31 ms·

Fuckin' user interface design, I swear

• mjd 6y ago
  Title needs more fucking obscenities.
• mjevans 6y ago
  So very much effort is spent on making websites 'pixel perfect' conforming to some marketing person's designs. Human Interaction Engineers should be dictating this instead; with a focus on making information easy to parse, for humans and machines. For placing action widgets in locations that reduce errors.
  • AgentOrange1234 6y ago
    Hrmn. Marketing is probably more important a good part of the time, though? :(
    • neilpanchal 6y ago
      What makes people think that we cannot engineer marketable and great user interfaces? It's not like they're mutually exclusive. We can do better.
    • selfhoster11 6y ago
      In a capitalist economy obsessed with optimising for profit, yes.
• userbinator 6y ago
  I do not use Google Meet, but do those buttons at least now stay visible and not only appear if you know where to mouse over? Very relevant comment from a few months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965293
  • neilpanchal 6y ago
    Uhh so apparently, Microsoft Teams copied that same pattern of auto-hiding the most important controls. https://neil.computer/notes/oh-sorry-i-was-on-mute/ https://neil.computer/notes/oh-sorry-i-was-on-mute/
    • s-lambert 6y ago
      Teams has updated their UI, it's always shown on the top right of calls now, so at least they realised their mistake.
  • perryizgr8 6y ago
    Still disappears for me. And when it appears it makes sure to obscure the video/content/subtitles so that I am frantically trying to make it go away.
• solox3 6y ago
  Google Meet is an interesting example. The mobile apps (Meet, and for some reason, within Gmail) have the End Call button on the left, which is more reasonable I guess, but makes me tap the wrong button on desktop all the time.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • perryizgr8 6y ago
    End call should ideally be on the right, since it matches with the usual calling button conventions of send on the left, end on the right. Example: https://pixfeeds.com/images/technology/phones/1280-458994239-nokia-mobile-phone.jpg https://pixfeeds.com/images/technology/phones/1280-458994239...
• deleted 6y ago
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• ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
  Shouldn't the submit button be obviously on the right? It's an operation that goes forward in the procedure, in time, like the x axis the process should point right. Do all web forms have a left aligned button by default? I just realized they do on HN but if you'd asked me 5 minutes ago I'd have told you it was on the right.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • franciscop 6y ago
    No, it depends where you are aligning things among other considerations. But if your form follows the typical "F" pattern, then putting the button where the user's eyes are is the logical step.
  • sergix 6y ago
    Not necessarily. Having the submit button first means it's the first action the user sees since most people (at least Westerners) read left-to-right. However, your reasoning with having the order the opposite with the submit button last is spot-on. No specific advantage has actually been attributed to either choice of order. What matters is (1) keeping the order consistent throughout an application, and (2) following the provided style guide for the platform you're developing on. (Also, the order may need to be changed if the primary action is destructive, such as a "Reset" button.) I did an extensive write-up about this topic if you're curious on more details: https://dev.to/sergix/ux-illuminating-intention-198k https://dev.to/sergix/ux-illuminating-intention-198k
    • inetknght 6y ago
      > (1) keeping the order consistent throughout an application Not even just an application. The whole phone needs to be consistent. Every app in it. Otherwise it's just repeatedly discovering and forgetting how to use each and every app's unique interpretation of what their average user wants and what their average user thinks is intuitive.
• closed 6y ago
  I'm surprised every time someone says: 1: This field requires a lot skill. 2: I am not skilled in this field. 3: It's obvious to me <observation that might require skill in domain>. And then there's no appeal to an expert in the field, or observed behavior. It's fair that sometimes negative effects are obvious, and if the writer was observing the deleterious effects of the button placement, I could see where they're coming from.
  • mjd 6y ago
    Getting it right is hard. Takes talent, smarts, hard work. But recognizing when it's wrong, not so much.
• hiisukun 6y ago
  Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20210308022841/https://blog.plover.com/tech/ui.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210308022841/https://blog.plov...
• franciscop 6y ago
  Totally agree. In fact, it is one of my biggest issues moving from Linux to Mac (which is supposed to be oh so good about UX/UI). Fortunately there is a hack where you can map the Command+Q to something less malign like "invert the colors on the screen" so I won't accidentally kill the whole app when intending to only close a small part of it. I just wanted to disable it, but well at least inverting colors is reversible.
  • wolfgang42 6y ago
    Having a dedicated keyboard shortcut for Quit made a lot more sense when it was something you’d often do as much as or more than closing documents, sometimes dozens of times during a single project. (Open Illustrator, copy, quit Illustrator, open Word, paste, quit Word, open Illustrator...) It’s less helpful nowadays when you can just leave applications lying around until next time you need them.
    • Firehawke 6y ago
      At least on Windows you've always had Alt-F4 so having Ctrl-Q was always a bit weird.
• knowingathing 6y ago
  Not only should the "END CALL" icon/button be more removed from the other more common actions like muting yourself, there should be a small "End call" label underneath or above the icon as well. Seeing what the buttons do without needing to guess or hover is important. The only way to get good design is to hire good designers. Money doesn't buy good design. This UI was shipped by Google. They have money.
• chii 6y ago
  user interface design has been taken over by people who do the graphics design.
• madhadron 6y ago
  The Google Meet example is utterly crazy, but for Submit/Reset I think I see how it happens. You're thinking through the user's flow, and at the end of that flow you have Submit and Reset or Cancel. You think about them at the same point in the workflow, so you by default put them together. I see the same thing with Approve/Reject right next to each other in internal review tools.
  • wolfgang42 6y ago
    And on the point about why the form has a reset button at all, you see the option in the spec (again, right next to submit) and figure it must be there for a reason, so I guess I should include it? Everyone else is, it must have some purpose...
• eyelidlessness 6y ago
  Credit to the author for admitting he doesn't really know UX. And he does have a point about the importance of differentiating destructive actions from non-destructive ones. Determining which those are can be really hard depending on how your users use your app. And won't always be universal. The example of the "commonly used" closed window versus quit app... the destructiveness of the former is equivalent. When one is a common action and the other causes more pain when performed accidentally, it's been more helpful to add an option to ask if that was the intended action than to retrain now-generations of users on keyboard commands. Cmd+Q/Cmd+W have been used this way since I was in diapers.
  • mjd 6y ago
    The destructiveness of "close tab" is not equivalent. Control-shift-T will instantly undo the close-tab action. And there is a menu item that lists "recently closed tabs". Try finding the menu item that brings back the app once you've quit.
    • fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
      One of the most annoying things about Firefox is its limited reopen close tab implementation: I’ve gotten really used to Safari’s behavior here and is really irritates me when I can’t reopen the last tab because it triggers whatever Firefox uses to reset the history.
      • eyelidlessness 6y ago
        Speaking of Safari having good UX around undoing state changes that I miss in other browsers: why can a website put a navigation in another tab, but I can’t press back to get out of it in any other browser? (Safari’s implementation isn’t perfect and I can think of ways to improve it, but a simple “yep I didn’t want to go here” should be just as effective if the website specifies `target` as when it doesn’t.)
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • 6y ago
• ianlevesque 6y ago
  In Google’s defense the size & spacing on those is way beyond the minimum recommended for touch targets and that placement keeps them in easy thumb reach. I would assume that’s why this shipped.
• overgard 6y ago
  Slight rant, but I feel like phone interface design keeps getting worse rather than better. We don't have to go back to skeuomorphism of the old iphones, but whenever I use my phone I have no idea what's tappable and what's not. There's even this trend now of not making it obvious what's even a text box or what's not. It /looks/ nice, but it's infuriating to use. And then you have the weird gestures that are completely undiscoverable. Like pulling down from the top right to get the utility menu thing. I mean, yeah, I know it's there, but I never would have actually discovered that on my own. Also now there's this trend of just hiding everything to make an app look minimalistic and simple even though it's not. So I have no idea what it can even do when I look at it. And I /still/ have no idea how to properly line up apps side by side on my iPad. I mean I kind of do, but I constantly forget, and worse, once I do have them lined up, it's hard to get rid of them. It's all insanely undiscoverable. I wish UX designers would realize it's not all about being pretty, you have to actually give people an idea of what things actually DO. All the clunky old interfaces with the bevelled buttons and huge scroll bars and stuff might have been ugly as sin, but at least they weren't a constant confusion.
  • fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
    I often feel like I’m the only person who likes the sort of extreme skeuomorphism of Apple circa 2007: it wasn’t perfect, but it didn’t have the soulless corporate feeling of flat UI styles.
    • XorNot 6y ago
      Skeuomorphism has the problem that everything looks like a photo - it doesn't advertise what's usable clearly either. The problem with flat UIs is that they're also in the middle of abandoning any conventions on what's interactable as well. Ironically Windows circa 3.1 and definitely by 95 had this nailed: is it greyed out? 3D? You can interact with it. Not 3D? You can't. 3D but greyed out? It is contextually disabled. Simple and clear at a glance. What that interface got wrong was the MDI motif - multiple document interface never really worked as well as Microsoft wanted, although if they'd made the leap of making it tiling by default they would've got there.
    • 6y ago
• mightybyte 6y ago
  I appreciate the OP's point. In fact, I accidentally hung up a video conference literally today due to pretty much this exact issue (no, it wasn't Google Meet). I even appreciate the colorful language and style of writing. Sometimes is just feels good to get one's frustrations out. However, allow me to defend the UI designers. The thing the author doesn't seem to realize / acknowledge is that UI/UX design is about balancing enormous numbers of competing constraints and concerns. It's a human problem, and like most problems of this genre there is no "best" answer, only different sets of weights for different, often competing, concerns. Simplicity and ease of use are good things, but they are almost always at odds with flexibility and power...also good things. Do you make things bigger with more space so they're easier to see, or do you make them smaller so you can fit more things on the page? Do you use color so you can communicate more and catch the eye more quickly, or do you avoid that so that your app is friendly to colorblind users? (Yes, I know there are color schemes that can achieve both to a decent degree.) These kinds of tradeoffs are lurking almost everywhere you look in UI/UX design, but this kind of nuance seems to be lost on the author. He only seems to see his set of priorities for a UI. Yes, there are plenty of cases where one thing is pretty objectively worse than another, but usually it's more subtle than that. I'm way more impressed with someone who can talk intelligently about the tradeoffs than I am with someone who fixates on something that very well might have been traded off and rant about it.
  • bobthepanda 6y ago
    There’s also the issue of trying to balance what you know to be good vs the desires of the person actually paying you. Fighting this directly doesn’t get you very far (you’ll most likely be replaced by someone more pliable) and some people cannot be convinced of some things. Everyone and their mother has an opinion on what they think is good design. I am thankful that as a developer I am not having to fight over pixel pushing.
  • vxNsr 6y ago
    Zoom solves this problem by.... adding a confirm popup button. As far as I can tell they're the only meeting app that does that, I find it almost annoying most of the time but very useful when I hit it by accident.
• 3np 6y ago
  Another pet peeve with Meet (and others); does a crossed-out microphone button indicate "click here to mute", or "you are currently muted"? I can't be the only one getting confused about this on a regular basis.
  • simonw 6y ago
    This is a classic challenge in interface design: this confusion pops up every time you have a button which both toggles state AND represents the current state of the world. It's rare to see it solved cleanly. I try to avoid interface elements that attempt to combine these two roles entirely. I quite like the way the Twitter "Follow" button works: when you click it the text changes to "Following", which I think is just clear enough, but only because it's a button that every Twitter uses frequently enough that they are likely to remember how it works.
    • 3np 6y ago
      I don’t get this obsession of removing all textual elements. “Muted” wouldn’t be that bad would it?
      • XorNot 6y ago
        Given that's it's an absolutely critical state, I don't get why "You are muted" isn't in white text on a red background. This and "Your video is OFF" are states I care about when video conferencing because the reason to enter them is important.
        • draugadrotten 6y ago
          If I mute my TV, a big crossed-over speaker icon is shown on screen. That UX is how a muted microphone should appear in video meetings. There is perhaps a patent which prevents it for financial reasons.
    • oftenwrong 6y ago
      How about a checkbox? [x] Mute microphone (apparently HN doesn't permit the checkbox character)
• smnrchrds 6y ago
  Personal anecdote: I have accidentally left meetings when I wanted to just mute my audio.
• tshaddox 6y ago
  There’s a fine line between valid complaints about widespread problems in user interface design, and making a frustrating mistake a few times and blaming this on “obviously bad” user interface design. The complaint about two keyboard shortcuts being nearby (on the author’s particular keyboard) is pretty darn close to that line. There’s nothing semantic about the physical locations of two keys on a keyboard like there (arguably) is for a submit and reset button on a user interface.
  • sokoloff 6y ago
    On the author’s particular keyboard (Q and W are next to each other)? I think you mean on 98+% of keyboards in the US. It’s not like it’s some custom-assembled mechanical keyboard from a Kickstarter or group buy.
    • marcosdumay 6y ago
      It's probably on the majority of keyboards that carry the Latin alphabet. Yeah, there are countries that use keyboards where Q and W are apart, but that's not common.
• intrepidhero 6y ago
  I just had an idea that might explain why this happens. Firstly, I've observed a phenomenon when I talk to a programmer about a problem I want to solve. They might get excited, learn a bit of the problem domain and then go off and build something that kind of solves part of my problem. But then I'm stuck in a endless cycle of explaining the rest of the problem, to someone who isn't really interested, then waiting for a new iteration and then evaluating how it doesn't completely the solve the problem until the programmer gets bored and goes off to find something new and exciting to do with computers. Programming the computerwas always the end for them. They don't actually care about the problem. I care about the problem. So for me computers are a tool to solve my problem. I might as well write the program myself because it's less work to become a mediocre programmer than to intimately understand the problem. My theory is that something like this happens in interface design. There are designers who love to create beautiful designs, and we love that, but beauty is the end of it for them. They don't actually care about the problem that the program (website, app, whatever) is supposed to solve. If they were stuck in a job filling out forms all day they would quickly learn the lesson to put the reset button out of the way. If they were intimately familiar with the problem, the better design would be obvious. And so it is that people with no "design skills" can point out the obvious mistakes of the designers. It's also true that good design is hard. Starting with a blank sheet and creating something, let alone something good, is daunting. Perhaps the hardest part is having the humility to admit, "I don't understand the problem sufficiently" and the empathy to care about the problem enough to learn it well.
  • pier25 6y ago
    I've seen that too. UI designers not realizing UX is way more important than aesthetics.
    • jevgeni 6y ago
      I think partly it is because UX is measurable (“A is less usable than B and thusly bad”), whereas aesthetics are not (“different tastes”). A kind of means to escape personal emotional accountability.
• roughly 6y ago
  > In particular, don't put "close this window" on control-W and "quit this application" on control-Q. I'm looking at you, Firefox. Oh man, I actually remapped quit on Firefox because this bit me too many times and Firefox kept removing ways to confirm quit. I will die on the hill that "confirm quit" is the correct behavior. (I have, in fact, died on this hill enough times I may be outing my HN burner with this comment.)
  • natrys 6y ago
    Apparently it's finally going to be configurable in Firefox 87 (next release)[1]. browser.quitShortcut.disabled true The default will still be false though. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=52821 (only took 21 years, jeez)
  • lifeformed 6y ago
    Reminds me of playing PUBG: while in a moving vehicle, press R to reload, or press F to jump out and instantly die.
    • speedgoose 6y ago
      The designers were aware. One of the car in-game has a F2HNK license plate (f to honk), which doesn't honk but jump out of the car.
    • vxNsr 6y ago
      This is where extra mouse buttons save you, if my wasd fingers are leaving their positions I'm doing something wrong.
    • input_sh 6y ago
      My favourite is editing crontab (the scheduler on Linux). It's -e to edit the file, -r to delete all content from it with no confirmation dialogue or anything. I fell for that twice already. I can't imagine how often you need to delete everything from a file without using a text editor. I'm sure it's not that common that you need to give it a one-letter flag (instead of --remove or --delete) and put it right next to the fucking edit flag.
