9 ms·

It's not only that every app has a different style these days, but some of them change their style or add new features via auto-update every few weeks. Even off

It's not only that every app has a different style these days, but some of them change their style or add new features via auto-update every few weeks. Even office 365 (desktop version) does this. It's not just a usability nightmare, it's an accessibility one too (although the two go hand in hand most of the time). Imagine teaching some elderly neighbour how to write a word document, and after weeks of practice they get it into their muscle memory that the thing they want a lot is the 5th button from the left ... then microsoft adds another one in the next update so it's now the 6th. This would be one place where free software could really shine - you could convert a lot of people with "every application works the same, and we promise we won't change the UI more than once every two years unless we really have to.

saagarjha 7y ago
Sometimes they'll change their style every time you go to them! Aggressive A/B testing is truly awful.
- jwing 7y ago
  “The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles.” - Oren Harari
agumonkey 7y ago
I think we're in a strange bubble. Rapid iteration was a potential source of improvements (never going wrong since you can always adjust next week vs potential big fail every N years) and that it would yield better understanding of users by throwing every possible solutions at them. It will have to pop and rebalance itself because it leads to fatigue and false sense of progress.
- ardy42 7y ago
  > Rapid iteration was a potential source of improvements (never going wrong since you can always adjust next week vs potential big fail every N years) and that it would yield better understanding of users by throwing every possible solutions at them. > It will have to pop and rebalance itself because it leads to fatigue and false sense of progress. Totally agree, it's ended up turning into a stream of pointless side-grades and regressions, forever. Progress come from thoughtfulness, vision, and luck. You can't replace any of that with A-B testing and little experiments.
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    It's doubly odd because as many (I suppose) I firmly believed that faster pace and smaller changes would lead to global improvements (same goes for ajax web..). I think we just blew some social limit. People prefer stability, stability allows for more complex but riskier constructions, society enjoys the working ones even better. I like the notion of seasonality these days.
    - Jtsummers 7y ago
      > It's doubly odd because as many (I suppose) I firmly believed that faster pace and smaller changes would lead to global improvements (same goes for ajax web..). A late response, but a response none the less. Faster response time and changes can result in global improvements, but they don't ensure it unless they consider global implications. See also: normalization of deviance [0]. It's very easy to make small changes based only on local considerations. These can, individually or in aggregate, produce a globally worse system. A non-programming example, but I think illustrative: A friend works in aircraft maintenance as an engineer. They use an adhesive to apply patches to aircraft versus bolts and other joining mechanisms (it's less harmful, longterm, to the airframe and less disruptive to the operation of the aircraft being lightweight and not intruding into the airflow). When the aircraft come in for maintenance the worker is supposed to use a disposable plastic tool and some chemicals to remove the adhesive, it is a slow tedious process. So, naturally, the worker makes a local change to improve their flow: a metal tool that quickly scrapes off the old adhesive. Job done, they move on. The decision was made only with local consideration, but the consequence was an extra 2-4 weeks of maintenance on every aircraft this happened to. Why? The metal-on-metal scraping resulted in damage to the aircraft that required repair. Unless you're making changes with the whole system in mind, the consequences can go either way with regard to the global optimum, while moving towards a local optimum. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
      - agumonkey 7y ago
        Thanks, once again, lots to learn from other industries "issues" :)
- golergka 7y ago
  Rapid iteration as a potential source of improvements is great for startups and new things in general. Word, which you teach your grandma, is NOT a startup. Startup needs to change fast or it will die, and they depend on early adopters who want something new. Word needs to think about it's huge audience that doesn't want anything to change. Remember ribbon redesign and pushback it received? These two types of products need completely different approaches to product development. But also, don't teach your grandma Notion - Word's a much sensible option for her.
wwweston 7y ago
If you think resume-driven development is bad for developers (and it is), consider the career incentives for UI and product people. If there's a "maintain" incentive, I'm not sure what it is. "Didn't change anything about functional and satisfactory interfaces" may be a real value-add in some cases, but it's not a sizzling narrative for selling yourself on the job market.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Very true. Most people get measured by how much churn they create. The more the better. Even if it’s 100% correct for the business you are digging your own grave if you leave things the way they are.
  - MattGaiser 7y ago
    I met these two mobile devs at a conference. They survived several rounds of cost-cutting at a large company by constantly convincing management to let them rewrite their mobile app in some new framework because of X. Start out with the native implementations, then they did Xamarin, tried PhoneGap, went back to native, then to React Native, and now on to Flutter. The pair of them keep their jobs constantly rewriting an app.
    - Moru 7y ago
