9 ms·

Krita matured nicely over the years and last time I found it quite easy to use. UI is hard. It got replaced by "UX", but nobody agrees what that really is. So

by loopz 7y ago

Krita matured nicely over the years and last time I found it quite easy to use. UI is hard. It got replaced by "UX", but nobody agrees what that really is. So it boils down to whatever impracticality designers dream up. When UI was easy, there were real research, data backing up claims of improvements and laid down rules to enforce some consistency. This became "unfashionable" and was removed.

kristopolous 7y ago
It was a hard structured science, hicks law, conservation of complexity, goms analysis, fitts law ... we've tossed these decades of hard work in the garbage can because somebody in marketing didn't like the colors. It was like during the VCR wars of the 80s when consumers wanted the most features but yet the fewest buttons. Then they complained how you had to basically play rachmaninoff on their sleek minimal interface to set the clock. We need to be like other industries; "that's too bad". Seatbelts are inconvenient? "that's too bad". You don't want to stay home during a pandemic because the weather's nice? "that's too bad" ... you want a bunch of incompatible UX goals that leads to trash? "That's too bad". Sometimes the opinion of an uninformed public shouldn't matter. We don't go to a doctor and pass around ballots to the other people in the waiting room to democratically decide on a diagnosis. Knowing what to not listen to is important.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  The uninformed public is pretty vocal about what is going on in most apps. The UX propellerheads come back with statistics from user telemetry that always agree with them. UX is the problem — designing “experiences” geared around an 80/20 approach is substituted for the harder task of building tools that work.
- rapind 7y ago
  Having rarely seen a VCR that wasn't flashing "12:00", I came to the conclusion that a clock was simply feature bloat.
  - kristopolous 7y ago
    One of the arguments, given in the Supreme Court, by Mr. Rogers, to permit the VCR to be legally owned (I know how crazy this is sounding but it's real) was to time shift programming ... which requires a functioning clock. Fred Rogers, 1984: "I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the 'Neighborhood' off-the-air ... they then become much more active in the programming of their family’s television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been ‘You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions’ ... I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important." see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive.... There's definitely non-crazy ways of doing this ... but it requires what at first blush, would appear to be a complicated interface.
    - aspenmayer 7y ago
      Just when I thought I couldn’t be thankful enough to Fred Rogers for saving public television in America as he transformed what it could be, now I find out that he’s also pivotal in standing up for fair use rights and inadvertently supported the analog hole before the digital one was even invented to be closed. He truly was a person who stood up for his beliefs on behalf of the fellow person and an example of goodness in the world without pandering or compromise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
    - gowld 7y ago
      Time shifting doesn't require a clock, if you are home to start recording, but a clock helps with programmatic recording.
      - lmm 7y ago
        That's an extreme nitpick. The whole argument for time shifting is to be able to record something while you're not at home.
- hilbert42 6y ago
  "Sometimes the opinion of an uninformed public shouldn't matter." Correct, that's the 2000+ year old axiom of ignoring the lowest common denominator and seeking the best advice available. That said, if you're designing software for use by users who are 'lowest common denominator' then, a priori, you have to make it to their measure. If they cannot understand what you've done then you've wasted your time.
xg15 7y ago
My impression is that modern UX is data-driven alright, it just follows radically different paradigms and goals. It's not at all anymore about presenting consistent mental models, it's solely about the ease or difficulty with which particular isolated tasks can be performed. It's also not automatically the goal to make all tasks as easy as possible. Instead, discoverability and "friction" are often deliberately tuned to optimize some higher-level goals, such as retention or conversion rates. This is why we have dialogs where the highlighted default choice is neither the safe one nor the one expected by the user, but instead the one the company would like the user to take. (E.g. "select all" buttons in GDPR prompts or "go back" buttons if I want to cancel a subscription. You can see that quite often in browsers as well, often even with good intentions: Chrome, for a time, still used to allow installing unsigned extensions but made the process deliberately obscure and in both Chrome and Firefox , options are often deliberately placed into easy or hard to discover locations. (E.g. a toggle on the browser chrome, vs the "settings" screen, vs "about:config", vs group policies)
- lloeki 7y ago
  > It's not at all anymore about presenting consistent mental models, it's solely about the ease or difficulty with which particular isolated tasks can be performed. IOW following metrics optimising for local maxima instead of looking at the big picture in a non-zero sum game. Each task is made easier by itself but in doing so creates a model in conflict with everything else, making everyone miserable. Nash would be sad.
- kristopolous 7y ago
  Data driven ux seems to put all users in a single bucket. I will readily admit in collective number of clicks and screentime, 37 year old men with advanced degrees in computer science are a super small minority. But who is the majority then? Who spends the most time on say Reddit and YouTube? Children! Yes, people who we know are dramatically cognitively different than adults. Why does YouTube keep recommending videos I've watched? That's what a child wants! Why does reddits redesign look like Nickelodeon? There isn't one user and one interface that's right for everyone when we're talking about 5 year olds, 50 year olds, and 95 year olds. We can make them adaptable to the screen, we should also do work to make them adaptable, at fundamental interaction levels, to the person using the screen. And not in a clever way, but in a dumb one. For instance, here's how you could ask YouTube: "We have a few interfaces. Please tell us what you like to watch: * Cartoons and video games * Lectures and tutorials * Other " And that's it. No more "learning", that's all you need to set the interface and algorithms. Let's take Wikipedia, it could be broken up into children, public, and scholar. Some articles I'm sure are correct but are way too wonky and academic for me to understand and that's ok. There's nothing to fix, I'm sure it's a great tool for professionals. However, there should be a general public version.
glangdale 7y ago
Correct. I remember traditional UI, watching users do things behind 1-way mirrors and grinding irritating and inconclusive statistics to try to get to a better interface. This used to be a speciality. Now all you have to do is stick a bone through your beard and pronounce yourself a "UX Guru" and off you go.
- rapind 7y ago
  UX to me is finding a compromise between designers who want it as sparse as possible and users who want "homer cars".
flir 7y ago
Hamburger menus are symptomatic of this for me. I spent /way/ too long not understanding this completely new element everybody was suddenly jamming in everywhere.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mcswell 6y ago
  Agreed, 1000%. I have the traditional Firebox menu bar turned on, but I can't get rid of the lousy hamburger menu. Plus I have ten icons up there, most of which I don't have any idea what they do. I should probably get rid of them. (When was the last time you used the "Home" icon in a web browser? What is "home", anyway?) (I just now cleaned it up, although there are some icons you can't get rid of.)

