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This post requires that users ignore the most prominent and longstanding discoverability feature of the Mac: the omnipresent top menubar. 1. Scrollable windows

This post requires that users ignore the most prominent and longstanding discoverability feature of the Mac: the omnipresent top menubar. 1. Scrollable windows flash their scrollbars when focused. This bit of bad UI was imported from iOS. Unlike iOS, it can still be turned off: Click the Apple menu -> System Preferences -> General -> Show scroll bars. 2. File menu -> Quick Look. 3. Every action in that context menu is available in the File menu. 3a. Holding the Option key works in the File menu as well, but this change can also be made from File menu -> Get Info -> Open with. 4. This actually bad UI was, again, taken from iOS. 5. Go menu -> Enclosing Folder. Nearly every example is solvable with single clicks in the always-visible, literally spelled-out menubar, as they have been for 30+ years. They are therefore eminently discoverable, contingent on a user giving a thought to trying in the first place to discover them. The one or two examples where this is not true are direct iOS tack-ons that do not respect the platform. What this post is doing is mendaciously pretending that power-user shortcuts, some more or less discoverable than others, are the only way to perform these operations which can actually be accomplished by reading and clicking. The attempt to equate the Mac's discoverability with iOS fails once that is pointed out, since in the latter those mystery-meat gestures truly are the only way to execute them.