      Now and then frameworks does backwards incompatible changes so you might as well rewrite the app. If you continue with the old version of the framework you are stuck with either security holes, bugs or that google and apple changes something that downprioritize your app into oblivion. And if the UI/UX does not significantly change every 6 months, your users will give you one star reviews and "Old looking and ugly" comments. I don't envy app developers.
      - ativzzz 7y ago
        Yea if a framework makes breaking changes to the point where you can't upgrade your app, that seems like it could be a recurring problem so after the first rewrite you might as well learn native code and write it there.
btrettel 7y ago
> This would be one place where free software could really shine - you could convert a lot of people with "every application works the same, and we promise we won't change the UI more than once every two years unless we really have to. This is one reason I use Xfce. My brother once told me that my computer has looked basically the same since I used Gnome 2, and he's right. I'm not entirely immune. After switching fully to GTK 3 it took me a while to find a decent style that had scroll bars or not terrible scrollbars. The one I'm using right now (ClassicLooks) has a few issues (e.g., I can't tab through GUIs because it won't highlight the active option), but overall is acceptable. I'll fix the highlighting issue eventually...
- anthk 7y ago
  https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
  - userbinator 7y ago
    Every time I see a screenshot of someone theming Linux to look like Windows, the most obvious thing that stands out as not being quite right is the font rendering. Even when using Microsoft's own TTFs, the font renderers that Linux use seem to put the pixels in a slightly different place than the MS one. Other differences I could see from the screenshots: the comboboxes have the dropdown arrow next to instead of inside the edit control, the table headers should have a thick left and top border too, the up/down control's buttons should also have a 3D border, the scrollbar buttons shouldn't become disabled even at the end of travel, and non-top-mounted tabs have their shadow in the wrong direction and side tabs should have text rotated accordingly. I've used this UI for over two decades so it's pretty easy to see when something doesn't look quite right.
    - Moru 7y ago
      If the font is not a pixel font, it will render differently depending on your settings and the choices of the rendering engine. Subpixel rendering for the different LCD-screens, aliasing for the pixels to look smooth on low res screens, hinting for those small details to be visible in vector fonts. Vector fonts are made of lines that can sometimes be smaller than a pixel wide. Font engines solves this in different ways. It both depend on the quality of the font and the settings of the engine. (I'm no font expert though so names might be off. But I have been playing on and off with pixel fonts and vector graphics since 30 years)
newsbinator 7y ago
> the thing they want a lot is the 5th button from the left I agree it's normal and expected that people get used to buttons being in certain places, and moving them around too often is bad usability. That said, the fact some of my elderly relatives use and understand technology this way, by memorizing how many centimeters from the edge of the screen they should look for a button, makes life needlessly tough for them. They'd be better off understanding what a button is conceptually, what forms it comes in (e.g. standard button vs. underlined link with no outline, etc), and how buttons might be grouped. I know it's a lot to ask of elderly users, but it pays dividends. After many years of Q&A with me, my mom understands her iPad conceptually and as a result gets much more from it than my aunt does, who only understands procedurally that if she presses her finger on 'the button in the corner' then 'x' should happen. If there is no button in the corner, my aunt is lost.
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  Alas too many people are either incapable of this kind of ubderstanding or it would take even longer than just giving them directions every time something changes.
  - Jtsummers 7y ago
    The way people react to computers is similar to how many react to math. A lot of capable people are mathphobic, and it's strange to watch (as someone who took naturally to math). The expressions on the page (or the attempt to produce those expressions from a model in their mind) causes them to seize up. It's like watching an anxiety attack happen. Something about math (the subject, their experience when taking the courses, whatever) has left them with a severe discomfort or level of fear when dealing with it. Computers illicit the same response from many people, regardless of background, education, level of experience with computers. They develop an understanding by rote, or with a rudimentary (but likely totally wrong) mental model. As soon as something is slightly different, the fear or discomfort rises and their mind blanks. They cannot figure out the next step. At an extreme, a color changes and they think it must mean something, but really it's just that that control is now "transparent" (pulling in the background color but blurred) and they happen to have a bright red object behind it, when normally it's a more neutral gray or blue. For some it's that things are no longer in the right place or that display differently (think of the changes in the Windows start menu over the decades). They'll have different thresholds, but once they hit theirs they cannot proceed without great difficulty.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
“the 5th button from the left” Exactly. That’s how I work in applications I use a lot. I don’t look much at the symbol and certainly not at the text. Same for buttons. It’s highly confusing when they shift icons around. Office 365 has become pretty bad that way. Every two months something gets shifted around. No new functionality. Just change for change’s sake.
zozbot234 7y ago
> and we promise we won't change the UI more than once every two years unless we really have to You get that for free by running a stable/LTS distribution.