by loopz 7y ago

kristopolous 7y ago

It was a hard structured science, hicks law, conservation of complexity, goms analysis, fitts law ... we've tossed these decades of hard work in the garbage can because somebody in marketing didn't like the colors. It was like during the VCR wars of the 80s when consumers wanted the most features but yet the fewest buttons. Then they complained how you had to basically play rachmaninoff on their sleek minimal interface to set the clock. We need to be like other industries; "that's too bad". Seatbelts are inconvenient? "that's too bad". You don't want to stay home during a pandemic because the weather's nice? "that's too bad" ... you want a bunch of incompatible UX goals that leads to trash? "That's too bad". Sometimes the opinion of an uninformed public shouldn't matter. We don't go to a doctor and pass around ballots to the other people in the waiting room to democratically decide on a diagnosis. Knowing what to not listen to is important.

Spooky23 7y ago
The uninformed public is pretty vocal about what is going on in most apps. The UX propellerheads come back with statistics from user telemetry that always agree with them. UX is the problem — designing “experiences” geared around an 80/20 approach is substituted for the harder task of building tools that work.
rapind 7y ago
Having rarely seen a VCR that wasn't flashing "12:00", I came to the conclusion that a clock was simply feature bloat.
- kristopolous 7y ago
  One of the arguments, given in the Supreme Court, by Mr. Rogers, to permit the VCR to be legally owned (I know how crazy this is sounding but it's real) was to time shift programming ... which requires a functioning clock. Fred Rogers, 1984: "I have always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that allows people to tape the 'Neighborhood' off-the-air ... they then become much more active in the programming of their family’s television life. Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My whole approach in broadcasting has always been ‘You are an important person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions’ ... I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important." see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Universal_City_Studios,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Corp._of_America_v._Unive.... There's definitely non-crazy ways of doing this ... but it requires what at first blush, would appear to be a complicated interface.
  - aspenmayer 7y ago
    Just when I thought I couldn’t be thankful enough to Fred Rogers for saving public television in America as he transformed what it could be, now I find out that he’s also pivotal in standing up for fair use rights and inadvertently supported the analog hole before the digital one was even invented to be closed. He truly was a person who stood up for his beliefs on behalf of the fellow person and an example of goodness in the world without pandering or compromise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_hole
  - gowld 7y ago
    Time shifting doesn't require a clock, if you are home to start recording, but a clock helps with programmatic recording.
    - lmm 7y ago
      That's an extreme nitpick. The whole argument for time shifting is to be able to record something while you're not at home.
hilbert42 6y ago
"Sometimes the opinion of an uninformed public shouldn't matter." Correct, that's the 2000+ year old axiom of ignoring the lowest common denominator and seeking the best advice available. That said, if you're designing software for use by users who are 'lowest common denominator' then, a priori, you have to make it to their measure. If they cannot understand what you've done then you've wasted your time.

