in an app and when people can’t see what’s possible, they likely won’t know what they can/should do in that app,” he told me in an interview about this idea. Increasing visibility boosts usage. They have this highly data-driven process which optimizes for usage and engagement . The problem is I don't wake up in the morning and go "gee I really want to up my engagement with google maps today". The ideal information retrieval app consists of me retrieving information and closing it. This is antithetical to Google's monetization model, and thus Google Consumer design is not for my benefit. That said each Google Product is like a different company and they do do good work here and there. Specifically the Google Cloud Console has improved tremendously over the years (no doubt due to massive investment). Is it perfect? Hell no. But I prefer it to AWS and Azure tremendously.
robertoandred 7y ago
Interesting that iOS has had bottom navigation all along and Apple gets criticized for never changing things. Meanwhile Google adopts it after ditching their own terrible UX design and gets lauded for innovation.
- DangitBobby 7y ago
  You seem to imply that iOS hasn't been lauded for it's innovations.
  - zapzupnz 7y ago
    I don't see that implication. I mean, the article is basically Google taking credit for going back to user interface design principles that Apple pioneered 12 years ago; whether Apple got its kudos back then has no bearing on whether Google's disingenuously backtracking on some of the major design features of Android's HIG and much of what makes the Material design … well, Material.
mark-r 7y ago
The most non-obvious thing I've seen in modern software is the hamburger menu. Now that I'm used to it it's OK, but for a long time I didn't realize that the hamburger icon would bring up a menu and there's a lot I missed.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  Our app is used by quite a few non-technical people. And we are in the process of figuring out something to make the hamburger menu more obvious. Lots of people still don't know that it's a menu.
  - mark-r 7y ago
    I'm plenty technical, but I was late to the party when it came to using my phone as a computer.
  - TimMeade 7y ago
    Instead of the 3 bars we just use the word menu. People seem to get it better.
  - worg 7y ago
    Add text to the icon [0] (the example is in spanish, but it's not much different) That also helps to convey the meaning of the icon and educate peopple [0] https://i.imgur.com/x6X6yXU.png https://i.imgur.com/x6X6yXU.png
    - ses1984 7y ago
      I am really disappointed the text doesn't say hamburger.
  - mrec 7y ago
    Smartphones are full of this. Even if you've been using computers for decades, when you pick one up for the first time there's nothing to suggest, for example, that "swipe" is a verb, or what it does, or whether the direction matters and if so how. I find it mind-boggling that more than a decade into the smartphone revolution there are a zillion fart apps and (AFAICT) zero tutorial apps teaching a user what the verbs and affordances and conventions are.
specialist 7y ago
Article buries the lede: do usability testing. It links to RITE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RITE_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RITE_Method Sure, sounds reasonable. TLDR: There is no obvious UI. There is only validated UI. -- Bad management is bigger challenge than good design. Too many times I've had drive-by management (pointy haired bosses) offhandedly override finely crafted user interfaces, tested and refined over months with real end users, forged by trained, experienced professionals. Designing user interfaces is even more fun and rewarding than architecture. Which is why I gave up.
- exolymph 7y ago
  YES. And usability testing doesn't have to be anything fancy — DO USER INTERVIEWS! Even a handful of 30-minute sessions watching them use the application will have tremendous ROI!
buboard 7y ago
Good that they are learning , because their designs are awful. I m struggling to understand why they consider their new adwords and adsense and search console an "upgrade". For example, I was searching the button to add a new campaign for 2 minutes between endless spinners, progressbars and "cards". There is absolutely no hierarchy in the page, even though the concepts campaign > ad group > ad are there. I don't even fathom how they manage to make such bluders on something simple Gimme back a simple 90s design with a menubar and a folder tree on the left. Or a command line. Those UX were genius. These new ones ... i dunno
mrweasel 7y ago
This is exactly my problem with gesture based interaction, especially on the iPhone (I don't know if it's better on Android). The gestures are almost always not obvious. There's simply no hints that their are available or what swiping the screen in circles and flicking the home button might do. It may get you one step back in your browser history, it may do nothing. That would be fine, if gestures where complementary to on screen navigation, but often the gestures are the primary "UI".
