8 ms·

I get so frustrated reading blog posts by user interface designers. They almost invariably consist of reasoning I disagree and conclusions I disagree with in su

I get so frustrated reading blog posts by user interface designers. They almost invariably consist of reasoning I disagree and conclusions I disagree with in support of user interface decisions that make my experience as a user worse. Ubuntu Unity is pretty much an anthology of user interface decisions that are exactly wrong by my perception, and "lets get rid of quit" is just another one. Of all the actions in any menu ever, "quit" is one of the few that I thought confused no one. Then I read something like: "in Ubuntu, we have some elements waiting to help out: the messaging menu, the me menu, and the sound menu" and discover the concept is stuffing functionality into a maze of predetermined slots based on a set of usage assumptions. I don't think any of this is responding to the needs of users, I think its the equivalent of rearranging the furniture in the middle of the night so people trip over the couch when they are walking to the bathroom.

gregschlom 16y ago
Now I know what I'll be doing at 3am tonight.
ams6110 16y ago
rearranging the furniture in the middle of the night so people trip over the couch when they are walking to the bathroom Exactly how I felt about the "new" Microsoft Office UI and the straw that broke the camels back on my continued use of that software.
- raintrees 16y ago
  It would seem that existing users' knowledge of menu/button layout was sacrificed for new users' organizational benefits. From a "never having used Office before" point of view, it is more logical now. From my power user's point of view, the first 30 hours of usage had an additional 5-10 hours (wag) of "okay, where would they have moved THAT feature to?"
- run4yourlives 16y ago
  It's funny, because from my perspective as a casual office user, I actually thought the menus made things a little easier to use, even if I needed to "re-learn" where things were. My wife however, much more of a "power" office user, has completely sworn off of them. This is a person that knew pretty much where every menu item on word and excel was by memory. Her experience has been destroyed, so much that I needed to re-install 2003 on all the machines that she would use. Most certainly tripping on couches.
  - epochwolf 16y ago
    As a casual user, it's made Word usable when I need to use it.
    - tankenmate 16y ago
      This is the engineering equivalent of offering discounts to new users, while ignoring loyal customers; it leads to churn, but not much progress for day to day users (i.e. the biggest users of the software). Applications that I like the most have "levels" of the user interface; you can switch to a more complete, complex, user interface once you get more used to the program.
  - adolfojp 16y ago
    Your wife might like this: http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/ http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/
- neutronicus 16y ago
  I went back to Office (after switching to OpenOffice) when the ribbons came out.
bmelton 16y ago
I don't know that I'd necessarily attribute it to the Canonical team, but the best UI designers make decisions that don't sound right out loud, but actually work quite well in the product. That's often the very point of UI, is in studying behaviors and responding to them in ways that aren't obvious, and that often sound wrong on their face. Apple, in particular, are considered a paragon of UI excellence, yet many of the decisions they make SOUND downright terrible. Of course, using their products is generally easy and convenient. For the record, I am not a UI/UX guru, so all I can offer are anecdotes on this, but I think that the important takeaway is that good UI/UX should not be obviously right. If it were, everybody would have already been doing it, and I think that we can all agree that most UI of yore is downright bad.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  Recently, meaning in OS X, I've felt like the Apple UI has degenerated through the use of "easy looking" UI elements that remove every "confusing" element to the point of preventing the user from doing anything. Not only can I not find files when Finder doesn't use folders but my parents and my friends who actually have Macs can't find files either. It seems to me the Mac doesn't win by real usability but by looking beautiful on first glance, having a reputation for usability and having a strong following of folks who will teach people who otherwise struggle with the interface.
  - cookiecaper 16y ago
    I agree, generally. I find Mac the most irritating platform to use -- the shortcuts are all different because Apple has a silly insistence of using Super where they should use Ctrl, and common shortcuts are supplanted by the OS, leaving apps to have to find new ones. The Dock is a slow method of switching and Sup+~ shortcut to switch to a windows is more annoying than a straight Alt+Tab. Sup+H and your window goes away; this has confused a lot of people I know, and it annoys me a lot when I try to look at history. I really see no serious UI benefit in Apple's products. It seems roughly equivalent to me, and it uses the same paradigms as other conventional systems, it just does it in a shinier way, and it seems cool just because Apple does it, just like everything MTV does seems cool to a teenager.
joe_the_user 16y ago
Hmm, Why "modern, up-to-date design decisions" tend to actually make computers lousier despite their being conceived of by people whose very job it is to make things better? And especially, why do they tend to make open source GUIs especially shitty? Well... First, what's good and desirable about these "modern, up-to-date design decisions" UIs is that they are organized around a tightly integrated, sort-of-intuitive metaphors in theory, and even in UI Labratories, let the average person accomplish more things, and accomplish those thing more quickly. The Office ribbon is fine example. In order to let a person accomplish more while confusing them less(giving fewer choices), it must anticipate what the user does... Anticipation... stop there, there's the first problem - anticipating the users intentions. It's not just that the anticipation can be just wrong from get-go (though that happens too). It's that anticipation is an approach in it's present incarnations scales very badly. As soon as you want to do something hard, the system will stop anticipating you and so the hard thing is twice as hard. And problem two of tightly integrated metaphors is that since they inherently have to abstract from how a computers' software and hardware actually work, any task that's hard for the machine will suddenly have to be done in a fashion that takes into account the machines' limitations and so violates the metaphors - if your app takes up 10GB, it need a quit menu item, damn - but giving it that menu now puts it in conflict with the "UI guidelines". And finally, the reason tightly-integrated metaphors are especially bad in Open Source is they require more consistency so the user can count on them (even from otherwise separate applications). And you'll have a hard time getting that with a horde of volunteers. IE, why KDE 4 was terrible.

