5 ms·

I’m 20 and it took me literally minutes to realise I needed to swipe up. I thought the computer had frozen.

• hilbert42 7y ago
  It's not your fault. It's the shitty ergonomics that have been pervading software UI design for several decades now. From the huge number of responses to this article, it's clear the software industry has a very major problem. The question I ask is why haven't users/user complaints been successful in stopping these irresponsible cowboys. Seems nothing can stop them.
  • masoudd 7y ago
    > Seems nothing can stop them. Of course. The people complain. They say fork it and change it yourself or use what we give you. The people that can't just suffer through it. The ones that know enough use something else. I login in linux tty. And startx starts dwm. No fancy login screen for me.
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > The question I ask is why haven't users/user complaints been successful in stopping these irresponsible cowboys. Most users don't complain, because technology is magic to them and they have no point of reference; they assume things must be the way they are for a reason. From the remaining group that does complain, many do it ineffectively (e.g. complaining to friends or in discussion boards that aren't frequented by relevant devs). And the rest just isn't listened to. It's easy to dismiss few voices as "not experts", especially today, when everyone puts telemetry in their software (see below), and doubly so when user's opinions are in opposition to the business model. Finally, software market isn't all that competitive (especially on SaaS) end, so users are most often put in a "take it or leave it" situation, where there's no way to "vote with your wallet" because there's no option on the market that you could vote for. The problem with telemetry is that measuring for correct things and interpreting the results is hard, and it's way too easy to use the data to justify whatever the vendor (in particular, their UX or marketing team) already thinks. A common example is a feature that's been hidden increasingly deeply in the app on each UI update, and finally removed on the grounds that "telemetry says people aren't using it". Another common example is "low use" of features that are critical for end-users, but used only every few sessions.
    • nitrogen 7y ago
      I would like to add the use of "taps" as an engagement metric to your list of misuses of telemetry. There used to be a rule of thumb in UI design that important actions should be as few clicks away as possible. Measuring engagement through taps encourages the opposite. I also don't like things measuring "dwell time" when scrolling, as it encourages attention-grabbing gimmicks and rewards things that are confusing as well as things that are useful.
    • ethbro 7y ago
      An organizational problem seems to be that UX decisions are owned by the UX team, who tend to be extremely tribal in their opinions. As in, if you are not a UX professional, your opinion is inconsequential. See: replies on most Chrome UX feature requests over the last decade