- hnick 7y ago
  Even for on-screen controls, we're missing tooltips on hover which I think are a crucial part of discoverability for programs on a desktop PC. You don't get that on mobile (at best you get a 'new user tour', and have to remember every button up front, or pity you). Maybe one day they can get the camera to do some creepy eye scanning and pop up tooltips based on what we are staring at.
  - Technetium_Hat 7y ago
    it is a convention in android apps to show a toast message as a tooltip when you long press on a button.
- Raphael 7y ago
  And when the app is updated every week, it opens up with the same tutorial again.
capableweb 7y ago
> session time increased 70 percent, and daily active users increased by 65 percent nearly overnight They never argue for why increase of session time is seeing like something good. For the user, if they can do something quickly, they can spend less time with the software. The "65 percent increase in daily active users " something that happened as a effect to making the application more difficult to use. "Increased usage" does not automatically mean the thing you are building is actually useful. A really good tool does it job and then gets out of your way. Also, looking at the "Polar app" screenshot, not only has the top part of the application changed, but the lower menu is completely gone? Seems like a bigger change than the one on the top. At this point, I think the UX of the application is way more important and worth doing user testing with, seeing the nitty-gritty of what's happening with the user and the application. Maybe Google did this, but judging by their UX in their products, they are all about those metrics instead.
- indymike 7y ago
  If you read the article the increase in use is due to the increase in use of features that were formerly hidden.
  - capableweb 7y ago
    The only example of actual increase of use in a particular feature is this one: https://miro.medium.com/max/2400/0*24guSnnmXQu2zi3n https://miro.medium.com/max/2400/0*24guSnnmXQu2zi3n (the Google Translate example) And in that it's not even just about icon vs icon + text, but two very different kind of icons... One is a snake (?) and the other one a pen. Edit: Also, want to answer directly to "the increase in use of features ": that also doesn't necessary means it's good for the user. Maybe they don't actually have any use of it, and what they could see before on the main page, they now try to find. Point being, designing UX after metrics is a bit pointless, as it doesn't show anything that you should really care about when solving someones problem.
SubiculumCode 7y ago
I am all for using text in place of icons almost always. I read text fast. I have memorized the match between these symbols and their meaning and would like to capitalize on that learning.
bradstewart 7y ago
Does anyone else find Hulu's new(ish) UI nearly impossible to navigate? Especially on smart TV apps, but also web and mobile. Trying to replay the previous episode of a show is one of the most frustrating interactions I have with any piece of software. They fill the entire screen with pilot episodes for a half dozen other shows, but can't find anywhere to put a "back" button?
bitcuration 7y ago
Seems this whole concept is also obvious. UI remains as a problem simply because it's a problem pertaining and invented by nerds. People with common sense don't recognize the existence of UI.
carapace 7y ago
Just want to recommend "The Humane Interface" by Jef Raskin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface > Jef Raskin ... was an American human–computer interface expert best known for conceiving and starting the Macintosh project at Apple in the late 1970s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin
- jfengel 7y ago
  Good suggestion. I got to review The Humane Interface in its later stages and it hugely influenced the way I design. It amused me to note that the manuscript came in the form of double-spaced Courier with hand-drawn illustrations. That seemed odd from a key designer of the Macintosh, which introduced the notion of fonts and page design to regular users. But he didn't have to do page design for this; that would be done by actual designers at the publisher. He picked the interface that did what he needed and left the rest of the job to somebody else.
thomasedwards 7y ago
What’s funny about the bottom navigation menu is that’s how iOS was designed from the start. All the first apps (pre-App Store) and the first wave of App Store apps all used it. Then apps started to get busy, so the bottom menu was removed. Now people have realised if you make your app do 25 things rather than 5, it’s just too complicated, and we’re back full circle.