saagarjha 7y ago

Sometimes they'll change their style every time you go to them! Aggressive A/B testing is truly awful.

jwing 7y ago
“The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles.” - Oren Harari

agumonkey 7y ago

I think we're in a strange bubble. Rapid iteration was a potential source of improvements (never going wrong since you can always adjust next week vs potential big fail every N years) and that it would yield better understanding of users by throwing every possible solutions at them. It will have to pop and rebalance itself because it leads to fatigue and false sense of progress.

ardy42 7y ago
> Rapid iteration was a potential source of improvements (never going wrong since you can always adjust next week vs potential big fail every N years) and that it would yield better understanding of users by throwing every possible solutions at them. > It will have to pop and rebalance itself because it leads to fatigue and false sense of progress. Totally agree, it's ended up turning into a stream of pointless side-grades and regressions, forever. Progress come from thoughtfulness, vision, and luck. You can't replace any of that with A-B testing and little experiments.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  It's doubly odd because as many (I suppose) I firmly believed that faster pace and smaller changes would lead to global improvements (same goes for ajax web..). I think we just blew some social limit. People prefer stability, stability allows for more complex but riskier constructions, society enjoys the working ones even better. I like the notion of seasonality these days.
  - Jtsummers 7y ago
    > It's doubly odd because as many (I suppose) I firmly believed that faster pace and smaller changes would lead to global improvements (same goes for ajax web..). A late response, but a response none the less. Faster response time and changes can result in global improvements, but they don't ensure it unless they consider global implications. See also: normalization of deviance [0]. It's very easy to make small changes based only on local considerations. These can, individually or in aggregate, produce a globally worse system. A non-programming example, but I think illustrative: A friend works in aircraft maintenance as an engineer. They use an adhesive to apply patches to aircraft versus bolts and other joining mechanisms (it's less harmful, longterm, to the airframe and less disruptive to the operation of the aircraft being lightweight and not intruding into the airflow). When the aircraft come in for maintenance the worker is supposed to use a disposable plastic tool and some chemicals to remove the adhesive, it is a slow tedious process. So, naturally, the worker makes a local change to improve their flow: a metal tool that quickly scrapes off the old adhesive. Job done, they move on. The decision was made only with local consideration, but the consequence was an extra 2-4 weeks of maintenance on every aircraft this happened to. Why? The metal-on-metal scraping resulted in damage to the aircraft that required repair. Unless you're making changes with the whole system in mind, the consequences can go either way with regard to the global optimum, while moving towards a local optimum. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance
    - agumonkey 7y ago
      Thanks, once again, lots to learn from other industries "issues" :)
golergka 7y ago
Rapid iteration as a potential source of improvements is great for startups and new things in general. Word, which you teach your grandma, is NOT a startup. Startup needs to change fast or it will die, and they depend on early adopters who want something new. Word needs to think about it's huge audience that doesn't want anything to change. Remember ribbon redesign and pushback it received? These two types of products need completely different approaches to product development. But also, don't teach your grandma Notion - Word's a much sensible option for her.

wwweston 7y ago

If you think resume-driven development is bad for developers (and it is), consider the career incentives for UI and product people. If there's a "maintain" incentive, I'm not sure what it is. "Didn't change anything about functional and satisfactory interfaces" may be a real value-add in some cases, but it's not a sizzling narrative for selling yourself on the job market.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
Very true. Most people get measured by how much churn they create. The more the better. Even if it’s 100% correct for the business you are digging your own grave if you leave things the way they are.
- MattGaiser 7y ago
  I met these two mobile devs at a conference. They survived several rounds of cost-cutting at a large company by constantly convincing management to let them rewrite their mobile app in some new framework because of X. Start out with the native implementations, then they did Xamarin, tried PhoneGap, went back to native, then to React Native, and now on to Flutter. The pair of them keep their jobs constantly rewriting an app.
  - Moru 7y ago
    Now and then frameworks does backwards incompatible changes so you might as well rewrite the app. If you continue with the old version of the framework you are stuck with either security holes, bugs or that google and apple changes something that downprioritize your app into oblivion. And if the UI/UX does not significantly change every 6 months, your users will give you one star reviews and "Old looking and ugly" comments. I don't envy app developers.
    - ativzzz 7y ago
      Yea if a framework makes breaking changes to the point where you can't upgrade your app, that seems like it could be a recurring problem so after the first rewrite you might as well learn native code and write it there.