• Causality1 6y ago
  UI is designed to generate profit. Sometimes that means contributing to an optimal user experience, but sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes how it looks in marketing materials is more important to the bottom line than whether or not the user hates it after they're already locked into the ecosystem.
  • nubero 6y ago
    This might very well be true as a general statement. However, I don’t see where it applies to reseting the contents of a form.
• josephg 6y ago
  There's an aspect of UX design that is obvious to users and not obvious to programmers: Not all UI elements should have the same visual weight If you have 3 buttons, probably one of those buttons will be pressed 80% of the time, and the other buttons pressed less than 10% of the time. How do you style those buttons? As a programmer, we like to think of the three buttons symmetrically. We want all the buttons to look the same and behave the same, because then they're easier to style and easier to reason about. Our instinct is to make a button class and then place all the buttons next to each other in a nice neat table. To a user, the three buttons are different, and it should be obvious which one is the button you're expected to press most of the time. From the user's perspective, "Submit form" isn't really the same type of UI element as "reset form". The submit button should be big, bold, colorful and obvious. My eyes should naturally settle on it. The reset form button (if it exists) should be small and non-obvious. Its an advanced feature. It should be out of the way and most people should never notice it. My email compose window has this problem. It has 3 buttons - "Send", "Save Draft" and "Discard". When I'm writing an email, I'm not choosing between 3 equivalent options. I hit send about 80% of the time I type an email. Once I've written an email, if I visually hunt for the obvious button on the screen, my eyes should naturally settle on "Send". Styling should make that obvious. But no - there are 3 buttons I have to choose from. They're all next to each other, and they're all styled in an identical manner. The interface makes users actively hunt for the "Send" action. This is bad UX.
  • antihero 6y ago
    Pretty much every web UI toolkit ever has the concept of primary and secondary buttons.
• aimor 6y ago
  On my Android keyboard the backspace key is directly above and adjacent to the enter key.
  • aimor 6y ago
    One day my Android phone updated and the interface for accepting/ignoring calls changed. A circle appears and you swipe up to answer and swipe down to ignore. I get a call, press on the circle, and swipe up, nothing happens. I press on the circle swipe down, nothing. Turns out the interface depends on the distance swiped up or down, and has nothing to do with the circle. By starting on the circle I didn't have enough runway to trigger the gesture. I love puzzles and felt pretty smart after solving this one after only the fourth missed call.
  • muro 6y ago
    Good one, though I surprisingly rarely use the enter key on my phone. Most text replies are single line and I send them with a dedicated button in the app. What really gets me is the touch bar on macbooks where I touch it by mistake when typing numbers, sending all my windows dancing around. Drives me up the wall. Leave more space there, Apple! Or just get rid of that stupid touch screen gimmick.
  • ernesth 6y ago
    On my physical keyboard also. As with all azerty keyboards from the last 20 years. https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/4668/as-images.apple.com/is/MLA22F?wid=572&hei=572&fmt=jpeg&qlt=95&op_usm=0.5,0.5&.v=1496943596366 https://store.storeimages.cdn-apple.com/4668/as-images.apple...
• eatbitseveryday 6y ago
  > Don't put the commonly-used "close this window" keyboard shortcut right next to the infrequently-used and irreversible "quit this application" shortcut. Obviously this matters only if your W and Q are next to each other on your keyboard, for your region, locale, custom keyboard layout.
• madrox 6y ago
  I feel this way whenever I watch YouTube streams with live chat. It’s unwatchable. Unlike Twitch, the chat is an overlay on the video (not sure if that’s true everywhere or not). I’m positive some designer made a really beautiful looking still image without thinking of what it might be like to follow a chat (or watch a video) in this way. I’m quite positive this is a byproduct of the product->design->engineering waterfall, because while we say we are agile, nothing really gets iterated on once an engineer starts coding. If it isn’t caught in the wireframe phase, it’ll take a redesign to address.
• dang 6y ago
  Current thread on the successor post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26395951 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26395951
• Eric_WVGG 6y ago
  From his related article… > So you'd have a bunch of form widgets, and then, at the bottom, a Submit button, and next to it, a Reset button. > Even as an innocent youth, I realized this was a bad design. It is just setting people up for failure… Obviously, the Submit button should be over on the left, just under the main form, where the user will visit it in due course after dealing with the other widgets, and the Reset button should be way over on the right Dead wrong. Most people are right-handed. The mouse cursor spends most of its time on the right side of the screen. That’s why the scroll bar is always on the right and why the HIG says the confirmation button is on the right. Cancel/reset/destructive button is on the left.
  • teddyh 6y ago
    > the HIG says the confirmation button is on the right There’s more than one “The HIG”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_interface_guidelines#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_interface_guidelines#Exa...
  • uxcolumbo 6y ago
    Forms are usually left aligned, so the keeping the form button on the left aids usability. https://uxplanet.org/buttons-alignment-policy-a26de4ce0c70 https://uxplanet.org/buttons-alignment-policy-a26de4ce0c70
    • Eric_WVGG 6y ago
      I think the author's own illustrations disprove his point. Most users do not tab between fields, they mouse. Given that anywhere on an input is clickable to focus, and the cursor rests to the right, a user is more likely to linearly click down the list on the right hand side. I suppose user testing would prove things one way or the other, but my money's on right.
      • uxcolumbo 6y ago
        Here are some results from a test Luke Wroblewski did many years ago. The best performing option was where the buttons were left aligned. See: https://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?571 https://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?571 But agreed, if you can test your designs with users then you should.
• trilinearnz 6y ago
  I have this issue occasionally in Zoom breakout rooms. Leave Room? Leave Meeting? A moment's absent mindedness can result in an embarrassing exit from the entire call. This comes down to terminology, and also context. I feel there should be a single button that reflects the desire to "just get out of where ever I am now", with a safe, sensible action happening as the next step.
• onirom 6y ago
  Guess this is not restricted to interface design for example having quit & save keys shortcut close together...
• InvOfSmallC 6y ago
  That happens on mobile with my fat fingers but not on desktop.
• toto444 6y ago
  What about putting a one click 'Report spam' button next to a 'Delete' one in one of the most used software on Earth ? Looking at you Gmail.
• nubero 6y ago
  Good article, and rather very similar to what I had written a while ago about the “save changes” dialogue boxes here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920422 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18920422
• perryizgr8 6y ago
  Google meet is the worst designed app of all time. Here are the 10 issues top of my mind. 1. It is slow. It heats my laptop and phone. 2. UI elements appear/disappear, slide-in/slide-out based on mouse hover. 3. There is no native app. 4. It is horribly feature deficient. Look at what use-cases Zoom supports. Meet probably supports less features than Zoom's initial PoC. 5. The videos are tied to the presentation. 6. There is no overlay mode. 7. There is no remote control mode. 8. There is no handover between mobile and PC. 9. There is no way to call somebody. 10. There is no way to share a tablet or phone screen, while you are connecting using a PC. It just infuriates me to no end being forced to use this piece of trash software at work. I genuinely wonder what the Google Meet dev team uses for video conferencing? Do they not know that it is so crappy? Are they using Zoom to collaborate??
  • gezfrg321 6y ago
    To me only number one and two are concerns. I guess I don't do enough video conferencing to care about the other features. As long there is video, audio and screenshare I don't care about anything else. Edit: I didn't notice 9 initially, that one is actually a must
• shultays 6y ago
  And meanwhile designers that aims to do dark patterns are pretty consistent and good with their works. For example placement of "reject all non essential cookies" button always seems to be on incorrect position
• ArchieMaclean 6y ago
  My favourite example of this is Sibelius. The 'Quit Sibelius' button is precisely where you'd expect to find the 'Next' button. This video shows it at 6:33 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI&t=6m33s https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI&t=6m33s
  • apexalpha 6y ago
    That was hilarious, thank you.
    • aasasd 6y ago
      That dude also among other programs reviewed MuseScore, and now he's a head designer at MuseScore.