em-bee 7y ago
and yet, the users tested didn't use the menu to solve the tasks but gave up, so the original point still stands.
- bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
  Maybe they gave up because the question was phrased as “do you know how to do this” and not “I’ll give you $100 if you can do this”
  - btschaegg 7y ago
    I'd say that is intentional, though. The second phrasing won't give you any good results if you're trying to determine the usability of a UI design. Normal users do not hunt for hidden options the moment they encounter a use case for them. In fact, most would probably assume the feature isn't there even if they realized they had a need for a somewhat generic functionality such as moving to ../ If you offer someone money for finding out about something they don't know about, you change their motivation, which is thus completely different from what they encounter in their day to day use of that software. And the latter is the thing you want to improve in the end.
- whytaka 7y ago
  I've talked with perfectly otherwise intelligent friends who didn't know that on Facebook Messenger, clicking the Phone icon on the top-right of the screen that's present in every single chat view allows you to have a voice call with the person in the chat. It could not get more obvious than this. Some people just need to be taught. They will never discover on their own.
  - swiley 7y ago
    This is why manuals and help pages along with just one or two good UI abstractions (a la readline with tab completion) will almost always be superior to poking at pictograms. Snapchat style GUIs will probably remain sexy on the other hand.
    - rhn_mk1 7y ago
      I'd rather take away "pictograms need labels" from that.
  - rkangel 7y ago
    Really? I have repeatedly called people on FB, accidentally every time...
  - coribuci 7y ago
    > I've talked with perfectly otherwise intelligent friends who didn't know that on Facebook Messenger, clicking the Phone icon on the top-right of the screen that's present in every single chat view allows you to have a voice call with the person in the chat. My friend, there are a lot of icons in every program. When the smart developer relies on the stupid user (emphasis mine) to guess what he wants without bothering to put a text label or a tooltip describing the role of the button don't expect wonders. And since "material design" it is really difficult to say if an UI element is a button, or a label or just a decoration without clicking on it and opening the Gates of hell. > It could not get more obvious than this. Some people just need to be taught. They will never discover on their own. There was a saying "The only intuitive interface is the nipple". Some people with children say it's an overstatement.
staplers 7y ago
Good ux designers don't inject their opinions. They observe the data and adjust accordingly.
- ZenPsycho 7y ago
  if, as a UX designer, you don't have opinions, then all you're doing is blindly optimising for metrics that may have nothing to do with actually good experiences. This is why platforms like twitter and facebook are such cacophonous trashfires: UX "Designers" chasing "engagement", and holding no opinions. you might as well just hand your job over to an AI, you're contributing nothing to the process.
  - dangerface 7y ago
    long engagement = good experience is an opinion, but I agree with you that its the wrong opinion. In my opinion less clicks = good experience
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
- blululu 7y ago
  Being humble and being observant are both important but in most interesting design challenges the data is sparse relative to the space of possible design solutions. Heuristics and opinions are a necessary part of the process. Good designers listen and inject well formed options into the product.
- pembrook 7y ago
  Good UX designers would also never conduct a user study with a sample size of 3.
  - Vinnl 7y ago
    While 3 is a bit on the low end, user studies are not required to have large sample sizes. You're not trying to estimate what percentage of users are running into a particular issue, but only which issues many users run into. Whether it affects 10% or 30% of users does not really influence whether it should be fixed. More on this: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-w...
spoondan 7y ago
“Mendaciously pretending,” is over the top. Even if you don’t agree with the author’s point, even if you think the tested users are idiots or unrepresentative, there’s simply no justification for calling the author a liar or suggesting he’s anything less than earnest. It’s entirely possible that none of these users thought to use the menu bar for these tasks. I, for one, have never thought to use the “Go” menu to get to the enclosing folder. Why? I don’t know. Maybe I’m dumb. I guess it didn’t occur to me that such a frequently needed action would be provided and yet not given dedicated UI in the window frame. Similarly, I “know” how to set the default program to open a file from the info pane, but I always end up re-discovering it because I do it so infrequently, and it’s not intuitive to me to find it under “Get Info.” I always doubt it until I find it there. Nor does it matter where macOS inherited usability issues from: they still exist in macOS, they still affect macOS users. I also think you’ve taken the wrong point. I don’t read the post as arguing that macOS has just as many discoverability issues as iOS or that it’s not in better in some ways. Instead, it seems to me the author is clearly arguing that macOS also has discoverability issues even for daily and power users, and thus we should re-evaluate both how good macOS’s discoverability is and how bad iOS’s is.
cycloptic 7y ago
The menubar doesn't make it more discoverable. If it did, the users in the article would have thought to look there, but they didn't. Nobody bothers with that anymore. This was not obvious to me until I saw people getting used to iOS programs where menus don't exist. The menubar is good at showing you a soup of options but is really bad at contextualizing it. The problem shows up in MacOS programs where they stuff all the contents of every context menu into the menubar just so they can say that it's usable with one mouse button. Well if you do that, the context behind all these actions and the locality of information goes away! Even in simple programs like the finder there is global application state that can cause some menu items to arbitrarily become inactive. The action itself might be discoverable, but the state that it relies on isn't discoverable at all. Take a more complex application with massive 50-item-long menus and it gets ridiculous. The menu doesn't communicate at all what an action means or when it should be used. In that situation the only thing the menus realistically exist for anymore is a learning tool to help memorize keyboard shortcuts. Side note: I didn't think I would be approving of Microsoft designers on something like this, but I think their "ribbon" UI has been a good step away from giant crazy menus.
- the_other 7y ago
  > The menubar doesn't make it more discoverable. If it did, the users in the article would have thought to look there, but they didn't. Nobody bothers with that anymore. I do it, almost without planning to, with most new software I encounter. Perhaps because I learned computing in the WIMP days. To say "no-one" does it, is false. The overall argument you're trying to counter is that the menubar doesn't aid usability and thus discounts itself from arguments of iOS vs Mac usability. This is also ridiculous. Everyone uses menubar all the time - sometimes they're more icon-y, sometimes more text-y... but they're everywhere and to say people don't look across them is to deny the existence of vision.
- ivanhoe 7y ago
  > I think their "ribbon" UI has been a good step away from giant crazy menus. When you discuss UX you always have to be aware that you have two very distinctive populations with very different expectations: new users and old users. Everyone I've ever seen trying to find something in new Office apps (myself included) was bitching about ribbon menus and how much they suck. It's 100% biased because we all were used to the old UI, but since I use Office and Windows only occasionally, to this day I still didn't get used to it fully. For new users who grew up on Win10 and this type of UI I'm sure it works great.
onion2k 7y ago
Scrollable windows flash their scrollbars when focused. No doubt there's a setting for this somewhere in OSX, but that isn't happening for me in Chrome, and it doesn't happen in the notifications panel where the Do Not Disturb toggle is either. What's worse, I set scrollbars to "Always show" in preferences it still doesn't show me that there are hidden options at the top of the notifications panel. There is nothing in the UI to indicate that those are there.
dangerface 7y ago
The menubar is the worst bit of mac ui design, completely removes the action from the context of what you are acting on UI 101. I hate that people keep pretending its good UI design simply because it was a thing before we knew what good UI design was.