btrettel 7y ago

> This would be one place where free software could really shine - you could convert a lot of people with "every application works the same, and we promise we won't change the UI more than once every two years unless we really have to. This is one reason I use Xfce. My brother once told me that my computer has looked basically the same since I used Gnome 2, and he's right. I'm not entirely immune. After switching fully to GTK 3 it took me a while to find a decent style that had scroll bars or not terrible scrollbars. The one I'm using right now (ClassicLooks) has a few issues (e.g., I can't tab through GUIs because it won't highlight the active option), but overall is acceptable. I'll fix the highlighting issue eventually...

anthk 7y ago
https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
- userbinator 7y ago
  Every time I see a screenshot of someone theming Linux to look like Windows, the most obvious thing that stands out as not being quite right is the font rendering. Even when using Microsoft's own TTFs, the font renderers that Linux use seem to put the pixels in a slightly different place than the MS one. Other differences I could see from the screenshots: the comboboxes have the dropdown arrow next to instead of inside the edit control, the table headers should have a thick left and top border too, the up/down control's buttons should also have a 3D border, the scrollbar buttons shouldn't become disabled even at the end of travel, and non-top-mounted tabs have their shadow in the wrong direction and side tabs should have text rotated accordingly. I've used this UI for over two decades so it's pretty easy to see when something doesn't look quite right.
  - Moru 7y ago
    If the font is not a pixel font, it will render differently depending on your settings and the choices of the rendering engine. Subpixel rendering for the different LCD-screens, aliasing for the pixels to look smooth on low res screens, hinting for those small details to be visible in vector fonts. Vector fonts are made of lines that can sometimes be smaller than a pixel wide. Font engines solves this in different ways. It both depend on the quality of the font and the settings of the engine. (I'm no font expert though so names might be off. But I have been playing on and off with pixel fonts and vector graphics since 30 years)

newsbinator 7y ago

> the thing they want a lot is the 5th button from the left I agree it's normal and expected that people get used to buttons being in certain places, and moving them around too often is bad usability. That said, the fact some of my elderly relatives use and understand technology this way, by memorizing how many centimeters from the edge of the screen they should look for a button, makes life needlessly tough for them. They'd be better off understanding what a button is conceptually, what forms it comes in (e.g. standard button vs. underlined link with no outline, etc), and how buttons might be grouped. I know it's a lot to ask of elderly users, but it pays dividends. After many years of Q&A with me, my mom understands her iPad conceptually and as a result gets much more from it than my aunt does, who only understands procedurally that if she presses her finger on 'the button in the corner' then 'x' should happen. If there is no button in the corner, my aunt is lost.

jimmaswell 7y ago
Alas too many people are either incapable of this kind of ubderstanding or it would take even longer than just giving them directions every time something changes.
- Jtsummers 7y ago
  The way people react to computers is similar to how many react to math. A lot of capable people are mathphobic, and it's strange to watch (as someone who took naturally to math). The expressions on the page (or the attempt to produce those expressions from a model in their mind) causes them to seize up. It's like watching an anxiety attack happen. Something about math (the subject, their experience when taking the courses, whatever) has left them with a severe discomfort or level of fear when dealing with it. Computers illicit the same response from many people, regardless of background, education, level of experience with computers. They develop an understanding by rote, or with a rudimentary (but likely totally wrong) mental model. As soon as something is slightly different, the fear or discomfort rises and their mind blanks. They cannot figure out the next step. At an extreme, a color changes and they think it must mean something, but really it's just that that control is now "transparent" (pulling in the background color but blurred) and they happen to have a bright red object behind it, when normally it's a more neutral gray or blue. For some it's that things are no longer in the right place or that display differently (think of the changes in the Windows start menu over the decades). They'll have different thresholds, but once they hit theirs they cannot proceed without great difficulty.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

“the 5th button from the left” Exactly. That’s how I work in applications I use a lot. I don’t look much at the symbol and certainly not at the text. Same for buttons. It’s highly confusing when they shift icons around. Office 365 has become pretty bad that way. Every two months something gets shifted around. No new functionality. Just change for change’s sake.

zozbot234 7y ago

> and we promise we won't change the UI more than once every two years unless we really have to You get that for free by running a stable/LTS distribution.