      • frosted-flakes 6y ago
        He's actually the Product Owner now (I think that's what it was), which I'm assuming is a promotion.
• bronlund 6y ago
  He obviously don't use macOS :) This utility have saved my ass more than once: https://commandqapp.com/ https://commandqapp.com/
• rPlayer6554 6y ago
  I think Spotify has to take the award for worst design decision of recent history. They changed their interface last year to add a "hide this song" option in the menu _right where add to playlist used to be_. While hide song is useful, why is it very high up in the menu (when you have to scroll for other options that are more frequently used) _and why is it where the most used button, add to playlist was_. It totally broke my muscle memory for no good reason.
• kristofferc 6y ago
  Or don't put the <hide> link right next to the <comments> link (looking at you HN frontpage).
  • capableweb 6y ago
    Tiny tip: The "2 hours ago" link is the same as "comments" and far away from "hide" :)
• darepublic 6y ago
  Well the ultimate solution is to control apps with your thoughts, then there is no chance of fuckups. A bridge to get to this user brain interface utopia is a pure text command interface where arbitrary natural language commands can be fulfilled. This can then be interfaced with by voice but better yet small movements of the fingers that get translated into keystrokes and receive haptic feedback so the user is playing with an invisible but strangely physical device
  • jclulow 6y ago
    I absolutely don't want to talk to the computer, and I don't want to sit in an office or on a train full of people talking to theirs. I also don't feel any particular need to plug my brain into something that Amazon probably owns. We could, and I cannot stress this enough, just do a better job with the buttons.
    • darepublic 6y ago
      The thing is voice is often less intrusive than having to pull out your phone, block out the surrounding world and make precise little taps on a screen. Doesn't obsolete keyboard and mouse and desktop. Also being able to use finger movements gives u the convenience while being inconspicuous. If anything I think Amazon and Google would hate a Good voice assistant as it would destroy their monopoly on what u look at and your visual attention
• yakkomajuri 6y ago
  This happened to me just the other day and the post encompasses my exact feelings. I was sharing my screen, then using the chat, muting, unmuting, and eventually went to unmute and was jacked out of the call, with not even a "Hey, are you sure you want to leave?"
• jonplackett 6y ago
  The follow up about gmail icons is equally true + cutting. I've always just ignored all those icons having had no idea what most of them do. https://blog.plover.com/tech/ui-2.html https://blog.plover.com/tech/ui-2.html
  • DavidPiper 6y ago
    Opened this fully expecting to see a rant about the Spam button being right next to the Trash button (the UI 'mistake' I make most often because of lazy mouse movement). But it wasn't, and now I can't unsee those icons either, even though I don't use them!
    • jonplackett 6y ago
      It’s funny, I didn’t really fully know they were there either, I just had the feeling that gmail was really quite cluttered.
• kitd 6y ago
  > Don't put the Yes button right next to the No button. That encourages mistakes. Obviously Eg. Don't put the "Sound Hawaiian missle alert button" next to the "Test sound Hawaiian missile alert button".
• Vinnl 6y ago
  Off-topic, but I'd like to give this line of thinking a name some day: > this particular problem is apparent even to a blockhead like me > So it must be extremely obvious "I'm not an expert, and even I can see that" sounds reasonable, but it's often used to disagree with experts. Whereas it's not unlikely that while it may look obvious to a layman, someone with more familiarity with a problem might know about non-obvious trade-offs that come with the "obvious" solution. All of which doesn't necessarily relate to the article, the rest of which I'm going to read now - I just found it interesting, and wanted to share.
  • Hnrobert42 6y ago
    I share a similar frustration at the glee with which folks lament the lack of common sense.
  • draw_down 6y ago
    Mmm, I think it’s ok to disagree with experts. Yes, even for dirty laypeople.
• blunte 6y ago
  This is the classic problem of people being allowed or enabled to do things they are not properly educated about - not a criticism, but an observation. This can be applied to anything: child rearing, writing, presenting, singing, dancing, pet-owning, coding, UI developing, ..., ..., ... Without a formal educational foundation, people just do what they see. And the more people do without education, the more the overall result will stray from (perhaps) what is best. In school we learned formal language grammar, and only if we were experienced and of some high profile (or having no audience) were we allowed to exercise "creative license" to break the rules. It might kill some good creativity, but it would also kill bad/wrong creativity in user interfaces if there were fairly strict rules to follow. Some of the coolest UIs also happen to be terrible to actually use. Same goes for books written with inconsistent typography, alignment, etc.
• ggm 6y ago
  Having both a do and a logical undo function use "down" arrow indicators is pretty bad.
• cblconfederate 6y ago
  Thanks for reminding me to switch to text labels again. Text labels are immune to redesigns and have a constant mental processing time. Life is short, i don't want designers to steal my milliseconds. Instead of using other metrics, they should be judged on the user response times that their designs generate
• mft_ 6y ago
  Late to the party, but while we're sticking the boot in to the UI in Google Meet, have you ever compared iOS to Windows? https://imgur.com/a/HO6oi2F https://imgur.com/a/HO6oi2F
  • markstos 6y ago
    THIS. I accidentally left a meeting multiple times because the Google Meet icon order is reversed between Android and Web. What were they thinking? Using either order consistently would be better than changing the order between apps!
    • laurent123456 6y ago
      Isn't it one of those things where they make it consistent for the platform, rather than across platforms? It's like the browser tab close button is on the right on Windows but left on macOS, which always annoys me.
• ysavir 6y ago
  I think the author's point about reset buttons and cancel buttons is valid, but not about the Google Meet interface. Reset and cancel buttons present an either/or with the submit button. You either submit or cancel, and only rarely reset a form, so they present interface functionality that is rarely used, but significantly impactful of the experience. But a "leave meeting" button is used at least once per meeting by each participant, which may be more frequent than the mute or hide video buttons. It's appropriate to put it front and center where participants can easily find it. I feel like what the author really wants here is a confirmation before leaving in case of accidental clicks.
  • sesqu 6y ago
    That's not so much a problem for the people who want to leave a meeting, but it is very much a problem for people who frequently toggle their mic on and off.
  • alejoar 6y ago
    The "leave meeting" button is not used "at least" once by each participant. It is used exactly once. Same as the submit button. The reset button can be used multiple times, same as the "enable/disable mic/cam", although arguably the latter WILL be used multiple times. I believe it is more a matter of "multiple vs single" use that needs to be considered, or more like "on going vs finishing" actions when separating/grouping buttons.
    • ysavir 6y ago
      The usage of the other buttons varies wildly by participant. I know some that mute and hide the camera at all times unless otherwise necessary, while I also know others that generally never mute or hide. > I believe it is more a matter of "multiple vs single" use that needs to be considered, or more like "on going vs finishing" actions when separating/grouping buttons We could probably separate them along those lines, yes. But I don't think this relates much to the original article. It compared the "leave meeting" button, which we agree is an "exactly once per call" button, to the cancel/reset buttons, which are in the "hardly ever maybe never" category, and that's not a fair comparison. My point is that while we can find ways to distinguish the "leave meeting" button from mute and hide, it's not appropriate to give it the same treatment as a cancel/reset button should get.
• tomaaron 6y ago
  This is hilarious. Check out his next rant about gmail icons [1]. [1] https://blog.plover.com/tech/ui-2.html https://blog.plover.com/tech/ui-2.html
• OliverJones 6y ago
  Yes, that UI is off-the-wall stupid. I'm no expert either. But I spend a lot of my time these days on Meet calls with far too many participants with my mic muted and video switched off. Then I get called on to say something. Ooof. Where's that user interface? Oh right, it pops up if I hover near the bottom of the Meet tab. Oh, right, I have to hover, then click the little webcam item, then click the little mic icon, but not click the little red thing between them -- BETWEEN THEM!!! -- that looks like the receiver from a 1970-vintage telephone 500 set. What is this, a Peter Sellers political movie with a way to call the Kremlin? "Sorry, could you repeat the question?" It really is horrible design.