xg15 7y ago

My impression is that modern UX is data-driven alright, it just follows radically different paradigms and goals. It's not at all anymore about presenting consistent mental models, it's solely about the ease or difficulty with which particular isolated tasks can be performed. It's also not automatically the goal to make all tasks as easy as possible. Instead, discoverability and "friction" are often deliberately tuned to optimize some higher-level goals, such as retention or conversion rates. This is why we have dialogs where the highlighted default choice is neither the safe one nor the one expected by the user, but instead the one the company would like the user to take. (E.g. "select all" buttons in GDPR prompts or "go back" buttons if I want to cancel a subscription. You can see that quite often in browsers as well, often even with good intentions: Chrome, for a time, still used to allow installing unsigned extensions but made the process deliberately obscure and in both Chrome and Firefox , options are often deliberately placed into easy or hard to discover locations. (E.g. a toggle on the browser chrome, vs the "settings" screen, vs "about:config", vs group policies)

lloeki 7y ago
> It's not at all anymore about presenting consistent mental models, it's solely about the ease or difficulty with which particular isolated tasks can be performed. IOW following metrics optimising for local maxima instead of looking at the big picture in a non-zero sum game. Each task is made easier by itself but in doing so creates a model in conflict with everything else, making everyone miserable. Nash would be sad.
kristopolous 7y ago
Data driven ux seems to put all users in a single bucket. I will readily admit in collective number of clicks and screentime, 37 year old men with advanced degrees in computer science are a super small minority. But who is the majority then? Who spends the most time on say Reddit and YouTube? Children! Yes, people who we know are dramatically cognitively different than adults. Why does YouTube keep recommending videos I've watched? That's what a child wants! Why does reddits redesign look like Nickelodeon? There isn't one user and one interface that's right for everyone when we're talking about 5 year olds, 50 year olds, and 95 year olds. We can make them adaptable to the screen, we should also do work to make them adaptable, at fundamental interaction levels, to the person using the screen. And not in a clever way, but in a dumb one. For instance, here's how you could ask YouTube: "We have a few interfaces. Please tell us what you like to watch: * Cartoons and video games * Lectures and tutorials * Other " And that's it. No more "learning", that's all you need to set the interface and algorithms. Let's take Wikipedia, it could be broken up into children, public, and scholar. Some articles I'm sure are correct but are way too wonky and academic for me to understand and that's ok. There's nothing to fix, I'm sure it's a great tool for professionals. However, there should be a general public version.

glangdale 7y ago

Correct. I remember traditional UI, watching users do things behind 1-way mirrors and grinding irritating and inconclusive statistics to try to get to a better interface. This used to be a speciality. Now all you have to do is stick a bone through your beard and pronounce yourself a "UX Guru" and off you go.

rapind 7y ago
UX to me is finding a compromise between designers who want it as sparse as possible and users who want "homer cars".

flir 7y ago

Hamburger menus are symptomatic of this for me. I spent /way/ too long not understanding this completely new element everybody was suddenly jamming in everywhere.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
mcswell 6y ago
Agreed, 1000%. I have the traditional Firebox menu bar turned on, but I can't get rid of the lousy hamburger menu. Plus I have ten icons up there, most of which I don't have any idea what they do. I should probably get rid of them. (When was the last time you used the "Home" icon in a web browser? What is "home", anyway?) (I just now cleaned it up, although there are some icons you can't get rid of.)