3 ms·

I'm inclined to think in a lot of cases good interfaces turn to shit because of cargo cult interface "design" combined with ideas of 'Mobile first' and 'it's go

by etiam 6y ago

I'm inclined to think in a lot of cases good interfaces turn to shit because of cargo cult interface "design" combined with ideas of 'Mobile first' and 'it's going to make us look for the quarterly reports to cut away "redundant" maintenance' (so we're going to have only the cell phone optimized site). For a striking example, have a look at the hitherto excellent Norwegian weather site's short term forecast here https://www.yr.no/place/Portugal/Lisboa/Lisbon/hour_by_hour.html https://www.yr.no/place/Portugal/Lisboa/Lisbon/hour_by_hour.... then click through to what they're humbly bragging about changing it to https://www.yr.no/en/forecast/graph/2-2267057/Portugal/Lisbon/Lisbon/Lisbon https://www.yr.no/en/forecast/graph/2-2267057/Portugal/Lisbo... I can only assume neither the management nor the "design" consultant actually use the result. Oh, and consultant reminds me. Accountability is probably a major factor here. In my perception, the people causing this sort of destruction don't suffer any negative consequences of them. Maybe they even get promoted or get a prestigious client to list on their CV.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
Somebody needs to write a book about how to design user interfaces when you actually care about helping your users. The closest I've seen so far are the books of Edward Tufte on showing information in graphical form. Looking at your weather site example, this is precisely the kind of stupid design decisions I so hate about modern software. On the old site, all the data is in one place, and can be read without any interactions. You can just glance at it and learn what you need (which also means you can do that while holding a toddler in one hand, and eating your sandwich with another). Who on Earth thought that dumbing down the table and forcing you to manually switch between it and the graph (and no option to show both!) was a good idea? What's up with information moved to graph tooltips? And where has the link to download the PDF version went? Your point about accountability is probably spot-on. These changes aren't making the website completely unusable, just strictly worse and more annoying than before. That's nowhere near enough to cross the threshold after which anyone on the vendor side would care. That, multiplied by the number of users, it amounts to a lot of man-units of annoyance, doesn't even register.

by etiam 6y ago

TeMPOraL 6y ago

Somebody needs to write a book about how to design user interfaces when you actually care about helping your users. The closest I've seen so far are the books of Edward Tufte on showing information in graphical form. Looking at your weather site example, this is precisely the kind of stupid design decisions I so hate about modern software. On the old site, all the data is in one place, and can be read without any interactions. You can just glance at it and learn what you need (which also means you can do that while holding a toddler in one hand, and eating your sandwich with another). Who on Earth thought that dumbing down the table and forcing you to manually switch between it and the graph (and no option to show both!) was a good idea? What's up with information moved to graph tooltips? And where has the link to download the PDF version went? Your point about accountability is probably spot-on. These changes aren't making the website completely unusable, just strictly worse and more annoying than before. That's nowhere near enough to cross the threshold after which anyone on the vendor side would care. That, multiplied by the number of users, it amounts to a lot of man-units of annoyance, doesn't even register.