  • sischoel 6y ago
    If it is any help to you, there are some hotkeys that you could use instead: https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9896256?hl=en https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9896256?hl=en
• pembrook 6y ago
  Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things? As organizational complexity increases, design debt and responsibility becomes diffused among larger and larger groups of people. Leading to the bizarre situation where no individual has power or responsibility over anything specifically. Any individual interface element might have taken input from as many as 100+ different people over many years, each with competing interests and goals (no, I'm not joking). Combine this with the precedents and decisions made on projects in the past (design debt), and you end up with stupid outcomes like this. As a multiple FAANG alumni, I've seen this firsthand hundreds of times. I think it's cute that people think IC designers or engineers have the power to make any real decisions inside large organizations. What's more likely, is these stupid icons were part of some design system somebody created 7 years ago (have to stay consistent of course!). The circular floating buttons were a precedent somebody set 5 years ago on a completely different product (god forbid it feels "off-brand"). The colors were set 6 years ago on some project where this kind of application was never thought of. And finally, the order & placement of the icons was changed 15 times by some PM, then the PM's boss, then the accessibility guys, then the brand team, the brand team's boss, then the director of marketing, etc. etc. The tie breaking vote going to whoever is perceived as having more soft power inside the org at the time. Hence, the inevitable outcome of big company stupidity.
  • dimitrios1 6y ago
    > Why do giant companies do so many hilariously dumb things? Because as they get bigger and hire more employees you inevitably move back towards the mean. There are only so many good designers and good PMs out there.
    • throwaway316943 6y ago
      I think the mean arrives a lot sooner than that. The situation where PMs and managers and goddamn copy writers start changing the design is commonplace even in smaller orgs. If you hire a competent designer to build an accessible and attractive application, just let them do their job! If you want design by committee instead then just fire the designer and get on with it.
• dsego 6y ago
  I have problems with many programs like this. For example thunderbird where the buttons don't stay in place. So when I want to archive some emails to clean up the inbox I keep clicking on Archive. But if I click on a message marked as junk, the Junk button disappears and all buttons shift right so instead of clicking Archive it's now suddenly Forward. In my new car, the phone menu lists all recent phone calls without grouping them by contact, so if I want to use the fancy controls on my steering to call someone I have to scroll and scroll. Another example from the physical world. Recently I found the buttons for all 15 floors selected (probably a kid thought it was funny) and I had to wait on every damn floor. No way to cancel them. And it's such an easy thing to predict, there can nr max 5-6 people in the elevator at any time, so why should you be able to select more than 5-6 floors at a time? And no way to cancel of course. And almost every software or device has those issues, and like the author I sometimes have to ask myself, am I the crazy one here, how can everyone else live with this? I believe most ordinary folk will believe it's there fault when things don't work as expected and their lack of expertise or handiness instead of blaming the interface. Or by learning the nuances and quirks of a system they consider themselves as skilled and knowledgeable.
  • ourmandave 6y ago
    UIs should be consistent, so the least they could do is make it so if you push the buttons repeatedly you get to the floors faster. Like the buttons in the lobby.
• dheera 6y ago
  My biggest problem with the design of Google Meet is that the buttons are horribly inconsistent. The big fat red phone button means "click this button to achieve the state that is depicted on the button (hung up)". Okay, so good so far, by clicking a button, you get whatever is pictured on it. Makes sense. One would thus think that similarly, a picture of a muted microphone on a button means "click to mute" and a picture of an unmuted microphone on a button means "click to talk" and this is backwards from what they actually mean.
  • Sebb767 6y ago
    To be fair to Google, though, this is a cultural problem. The mute and camera buttons depict the current state in basically all telephony applications (see Skype, Zoom, Discord ...) and the red "hang up" button is also the expected form. Yes, it's a bit inconsistent, but I can see why they make the buttons inconsistent within themselves rather than breaking user expectations. This does not excuse the placement, though.
  • christophilus 6y ago
    100% of the time, I get confused as to whether or not I’m muted. This really should have text in addition to an icon.
    • dheera 6y ago
      Or alternatively, make it a toggle on/off switch with a LED light sort of indicator, which would be super clear without localization because that's how mic on/off switches are in the real world.
• pornel 6y ago
  Oh, how I despise the Reset button. People put in forms just beacuse it exists, under assumption that it must exist for a good reason. Nobody has any use-case for it other than "I don't know, maybe someone will want to reset the form for some reason." And even if "filling in the whole form again from the beginning" was a real use-case worth catering for, the reset button would make more sense the beginning of the form (and it wouldn't be such a footgun there!)
• bogwog 6y ago
  My only explanations for these types of problems is that these people either hate their jobs, or have horrendous managers.
• swyx 6y ago
  First thing I do on every new Mac - remap the Cmd+Q command that closes all the things (one fat finger away from Cmd+W which we all use daily) to something harmless, like invert colors. lifesaver. https://dev.to/swyx/my-new-mac-setup-4ibi/ https://dev.to/swyx/my-new-mac-setup-4ibi/
  • Ashanmaril 6y ago
    I've never actually had the Cmd+Q issue with my browser because Chrome overrides the system Cmd+Q, popping up a message to hold it if you want to actually close the browser. I just check with Firefox which he was complaining about, and while it doesn't do this, it at least by default prompts you to confirm you want to close multiple tabs which should hopefully prevent you from quitting out by accident.
    • swyx 6y ago
      idk how true this is, i use chrome myself and i had the Cmd + Q issue once before deciding it was a stupid shortcut and i never wanted to ever think about it again. that was like 5 years ago
• izietto 6y ago
  The next blog post is hilarious too: https://blog.plover.com/tech/ui-2.html https://blog.plover.com/tech/ui-2.html
• ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
  How about HN and it’s upvote/downvote placement/size? So small, that on my phone, Side-to-side would be easier, especially for the fat-fingered
• teekert 6y ago
  I routinely drag one folder of my Windows Explorer favorites (where I drag all network disks because man I hate people giving me urls to THEIR U-or-whatever-drive) onto another. Thank god it then starts to load and load and load and I can use ctrl-z and it has been fine every time so far... But man, it makes me nervous that I can just drag a network disk onto another and make both a complete mess in a microsecond. Oh and also just switched from Android to iPhone. And the top search result in the app store is often not what I searched for (sometimes it is though), but a promoted app. Maybe it is clear when you don't use dark mode but if you're new to an ecosystem it would be nice if the top result is the correct one (and not a crappy result with a slightly discolored background tile behind it). Also, the app store opened to some page with no search the first time. Turns out there are tabs at the very bottom (where your thumb hoovers when reading the rest of the screen), one of them is search. Do people browse the app store like a magazine? Oh and please Apple, keep correcting my .nl email address to .nul in email-address fields, sure, you know better what tld I must mean. Thankfully it does stay correct after about 1-5 tries (it really varies!). Oh and try adding an app to a folder in the bottom panel/tray (the 4 apps arbitrarily placed below the 3 dots that don't move with the desktops because... you may still want them there on the next desktop?), it does not work, one must drag the folder above the dots, add the app and drag it back. Many things are not intuitive, thank god I found the yellow square with "Sets" as title when you open it (it's right below the gray rectangle with "No material available" on it). It has a flashy 14 animation. Sweet. It contains some tips, together with some stuff picked by a person named Genius, those tips are useful. Many things are nice indeed, but some things are just... how does this come into existence? What path did this feature follow to become... like this... Overall though, I really like the iPhone.
  • Forge36 6y ago
    Someone at my work created a tool (windows hook? Not sure how they did it) which shows a warning when moving network folders and files. (Just a simple confirmation box). So much time saved by now needing to request the backup be restored because files couldn't be found.
• swiley 6y ago
  I've given up and just run older x11 software on my phone now because the UI is more sane. No one builds good UIs anymore.
• hi41 6y ago
  Same thing happens on iPhone too. In the minimized window that appears on top, I click the small green button. I am not sure I clicked it, So I click again. But now it has turned into the red quit button and inadvertently click it and then the call ends. This is happened several times and got my wife super mad. I tell her bad UX design is at fault and it falls on deaf ears. Now my marriage is in ruins because of bad UX. Apple, are you listening?