241 points by keyle 7y ago

Sometimes a word is worth a thousand icons. https://blog.codinghorror.com/sometimes-a-word-is-worth-a-thousand-icons/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/sometimes-a-word-is-worth-a-th...

teddyh 7y ago
But I don’t know what “BT” does, either.
- mark-r 7y ago
  When I saw your comment my first thought was "Bluetooth" but in the context of the article, I can't figure it out either. The Microsoft Word example is terrible too. The ribbon didn't fix anything, there's still too much to fit on screen at once. The old menus and toolbars were at least scannable, since everything lined up; the ribbon requires much more hunting to find what you need.
  - Someone1234 7y ago
    The Ribbon is context aware, unlike the old toolbars. So if you're in a graph, you'll see the graph design Ribbon, if you're not then you won't. This gives users less they need to scan and or ignore. Is the Ribbon a panacea? Absolutely not. But I'd respectful disagree with anyone who claims it is "just as bad" as the old toolbars. They made a lot of accessibility improvements and reduce the training curve substantially.
    - NeedMoreTea 7y ago
      Maybe it's much better for someone using Office daily. Having seen quite a few who are occasional users struggle with the Ribbon it sure seems like they find it worse. With an old static toolbar they could at least hunt and (eventually) click. With the intermittent context awareness they were searching something that was often simply not there at the moment. I had a relative who ran a mailmerge to print some address labels once a month, which apart from the odd letter was all he did with Word. Without fail after Word 2007 (IIRC the one the Ribbon arrived in) I'd get a monthly call, that usually became long and painful, trying to let him print his labels. Few months later, I visited and put back his old copy of 2003. :)
      - fireattack 7y ago
        What stops them to "hunt" with the Ribbon?
        mark-r 7y ago
        As I said, nothing lines up on the ribbon so hunting is harder.
    - stan_rogers 7y ago
      I'll go along with saying it's not "just as bad"; it's far, far worse, especially when training. Disappearing things are incredibly disorienting to non-expert users.
      - Someone1234 7y ago
        It is worth stating that in neither case does it function without a relevant item selected. Meaning with the graph design toolbar, it would be visible, but do absolutely nothing until a graph is selected. With the Ribben it appears when the graph is selected. I don't see how a disabled toolbar, with no clue how to enable it, helps with user training or clarity.
        osel 7y ago
        The disabled toolbar is easier because it still gives context and confidence you are looking in the right place. 'This is what I want...hmm...how do I make it work?' is a far easier process than 'I can't find what I want...where on earth is it?..does it even exist?'
        CuriouslyC 7y ago
        And that waste of screen real estate necessitates other design tradeoffs that are more sub optimal than the ribbon.
- mrec 7y ago
  My guess would be "BitTorrent", given that it's next to "url" and apparently in the context of some sort of media player.
jjeaff 7y ago
I remember when I was first thinking about designing good pages, I picked up a book called something like "Ugly Websites" and it was drilled into my head that "mystery meat navigation" is always a bad idea. And that late 90's advice still holds true. Though I am seeing a lot of it lately.
- d3ld0t 7y ago
  web pages that suck by vincent flanders
sixstringtheory 7y ago
Somewhat related: I often say that CLIs are GUIs. Letters are pictures to which we've assigned meaning, just like icons. They are just simpler and less ambiguous, and we're all taught a standardized usage from a very early age to the point that it becomes embedded in our brains for highly efficient processing.
marcosdumay 7y ago
There's a recent phenomenon, where no link I click on a page posted into an HN comment works. Are we all getting old?

teddyh 7y ago

A.k.a. the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishmen...

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

It's like modern developers are slowly rediscovering things we knew when the Macintosh was released in 1984. Maybe in a few decades we can have computers that don't suck again.

jbverschoor 7y ago
Hallelujah
cobalt 7y ago
nah, we'll just do it all again.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  waves and roundabouts
jcadam 7y ago
The OS X GUI was (and still is) a big step down from OS 9.
- machello13 7y ago
  How so?
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    Probably the biggest one is that there was no more spacial file manager.
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      Have you tried Finder in combination with say Amethyst?
    - machello13 7y ago
      Do you have a link to more info on this? As someone who's never used OS 9 I have no idea what a spacial file manager is and would love to learn.

hacknat 7y ago

So true. So many designers try to be too clever, and bad UI is the end-result. Non-obvious design is excusable proportional to how-often I'm going to use something AND how many steps it takes away from me. Non-obvious design is really only good when it saves people time, but people will only put up with time-saving UI when they are going to be using a UI often. For example, Spotify's UI is a little counter-intuitive at first, but I use it so frequently that it's okay and I know how it works now.

gnud 7y ago
Spotify are masters at hiding information. The only way to actually see full track names or artist lists is to wait for it to scroll by in the 'currently playing' view - you can't see the full name of the song before you play it. There's no way to see label or release year. There's no way to see a readable version of the cover art. I could go on.
- sushisource 7y ago
  Agreed. Spotify's UI looks nice. That's pretty much the only nice thing I can say about it. This thread I think highlights the absolute dumpster fire that is the insane design choices they've made: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Linux/adding-an-album-to-the-queue-adds-it-to-the-front-of-the-queue/td-p/2910397 https://community.spotify.com/t5/Desktop-Linux/adding-an-alb...
  - ThalesX 7y ago
    As I was reading this wonderful thread on mobile, I got a hilarious popup asking me to rate my experience and scrolling my page all the way to the top. Hilarious! On the plus side, their metrics will show them I now visited the web site two times as I intend to go back and continue reading. That’s engagement for ya! Edit: there was only one reply left :(