em-bee 7y ago

and yet, the users tested didn't use the menu to solve the tasks but gave up, so the original point still stands.

bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
Maybe they gave up because the question was phrased as “do you know how to do this” and not “I’ll give you $100 if you can do this”
- btschaegg 7y ago
  I'd say that is intentional, though. The second phrasing won't give you any good results if you're trying to determine the usability of a UI design. Normal users do not hunt for hidden options the moment they encounter a use case for them. In fact, most would probably assume the feature isn't there even if they realized they had a need for a somewhat generic functionality such as moving to ../ If you offer someone money for finding out about something they don't know about, you change their motivation, which is thus completely different from what they encounter in their day to day use of that software. And the latter is the thing you want to improve in the end.
whytaka 7y ago
I've talked with perfectly otherwise intelligent friends who didn't know that on Facebook Messenger, clicking the Phone icon on the top-right of the screen that's present in every single chat view allows you to have a voice call with the person in the chat. It could not get more obvious than this. Some people just need to be taught. They will never discover on their own.
- swiley 7y ago
  This is why manuals and help pages along with just one or two good UI abstractions (a la readline with tab completion) will almost always be superior to poking at pictograms. Snapchat style GUIs will probably remain sexy on the other hand.
  - rhn_mk1 7y ago
    I'd rather take away "pictograms need labels" from that.
- rkangel 7y ago
  Really? I have repeatedly called people on FB, accidentally every time...
- coribuci 7y ago
  > I've talked with perfectly otherwise intelligent friends who didn't know that on Facebook Messenger, clicking the Phone icon on the top-right of the screen that's present in every single chat view allows you to have a voice call with the person in the chat. My friend, there are a lot of icons in every program. When the smart developer relies on the stupid user (emphasis mine) to guess what he wants without bothering to put a text label or a tooltip describing the role of the button don't expect wonders. And since "material design" it is really difficult to say if an UI element is a button, or a label or just a decoration without clicking on it and opening the Gates of hell. > It could not get more obvious than this. Some people just need to be taught. They will never discover on their own. There was a saying "The only intuitive interface is the nipple". Some people with children say it's an overstatement.

staplers 7y ago

Good ux designers don't inject their opinions. They observe the data and adjust accordingly.

ZenPsycho 7y ago
if, as a UX designer, you don't have opinions, then all you're doing is blindly optimising for metrics that may have nothing to do with actually good experiences. This is why platforms like twitter and facebook are such cacophonous trashfires: UX "Designers" chasing "engagement", and holding no opinions. you might as well just hand your job over to an AI, you're contributing nothing to the process.
- dangerface 7y ago
  long engagement = good experience is an opinion, but I agree with you that its the wrong opinion. In my opinion less clicks = good experience
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
blululu 7y ago
Being humble and being observant are both important but in most interesting design challenges the data is sparse relative to the space of possible design solutions. Heuristics and opinions are a necessary part of the process. Good designers listen and inject well formed options into the product.
pembrook 7y ago
Good UX designers would also never conduct a user study with a sample size of 3.
- Vinnl 7y ago
  While 3 is a bit on the low end, user studies are not required to have large sample sizes. You're not trying to estimate what percentage of users are running into a particular issue, but only which issues many users run into. Whether it affects 10% or 30% of users does not really influence whether it should be fixed. More on this: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-with-5-users/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/why-you-only-need-to-test-w...