• colanderman 6y ago
  Regarding the addendum about mail archive buttons, Apple Mail is particularly bad. It has three buttons right next to each other that all look like trash cans: Archive, Delete, and Mark as Spam. I only ever want to press one of these (Archive), yet I have to stop and squint and think each time to remember which is which. Can you guess correctly? [1] (I've since realized that the Archive button is actually a banker's box. I nevertheless ended up enabling text labels to tell them apart.) [1] http://www.rawinfopages.com/mac/sites/default/files/sites/default/files/img17/mail-swipes1.jpg http://www.rawinfopages.com/mac/sites/default/files/sites/de... (ignore the arrow)
• ec664 6y ago
  Mac OSX is equally terrible as is windows by clustering window controls all in one section.
  • rgovostes 6y ago
    In Classic Mac OS, the close button was on the other side of the window for the reason described in the article. It joined the others probably for familiarity for Windows users.
  • Aachen 6y ago
    I never use the maximize button because I double click somewhere on the title bar. Why use a tiny button instead of a conveniently large area? When first installing Linux Mint years ago, I was going through the settings and noticed I could customize the buttons. I made the middle button, maximizing, empty and now just have more space between the minimize and close buttons. It's perfect. As a bonus tip, remapping double click to right click (also a setting in Cinnamon, don't need external software for this) also makes it way nicer to use (I never use the right click menu - after all, the buttons I regularly need are already right there and there's another button on the left for opening the menu, or you can use alt+space+t).
• andrepd 6y ago
  > Don't put the commonly-used "close this window" keyboard shortcut right next to the infrequently-used and irreversible "quit this application" shortcut. In particular, don't put "close this window" on control-W and "quit this application" on control-Q. I'm looking at you, Firefox. Oh my fucking god, the number of times I've been bit by this and had hundreds of tabs closed from under me because the shortcut I press hundreds of times per day is right next to the "close everything with no confirmation". Yes, if you click the X button to close the window you are treated to an "are you sure" dialog. But if you accidentally hit Ctrl-Q that doesn't happen.
  • jmholla 6y ago
    I've been using this to work around it in Firefox: https://janschejbal.github.io/disable-ctrl-q/ https://janschejbal.github.io/disable-ctrl-q/ Sounds like we'll be able to disable it altogether in newer versions of Firefox.
• gameshot911 6y ago
  Teams' incoming video call pop-up, anyone?[1] Can't tell you how many times I hit the big, highlighted telephone icon - exactly what you hit on every other platform since the dawn of time to accept an incoming call - only to instead reject it. [1] https://www.lync.se/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/image-6.png https://www.lync.se/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/image-6.png
  • wohfab 6y ago
    "Why is do I get an second call when I’m busy?"
• VectorLock 6y ago
  The Google Meet three-buttons thing is so infuriating. Every time I get a family video conference going an older person will join with their camera/mic off and a "press the red circle with the camera icon in it" inevitably ends up them hanging up on the call.
• YesThatTom2 6y ago
  Raises/promotions at Google come from launching new products. Fixing the fact that the hangup button is next to the ducking mute button does not help your salary/bonus. This has always been true at Google. If Google management thought that was a problem, they've had 15+ years to fix it. Issue closed. Works as designed.
• komape 6y ago
  Why is the upvote button for a Hacker News post so close to the link of the post? I just want to upvote this post but instead the blog post is loaded ;)
  • Aachen 6y ago
    Undown was a godsend for this mobile user. Not even because I hit it wrong so often - surprisingly - but now at least I know what I pressed and it's reversible to boot!
• arkh 6y ago
  I'd like to add Discord to the pile: see someone has started to stream their screen, click on the icon. Now try to find how to get out, usually the first time you'll click on the only "disconnect" button you find which disconnects from the voicechat. No one thinks "I'll just go on some of the text chats".
• username3 6y ago
  The reset button is for clearing search forms.
• beervirus 6y ago
  Let’s not forget about these horrible new icons: https://old.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/comments/jjzr8l/homogeneity_sucks/ https://old.reddit.com/r/CrappyDesign/comments/jjzr8l/homoge...
• itomato 6y ago
  What about pervasive compute with natural language processing? This will surely catapult us into a new age of bad ux?
• kryogen1c 6y ago
  After having spent 10 years in the US nuclear navy, i am surprised at how many things are obvious in that organization that no one else seemingly has any idea about: "When I came to Washington before World War II to head the electrical section of the Bureau of Ships, I found that one man was in charge of design, another of production, a third handled maintenance, while a fourth dealt with fiscal matters. The entire bureau operated that way. It didn’t make sense to me. Design problems showed up in production, production errors showed up in maintenance, and financial matters reached into all areas. I changed the system. I made one man responsible for his entire area of equipment—for design, production, maintenance, and contracting. If anything went wrong, I knew exactly at whom to point. I run my present organization on the same principle." -Admiral Rickover, creator of the US Nuclear Navy the hang-up button in between the audio- and video- mute buttons results from the lack of responsibility described above. any single person would agree this is wrong, therefor no single person is in charge.
  • ryandrake 6y ago
    I've always liked Apple's DRI[1] concept. You have a single responsible person who is the final decision maker about the [product | feature | initiative]. No more dodging tough calls and diffusing the responsibility over a project across 5 different PMs, 3 designers, 4 tech leads, and 2 executive sponsors, so that really nobody is responsible for anything. The buck stops at a single, known decision maker. Most company cultures can't quite manage to do this, as everyone seems to have to have this weird fractional "ownership" of some part of the product. 1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/10/02/how-well-does-apples-directly-responsible-individual-dri-model-work-in-practice/?sh=764e2b7f194c https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2012/10/02/how-well-does-...
    • systemvoltage 6y ago
      In addition to what you said, you need these DRIs to actually care. And they need a good mechanism for feedback since they’re not going to know what’s broken if everyone is afraid of harshly criticizing or even cancelling the entire product. You need Steve Jobs at the top. What happens with DRIs today at Apple is complacency sets in since no one is complaining, feedback (demo days with Steve) is getting weaker and less threatening. And, shitty ideas get democratized and perpetuated since no one is there to put an end to it.
• flanbiscuit 6y ago
  > In particular, don't put "close this window" on control-W and "quit this application" on control-Q. I'm looking at you, Firefox. I feel like on a Mac this is just about every single application. I actually thought this was an OS level shortcut and not something implemented by the applications themselves. Maybe it's offered out of the box but can be overridden? I'm not an Mac app dev so not sure how that all works. I have accidentally hit the command-Q instead of command-W and it is very frustrating. I appreciate those apps that ask you to confirm quitting.
  • wohfab 6y ago
    The mac is extremely good in being bad in this. CMD+Control+Q locks the computer. Incredibly useful for office places, where you are not alone. Not quite hitting that Control-key though, and your app quits.
    • flanbiscuit 6y ago
      I'm guessing people who design/choose shortcuts like to group similar/related action shortcuts near each other like copy/paste. I am constantly hitting command+c when meaning to command+v still to this day! Some apps will annoyingly copy a blank space (or clear your clipboard) if your cursor is in an input/textarea but you are not highlighting anything. Chrome does not do that, on Chrome if you do not have something highlighted it will not copy it.
• andybp85 6y ago
  I've been saying this exact thing about the copy and paste shortcuts for years. If I had a dollar for every time I copied the thing I was trying to paste over, I could afford to crusade against this injustice.
• dhimes 6y ago
  I would add, "Use your words." Pictures are nice. And I get that they are maybe easier for i18n. But if it isn't completely clear what the picture is supposed to mean (and everybody seems to like their own) then it understanding what the heck to do can take some time. I value my time. I'm still looking for the "back" button on my Apple TV. I seem to be easily able to touch something that takes me to some unknown place and basically have to start over. In a word, I would tell the FAANGs: don't re-invent UI. You're simply not good enough at it. Simple, repeatable and ugly is much preferable to confusing and pretty.