_0o6v 7y ago

Kind of funny that this is written by Google, responsible for some of the strangest UX decisions. Just look at Gmail. In the single email view there are 5 different toolbars, at different levels of hierarchy. Why is forward at one level, but archive at another? Why are there two sets of drop down menus? Maps is another disaster. Watching my relatively non-technical partner attempt to navigate Maps is quite eye-opening - different panes sliding in and out, Navigation, Places and Maps often conceptually colliding with each other leading to all sorts of confusion (unless you're very familiar with the Google suite of products).

dmix 7y ago
The adwords management app might be one of the worst designed pieces of business software I've ever used. Google Analytics was also full of strange decisions and unnecessary complexity. I guess they don't get the good designers on their B2B stuff either. If I was in charge of the gmail team my first goal would be making it faster. It always feels clunky when you need to open gmail.
- mook 7y ago
  > Google Analytics was also full of strange decisions and unnecessary complexity. Presumably, Google Analytics would be big on dogfooding… which is probably a sign that analytics-driven development isn't quite as useful as it's been touted to be. It's probably got great engagement metrics though!
  - anoncake 7y ago
    A sign and possibly a reason.
ben_jones 7y ago
> After analyzing the user engagement statistics of apps that switched from semi-hidden navigation within hamburger menus to more visible bottom navigation bars, and apps that switched from more exposed to semi-hidden navigation, Wroblewski saw a trend. “Navigation is the manifestation of what is possible in an app and when people can’t see what’s possible, they likely won’t know what they can/should do in that app,” he told me in an interview about this idea. Increasing visibility boosts usage. They have this highly data-driven process which optimizes for usage and engagement . The problem is I don't wake up in the morning and go "gee I really want to up my engagement with google maps today". The ideal information retrieval app consists of me retrieving information and closing it. This is antithetical to Google's monetization model, and thus Google Consumer design is not for my benefit. That said each Google Product is like a different company and they do do good work here and there. Specifically the Google Cloud Console has improved tremendously over the years (no doubt due to massive investment). Is it perfect? Hell no. But I prefer it to AWS and Azure tremendously.

robertoandred 7y ago

Interesting that iOS has had bottom navigation all along and Apple gets criticized for never changing things. Meanwhile Google adopts it after ditching their own terrible UX design and gets lauded for innovation.

DangitBobby 7y ago
You seem to imply that iOS hasn't been lauded for it's innovations.
- zapzupnz 7y ago
  I don't see that implication. I mean, the article is basically Google taking credit for going back to user interface design principles that Apple pioneered 12 years ago; whether Apple got its kudos back then has no bearing on whether Google's disingenuously backtracking on some of the major design features of Android's HIG and much of what makes the Material design … well, Material.

mark-r 7y ago

The most non-obvious thing I've seen in modern software is the hamburger menu. Now that I'm used to it it's OK, but for a long time I didn't realize that the hamburger icon would bring up a menu and there's a lot I missed.

jjeaff 7y ago
Our app is used by quite a few non-technical people. And we are in the process of figuring out something to make the hamburger menu more obvious. Lots of people still don't know that it's a menu.
- mark-r 7y ago
  I'm plenty technical, but I was late to the party when it came to using my phone as a computer.
- TimMeade 7y ago
  Instead of the 3 bars we just use the word menu. People seem to get it better.
- worg 7y ago
  Add text to the icon [0] (the example is in spanish, but it's not much different) That also helps to convey the meaning of the icon and educate peopple [0] https://i.imgur.com/x6X6yXU.png https://i.imgur.com/x6X6yXU.png
  - ses1984 7y ago
    I am really disappointed the text doesn't say hamburger.
- mrec 7y ago
  Smartphones are full of this. Even if you've been using computers for decades, when you pick one up for the first time there's nothing to suggest, for example, that "swipe" is a verb, or what it does, or whether the direction matters and if so how. I find it mind-boggling that more than a decade into the smartphone revolution there are a zillion fart apps and (AFAICT) zero tutorial apps teaching a user what the verbs and affordances and conventions are.

specialist 7y ago

Article buries the lede: do usability testing. It links to RITE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RITE_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RITE_Method Sure, sounds reasonable. TLDR: There is no obvious UI. There is only validated UI. -- Bad management is bigger challenge than good design. Too many times I've had drive-by management (pointy haired bosses) offhandedly override finely crafted user interfaces, tested and refined over months with real end users, forged by trained, experienced professionals. Designing user interfaces is even more fun and rewarding than architecture. Which is why I gave up.

exolymph 7y ago
YES. And usability testing doesn't have to be anything fancy — DO USER INTERVIEWS! Even a handful of 30-minute sessions watching them use the application will have tremendous ROI!