spoondan 7y ago

“Mendaciously pretending,” is over the top. Even if you don’t agree with the author’s point, even if you think the tested users are idiots or unrepresentative, there’s simply no justification for calling the author a liar or suggesting he’s anything less than earnest. It’s entirely possible that none of these users thought to use the menu bar for these tasks. I, for one, have never thought to use the “Go” menu to get to the enclosing folder. Why? I don’t know. Maybe I’m dumb. I guess it didn’t occur to me that such a frequently needed action would be provided and yet not given dedicated UI in the window frame. Similarly, I “know” how to set the default program to open a file from the info pane, but I always end up re-discovering it because I do it so infrequently, and it’s not intuitive to me to find it under “Get Info.” I always doubt it until I find it there. Nor does it matter where macOS inherited usability issues from: they still exist in macOS, they still affect macOS users. I also think you’ve taken the wrong point. I don’t read the post as arguing that macOS has just as many discoverability issues as iOS or that it’s not in better in some ways. Instead, it seems to me the author is clearly arguing that macOS also has discoverability issues even for daily and power users, and thus we should re-evaluate both how good macOS’s discoverability is and how bad iOS’s is.

cycloptic 7y ago

The menubar doesn't make it more discoverable. If it did, the users in the article would have thought to look there, but they didn't. Nobody bothers with that anymore. This was not obvious to me until I saw people getting used to iOS programs where menus don't exist. The menubar is good at showing you a soup of options but is really bad at contextualizing it. The problem shows up in MacOS programs where they stuff all the contents of every context menu into the menubar just so they can say that it's usable with one mouse button. Well if you do that, the context behind all these actions and the locality of information goes away! Even in simple programs like the finder there is global application state that can cause some menu items to arbitrarily become inactive. The action itself might be discoverable, but the state that it relies on isn't discoverable at all. Take a more complex application with massive 50-item-long menus and it gets ridiculous. The menu doesn't communicate at all what an action means or when it should be used. In that situation the only thing the menus realistically exist for anymore is a learning tool to help memorize keyboard shortcuts. Side note: I didn't think I would be approving of Microsoft designers on something like this, but I think their "ribbon" UI has been a good step away from giant crazy menus.

the_other 7y ago
> The menubar doesn't make it more discoverable. If it did, the users in the article would have thought to look there, but they didn't. Nobody bothers with that anymore. I do it, almost without planning to, with most new software I encounter. Perhaps because I learned computing in the WIMP days. To say "no-one" does it, is false. The overall argument you're trying to counter is that the menubar doesn't aid usability and thus discounts itself from arguments of iOS vs Mac usability. This is also ridiculous. Everyone uses menubar all the time - sometimes they're more icon-y, sometimes more text-y... but they're everywhere and to say people don't look across them is to deny the existence of vision.
ivanhoe 7y ago
> I think their "ribbon" UI has been a good step away from giant crazy menus. When you discuss UX you always have to be aware that you have two very distinctive populations with very different expectations: new users and old users. Everyone I've ever seen trying to find something in new Office apps (myself included) was bitching about ribbon menus and how much they suck. It's 100% biased because we all were used to the old UI, but since I use Office and Windows only occasionally, to this day I still didn't get used to it fully. For new users who grew up on Win10 and this type of UI I'm sure it works great.

onion2k 7y ago

Scrollable windows flash their scrollbars when focused. No doubt there's a setting for this somewhere in OSX, but that isn't happening for me in Chrome, and it doesn't happen in the notifications panel where the Do Not Disturb toggle is either. What's worse, I set scrollbars to "Always show" in preferences it still doesn't show me that there are hidden options at the top of the notifications panel. There is nothing in the UI to indicate that those are there.

dangerface 7y ago

The menubar is the worst bit of mac ui design, completely removes the action from the context of what you are acting on UI 101. I hate that people keep pretending its good UI design simply because it was a thing before we knew what good UI design was.