• mgh2 6y ago
  The author does not try to explain the subtleties of the design decision. Yes, putting two opposing choices next to each other might encourage some errors, at least initially, but what if the designers decided to do this because users were already trained to see this pattern in all other software? Because they were building on top of an already established mental model? Red is a double-edged sword: it has been identified as attention in nature (danger and attraction), so psychologically speaking it might warn AND nonintentional lead a user to a perceived action. What is the solution? Would you put it opposite to each other prompting the user to become frustrated when they cannot find the button to hang up? (X) closing the app does not imply hanging up. This is not a life or death situation (unlike healthcare), so at least offer some explanation of why it was designed that way or offer an alternative solution.
  • adambatkin 6y ago
    There are no subtleties. The post contains a specific example in Google Meet, which is used by "the general public" and not by anyone "already trained to see this pattern in all other software". It's confusing for a lot of people. Have you ever watched a "normal" person try to complete a task on a computer? They routinely click the wrong mouse buttons (or double/single click when they should single/double click), close windows, press in the wrong places in the GUI, and generally fumble around until they get the task done. But they don't get exasperated, because they have been conditioned to expect that computers are confusing, and they persist on with their work. And that's why "normal" people think that computers are mysterious complicated beasts. Because the UX sucks. Everywhere.
    • backtoyoujim 6y ago
      The neverending reality of the Edigerian nipple.
    • gotoeleven 6y ago
      Lots of big companies (ie Apple) have thrown massive amounts of work into trying to make better UIs and it produced stuff like itunes and the one button mouse that has a secret right click. Maybe we just shouldn't expect some things to be so simple?
• frusciante19 6y ago
  how low has gmail fallen from being the pinnacle of user interface design /s
• Graziano_M 6y ago
  My favourite stupid design: In iOS, your alarm, when it goes off, has two buttons: Snooze and stop. They are properly spaced out. The timer app has a similar UI, two buttons, one to repeat, and one to stop, spaced out. The problem: They are swapped!
  • boatsie 6y ago
    This bothers me as well and I constantly end up snoozing my timers! I can only imagine the reason it’s not fixed is that some people will complain that they reversed the buttons in their app!
  • meatmanek 6y ago
    It's funny when you compare the two (and I'm pretty sure I've accidentally restarted a timer that I meant to stop because of the muscle memory I have around alarms), but it makes sense to me. For alarms, the biggest, most obvious button absolutely must be snooze, not stop. The plausible harm caused by accidentally stopping when you meant to snooze is very high: you miss an interview, final exam, court date, or are late to work one too many times. The plausible harm caused by accidentally snoozing when you meant to stop the alarm is orders of magnitude lower -- you are embarrassed when the alarm goes off somewhere quiet, maybe you get kicked out of the movie theater. For timers, 90% of the time, you want to stop the timer. Another 5% of the time, you want to start the timer again for a different amount of time. (How often do you put something in the oven for 35 minutes and then discover it needs another 35 minutes? Usually you just need a few more minutes.). Only occasionally do you want to restart the exact timer you just finished. It's a nice feature to have, but it's appropriate to make it subtle.
    • asdff 6y ago
      IMO for the alarm app, the stop button is too small. Probably once a week I think I've hit stop and then I'm brushing my teeth and hear my alarm ramp up to 100% volume in the next room, to the chagrin of my neighbors who work nights in the adjoining thin walled unit.
• dmalik 6y ago
  There is a recent NN/g article that covers this exact UX issue: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/proximity-consequential-options https://www.nngroup.com/articles/proximity-consequential-opt... > One of the starting points of the modern UX discipline was the application of psychology to industrial design in the 1940s. During World War II, Alphonse Chapanis (among others) worked to understand why pilot errors caused a large number of B-17 bomber crashes during landings. He noticed that the lever that pilots used to lower the landing gear and the one that lowered the wing flaps were identical and differentiated only by placement. This similarity caused pilots to mix the two up, especially in high-stress moments such as landing a plane. Chapanis helped redesign the controls on the B-17 bomber to avoid pilot error by changing the shape of one of the two levers, so pilots could quickly tell which lever they had in hand.
• intrasight 6y ago
  Had to share this UX anecdote. My first job out of school was creating a "browser" for nuclear power plants. This is 1989. There were no mice. Just a dedicated custom expensive lit keyboard. Probably cost a few thousand at that time. This guy is in front of a more modern incantation. Ours had no joysticks - just arrow keys. https://www.alamy.com/control-room-of-nuclear-power-generating-plant-image1655240.html https://www.alamy.com/control-room-of-nuclear-power-generati... One of the older engineers explained that the key labeled "Run" used to be labeled "Execute". But apparently after a near fatal accident, management decided to change the label.
• excitom 6y ago
  My favorite pet peeve is whoever decided that in gmail nothing is ever deleted but you can move messages to the Trash folder. So instead of Select message, click Delete you have Select message, click Move, select Trash folder. Sure it's not much, but I reckon the cumulative time wasted by that extra action has taken a couple days of my life over the past decades.
  • ac2u 6y ago
    Sounds as nonsensical as this one https://twitter.com/ac2u/status/1347315392121872389?s=20 https://twitter.com/ac2u/status/1347315392121872389?s=20
  • roryokane 6y ago
    I’m not sure what platform you’re on, but I suspect you’re just overlooking the Delete button. As far as I can remember, Gmail has always had a dedicated Delete button that moves a message to the Trash folder, though its position in the toolbar has changed at least once in Gmail’s lifetime. After selecting or hovering over a message, look for the button with a trash can icon. On Gmail’s desktop website, it’s currently the fourth button from the left in the toolbar (next to Report Spam). On Gmail for Android, or when hovering over a message on the desktop website, it’s the third button from the right (next to Archive).
• m463 6y ago
  I've been saying the same thing about the Apple phone app for years. Here's the problem - you touch ANYTHING in the phone app and it will dial the phone. My mother used to have all kinds of problems with this. Why is butt-dialing a thing on an iphone? Billions of dollars of development and I still get into the phone app and I have to keep my hands off the screen and tap carefully not to screw up. I'm listening to a voicemail - whoops I am calling them back right now!!! argh. What is this unknown number? Wait, I DON"T WANT TO CALL IT! The solution is simple: a setting that lets you confirm before calling. Just like when you tap what looks like a phone number in everything OUTSIDE the phone app.
• lbriner 6y ago
  Isn't this another example of something that to the casual listener sounds simple: "Good design" but the truth is incredibly complex, as many posts have already mentioned: 1) I am paid for design so leaving it as it is cannot be an option, I need to change something 2) I want to make something objectively better but this would make it too different than the other existing products 3) I can make it better but my existing users would prefer things to be left alone 4) I don't understand that just because that crazy new design works for Google doesn't mean it makes sense for me 5) Everyone has an opinion on design without necessarily any cost to that opinion 6) Marketing need to have some control over branding and the line is not usually clear 7) The reasoning behind design decisions is often lost over time so somebody breaks something to make it look good 8) Need to optmise for multiple devices = compromise 9) Things need a freshen up to stay competitive even if they are functionally acceptable otherwise we look out of date and people won't use us 10) The line between pretty and functional is not the same for each person/company product. I could go on but you'll be pleased to hear that I won't! (edit - formatting)
• minhazm 6y ago
  This has happened to multiple times in a meets call. But at least part of the reason is because Zoom, Bluejeans, and Teams have a more sensible layout with mic mute and video mute next to each other. So I expect that right of mic mute will be video mute and end up leaving the calls. I suppose I could get used to it if I were using Meets most of the time, but it is still a bad design nonetheless. It shouldn't be so easy to accidentally leave the call.
• ronyfadel 6y ago
  Good design is forgiving. To err is human. Destructive actions (leave meeting) should have a safety pin. https://uxplanet.org/design-principle-error-forgiveness-1495f7471113 https://uxplanet.org/design-principle-error-forgiveness-1495...
• RHSeeger 6y ago
  > These three buttons are at the bottom of the Google Meet videoconferencing app. The left one temporarily mutes and unmutes the microphone. The right one controls the camera similarly. I have had this bite me SO many times; hanging up on calls without meaning to. That misfeature, all by itself, is enough to make me want to avoid the entire app.