buboard 7y ago

Good that they are learning , because their designs are awful. I m struggling to understand why they consider their new adwords and adsense and search console an "upgrade". For example, I was searching the button to add a new campaign for 2 minutes between endless spinners, progressbars and "cards". There is absolutely no hierarchy in the page, even though the concepts campaign > ad group > ad are there. I don't even fathom how they manage to make such bluders on something simple Gimme back a simple 90s design with a menubar and a folder tree on the left. Or a command line. Those UX were genius. These new ones ... i dunno

mrweasel 7y ago

This is exactly my problem with gesture based interaction, especially on the iPhone (I don't know if it's better on Android). The gestures are almost always not obvious. There's simply no hints that their are available or what swiping the screen in circles and flicking the home button might do. It may get you one step back in your browser history, it may do nothing. That would be fine, if gestures where complementary to on screen navigation, but often the gestures are the primary "UI".

hnick 7y ago
Even for on-screen controls, we're missing tooltips on hover which I think are a crucial part of discoverability for programs on a desktop PC. You don't get that on mobile (at best you get a 'new user tour', and have to remember every button up front, or pity you). Maybe one day they can get the camera to do some creepy eye scanning and pop up tooltips based on what we are staring at.
- Technetium_Hat 7y ago
  it is a convention in android apps to show a toast message as a tooltip when you long press on a button.
Raphael 7y ago
And when the app is updated every week, it opens up with the same tutorial again.

capableweb 7y ago

> session time increased 70 percent, and daily active users increased by 65 percent nearly overnight They never argue for why increase of session time is seeing like something good. For the user, if they can do something quickly, they can spend less time with the software. The "65 percent increase in daily active users " something that happened as a effect to making the application more difficult to use. "Increased usage" does not automatically mean the thing you are building is actually useful. A really good tool does it job and then gets out of your way. Also, looking at the "Polar app" screenshot, not only has the top part of the application changed, but the lower menu is completely gone? Seems like a bigger change than the one on the top. At this point, I think the UX of the application is way more important and worth doing user testing with, seeing the nitty-gritty of what's happening with the user and the application. Maybe Google did this, but judging by their UX in their products, they are all about those metrics instead.

indymike 7y ago
If you read the article the increase in use is due to the increase in use of features that were formerly hidden.
- capableweb 7y ago
  The only example of actual increase of use in a particular feature is this one: https://miro.medium.com/max/2400/0*24guSnnmXQu2zi3n https://miro.medium.com/max/2400/0*24guSnnmXQu2zi3n (the Google Translate example) And in that it's not even just about icon vs icon + text, but two very different kind of icons... One is a snake (?) and the other one a pen. Edit: Also, want to answer directly to "the increase in use of features ": that also doesn't necessary means it's good for the user. Maybe they don't actually have any use of it, and what they could see before on the main page, they now try to find. Point being, designing UX after metrics is a bit pointless, as it doesn't show anything that you should really care about when solving someones problem.

SubiculumCode 7y ago

I am all for using text in place of icons almost always. I read text fast. I have memorized the match between these symbols and their meaning and would like to capitalize on that learning.

bradstewart 7y ago

Does anyone else find Hulu's new(ish) UI nearly impossible to navigate? Especially on smart TV apps, but also web and mobile. Trying to replay the previous episode of a show is one of the most frustrating interactions I have with any piece of software. They fill the entire screen with pilot episodes for a half dozen other shows, but can't find anywhere to put a "back" button?

bitcuration 7y ago

Seems this whole concept is also obvious. UI remains as a problem simply because it's a problem pertaining and invented by nerds. People with common sense don't recognize the existence of UI.

carapace 7y ago

Just want to recommend "The Humane Interface" by Jef Raskin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface > Jef Raskin ... was an American human–computer interface expert best known for conceiving and starting the Macintosh project at Apple in the late 1970s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin

jfengel 7y ago
Good suggestion. I got to review The Humane Interface in its later stages and it hugely influenced the way I design. It amused me to note that the manuscript came in the form of double-spaced Courier with hand-drawn illustrations. That seemed odd from a key designer of the Macintosh, which introduced the notion of fonts and page design to regular users. But he didn't have to do page design for this; that would be done by actual designers at the publisher. He picked the interface that did what he needed and left the rest of the job to somebody else.

thomasedwards 7y ago

What’s funny about the bottom navigation menu is that’s how iOS was designed from the start. All the first apps (pre-App Store) and the first wave of App Store apps all used it. Then apps started to get busy, so the bottom menu was removed. Now people have realised if you make your app do 25 things rather than 5, it’s just too complicated, and we’re back full circle.