gregschlom 16y ago

Now I know what I'll be doing at 3am tonight.

ams6110 16y ago

rearranging the furniture in the middle of the night so people trip over the couch when they are walking to the bathroom Exactly how I felt about the "new" Microsoft Office UI and the straw that broke the camels back on my continued use of that software.

raintrees 16y ago
It would seem that existing users' knowledge of menu/button layout was sacrificed for new users' organizational benefits. From a "never having used Office before" point of view, it is more logical now. From my power user's point of view, the first 30 hours of usage had an additional 5-10 hours (wag) of "okay, where would they have moved THAT feature to?"
run4yourlives 16y ago
It's funny, because from my perspective as a casual office user, I actually thought the menus made things a little easier to use, even if I needed to "re-learn" where things were. My wife however, much more of a "power" office user, has completely sworn off of them. This is a person that knew pretty much where every menu item on word and excel was by memory. Her experience has been destroyed, so much that I needed to re-install 2003 on all the machines that she would use. Most certainly tripping on couches.
- epochwolf 16y ago
  As a casual user, it's made Word usable when I need to use it.
  - tankenmate 16y ago
    This is the engineering equivalent of offering discounts to new users, while ignoring loyal customers; it leads to churn, but not much progress for day to day users (i.e. the biggest users of the software). Applications that I like the most have "levels" of the user interface; you can switch to a more complete, complex, user interface once you get more used to the program.
- adolfojp 16y ago
  Your wife might like this: http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/ http://www.ubit.ch/software/ubitmenu-languages/
neutronicus 16y ago
I went back to Office (after switching to OpenOffice) when the ribbons came out.

bmelton 16y ago

I don't know that I'd necessarily attribute it to the Canonical team, but the best UI designers make decisions that don't sound right out loud, but actually work quite well in the product. That's often the very point of UI, is in studying behaviors and responding to them in ways that aren't obvious, and that often sound wrong on their face. Apple, in particular, are considered a paragon of UI excellence, yet many of the decisions they make SOUND downright terrible. Of course, using their products is generally easy and convenient. For the record, I am not a UI/UX guru, so all I can offer are anecdotes on this, but I think that the important takeaway is that good UI/UX should not be obviously right. If it were, everybody would have already been doing it, and I think that we can all agree that most UI of yore is downright bad.

joe_the_user 16y ago
Recently, meaning in OS X, I've felt like the Apple UI has degenerated through the use of "easy looking" UI elements that remove every "confusing" element to the point of preventing the user from doing anything. Not only can I not find files when Finder doesn't use folders but my parents and my friends who actually have Macs can't find files either. It seems to me the Mac doesn't win by real usability but by looking beautiful on first glance, having a reputation for usability and having a strong following of folks who will teach people who otherwise struggle with the interface.
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  I agree, generally. I find Mac the most irritating platform to use -- the shortcuts are all different because Apple has a silly insistence of using Super where they should use Ctrl, and common shortcuts are supplanted by the OS, leaving apps to have to find new ones. The Dock is a slow method of switching and Sup+~ shortcut to switch to a windows is more annoying than a straight Alt+Tab. Sup+H and your window goes away; this has confused a lot of people I know, and it annoys me a lot when I try to look at history. I really see no serious UI benefit in Apple's products. It seems roughly equivalent to me, and it uses the same paradigms as other conventional systems, it just does it in a shinier way, and it seems cool just because Apple does it, just like everything MTV does seems cool to a teenager.

joe_the_user 16y ago

Hmm, Why "modern, up-to-date design decisions" tend to actually make computers lousier despite their being conceived of by people whose very job it is to make things better? And especially, why do they tend to make open source GUIs especially shitty? Well... First, what's good and desirable about these "modern, up-to-date design decisions" UIs is that they are organized around a tightly integrated, sort-of-intuitive metaphors in theory, and even in UI Labratories, let the average person accomplish more things, and accomplish those thing more quickly. The Office ribbon is fine example. In order to let a person accomplish more while confusing them less(giving fewer choices), it must anticipate what the user does... Anticipation... stop there, there's the first problem - anticipating the users intentions. It's not just that the anticipation can be just wrong from get-go (though that happens too). It's that anticipation is an approach in it's present incarnations scales very badly. As soon as you want to do something hard, the system will stop anticipating you and so the hard thing is twice as hard. And problem two of tightly integrated metaphors is that since they inherently have to abstract from how a computers' software and hardware actually work, any task that's hard for the machine will suddenly have to be done in a fashion that takes into account the machines' limitations and so violates the metaphors - if your app takes up 10GB, it need a quit menu item, damn - but giving it that menu now puts it in conflict with the "UI guidelines". And finally, the reason tightly-integrated metaphors are especially bad in Open Source is they require more consistency so the user can count on them (even from otherwise separate applications). And you'll have a hard time getting that with a horde of volunteers. IE, why KDE 4 was terrible.