• oblib 6y ago
  This post cracked me up. The follow up post to this is just as good. When I first started developing software in the mid-late `90s I bought a book published by Apple called "Apple Human Interface Guidelines". I expected it to be a very technical book, but it felt more like an 5th grade level school book with lots of cartoonish illustrations and very simple language. At first I was very disappointed. I sped through it and felt I'd learned nothing. After a few days I picked it up and went through it again. It only took about 10 minutes to read it. It explained how the GUI widgets were based on UIs that people were familiar with, like the old Radios in cars with push buttons that changed the radio station and check boxes used on printed forms and then it began to dawn on me just how brilliant that design was, and how well that book was written. So well most any 5th grader could understand it. In my own software I've been tempted to use one of the many "Icon" galleries we have to choose from now but decided not too. I opted for simple links and buttons with short but descriptive words, like "Preferences" and "New Document" and "Reports". There are icons for all of those, but my users don't need to learn what those stand for, and really don't want to. It's silly for me to expect them to learn the purpose of an icon in my app when every other app they use might implement them for a different purpose. Sometimes "a picture is worth a thousand words" is not a good thing. Sometimes just a word or two is a lot better.
• firefoxd 6y ago
  Were you ever expecting an important phone call? Maybe from a lawyer, from the government, or worst from the doctor. I always end up hanging up on those accidentally. When you add stress to the situation, I can never tell if it's swipe up or swipe down. Just put the words "Answer" or "Hang up" on the screen! Context: Android. Also, there is a book by Eric Meyers and Sarah w.b, Designing for Real Life. Highly recommended for dealing with these issues.
• ashneo76 6y ago
  I have left the call by mistake sooo many times. I can't even. This a full desktop screen, use it. And give an explicit button to hide controls. With clear text. "Hide Controls" "Leave Call" "Mute call" arbitrary images aren't a replacement for this.
• arkaic 6y ago
  Random thought: I always felt the mic on/off in conference apps should've been a toggle switch (up/down or left/right) rather than a single button that's red or crossed off when off. In the latter situation, I always find myself testing it a few times to make sure the UX conformed to what I think it would be.
• seph-reed 6y ago
  It would be nice if a precedent had been set a long time ago for having to double click or click and hold for actions like this. A prompt saying "are you sure" is obnoxious. But I wouldn't mind if big scary operations required me to click and hold for 1 second instead of just tapping the thing.
• dkarl 6y ago
  > Obviously, the Submit button should be over on the left, just under the main form, where the user will visit it in due course after dealing with the other widgets, and the Reset button should be way over on the right, where it is less likely to be hit by accident. So, there is one plausible intuitive argument for why his preferred way would be better. Does that make his preferred way "obviously" better? Here's another plausible intuitive argument. In left-to-right languages, right is forward. Left is backward. Submit is forward. Reset is backward. Putting submit on the right and reset on the left caters to our established instincts for going forward when things are satisfactory and back when things need to be redone. Now we have two arguments pointing in opposite directions, which should not be surprising, because arguments of this kind are far from conclusive. They don't make anything "obvious." > Does my “obviously” come across as superior and condescending? Honestly, it comes from a place of humility. My thinking is like this: His thinking does not take into account 1) how weak his initial argument was, and 2) that every domain contains some truths that are obvious with deeper thought and experience but are counterintuitive to most beginners.
  • coda 6y ago
    The correct answer of course is that the Submit button should be the primary CTA for the form, and it should be styled in a way to make that abundantly clear to the user. The Reset button (which I haven't seen on a modern form in years), if necessary, would be a secondary action and styled as a standard link, ideally beneath the Submit button (and it would require user confirmation).
• qubit000 6y ago
  The problem is that everyone has an opinion on design and thinks it's only about making things pretty. The designer, often on low end of organizational pecking order, is asked to bend over from all sounds and is just trying to keep food on the table.
• hamitron 6y ago
  Venmo fits in here as well. The pay and request money buttons are the same color and touching. I have fat-fingered it before and paid a person who owed me money.
• sdfhbdf 6y ago
  I still can't get over the autohiding of the toolbar feature in Google Meet. You cannot disable the autohide and it reflows the whole thing for no apparent reason. Usability is yet again at a loss. I loved this one comparison I read about it. It went: > Imagine I'm driving on a highway and suddenly I see that the exit I want to take is really close so I have to change lanes. But the maker of the car made it so I first have to take out the steering wheel out of the glovebox to make a turn. That is how it feels to use Google Meet's UI with the mute button hidden away.
  • benhurmarcel 6y ago
    They disabled the auto-hiding of the bar about a month ago. Now it stays visible all the time. Before that change we had colleagues complaining that they couldn't find the buttons. Now we have others complaining that the bar is always visible.
• remir 6y ago
  Genuine question: is there example of good looking UI that also provide good UX? I'm amazed at how big companies, with UX designers and researchers being paid big salaries, seems to produce confusing designs. Is it because management is pushing "shinyness" at all cost or is it because what works in terms of UX doesn't look "sleek" enough?
• arisAlexis 6y ago
  We are building a Design Review Marketplace that can help with this sort of problem by picking the minds of top experts. Check it out if you want at https://borrowmind.io https://borrowmind.io
• andrekandre 6y ago
  Obviously, the Submit button should be over on the left, just under the main form, where the user will visit it in due course after dealing with the other widgets, and the Reset button should be way over on the right, where it is less likely to be hit by accident. hello github! how many times ive accidentally closed a pr or merged before i was ready because the big green "merge" button it seems everywhere we are designing very pretty ui's that are usability nightmares...
• illwrks 6y ago
  100% agree with the writer. My daughter has been homeschooling and Google Classroom is the platform they are using, of which Meet is the video delivery part. The main things I've seen: 1. The age range of users is 5 years and older. 2. Parts of the UI is on a panel that is overlaid on the presenters video feed. This panel appears and disappears based on mouse input over the main presenter area. If a child needs to 'raise hand' or 'mute/unmute' they need to mouse the mouse then Mose the mouse to the correct button and click it. 3. The layout of the video feeds on the right of it could be better also. 4. There are no shortcuts attached to the raise/lower hand button. Watching and helping my daughter has been an eye-opening experience. It must be so difficult for people with mobility issues to use these tools...
• Andy_G11 6y ago
  Cool - a chance to vent. Well, here's my helpful suggestion: maybe they should get the people who position the log out buttons for some websites to place the exit buttons on zoom or refresh buttons for forms - log outs are generally in the last place on a menu that is hidden off screen. Sometimes you have to right click somewhere for the option to appear. Or even Google 'how do I log out of XYZ?' to work out how to log out. For these sites, the pre-launch user group testing probably has a threshold of 60 seconds for new users to work out how to leave & if the bulk of test subjects manage to do it in under that time, it's back to the drawing board.
• leephillips 6y ago
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• filoeleven 6y ago
  > In particular, don't put "close this window" on control-W and "quit this application" on control-Q. I'm looking at you, Firefox. Or MacOS. I disagree with this one almost entirely though. Keyboard shortcuts are for power users. Memorizing easy key combos for common tasks is the whole point, and they’re designed for touch-typists. There is a semantic reason behind mapping ctrl-q to “quit” and ctrl-w to “close window”. They use different fingers, and they are both used from “home position,” I.e. it’s not a hand shift and ring finger reach like ctrl-tab vs ctrl-~ is. That’s a better example of bad mapping IMO. Good design should prevent you from closing a window or application that has unsaved changes without a confirmation dialog. Good design should make it easy to restore your last “saved” state for both, e.g. Chrome’s ctrl-shift-w to reopen closed tabs, and most browsers’ “reload all open tabs/windows on launch.”
• twirlock 6y ago
  Things have controls. You have to use the right one.
• justinstimatze 6y ago
  This adblock rule fixes the issue for me by removing the button: ##[aria-label="Leave call"]
• mohanmcgeek 6y ago
  Google is notoriously bad at fixing their design even after being pointed out by the internets That the order of 'search result type'(web/images/maps) changes every time and you can't rely on your muscle memory has been pointed out for years now.