5 ms·

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 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.
- danielbarla 6y ago
  I've often wondered why this kind of confirmation couldn't be conditional on the confidence that the click / touch was intentional? As an example, my favourite pet peeve was using Visual Studio with old-school, upfront locking source control (like TFS), and then accidentally drag and dropping a file or folder due to lag in remote desktop, or a failing mouse which sent two click events in 1 ms or something. VS duly pre-emptively locks the 10k files in the folder you just dragged, and begins a 5 minute operation you'll have to somehow undo later, even though it should be fairly obvious from the click events that it was non-intentional. Going back to the meeting example, surely solid, accurate taps in the center of the hang-up icon could be taken as intentional, but a kind of glancing, less accurate one needing confirmation?
  - EarthLaunch 6y ago
    That type of approach is the way forward in UI. Maybe if we call it something silly like MLUX it will catch on sooner. Another instance of the same principle is that if an unexpected button/element appears and I click it in <30ms or whatever the fastest possible read+react time is, the click isn’t intentional and should be ignored or confirmed. This should scale over time based on user familiarity and speed. This culminates at: > as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. [HHGTG]
    - tpxl 6y ago
      Changing the way buttons behave that is completely opaque to the end user is a good way backwards. > if an unexpected button/element appears and I click it in <30ms Easily solvable by locking the buttons for a few seconds (or less).
      - EarthLaunch 6y ago
        Disadvantage there is advanced users know where the button will land and have to wait.
amenod 6y ago
I agree with you about the tradeoffs and the importance of looking at the problem from all angles, but I would argues that this is clearly the case wher aesthetics won over usability, which should _never_ happen. It should be easy to visually separate the "hang up" button from other, much less destructive and more commonly uses buttons (especially "mute"), for example with some small amount of separating space. The only reason this is not done is that it "wouldn't look balanced" and designers would be unhappy. In my experience designers are the worst people to hire for UX because they often sacrifice usability for aesthetics. Programmers fare a bit better (usable UI usually doesn't conflict with the code quality), still not perfect though. Casual users are probably best, with some education in usability of course.
- SilasX 6y ago
  Yes! A comment from a few month ago resonated with me: devs are to blame for mediocre design, designers for terrible design. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24760194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24760194
- mightybyte 6y ago
  Completely agree. And the thing I love about your comment is that even though you've found solid argument for why the OP's criticism was right, you articulate the tradeoff and explain why you think it was the wrong one. This is a dramatically more effective and compelling approach IMO. If you happen to do design work and are looking for a job, I'd love to chat and see if there are any possibilities for collaboration. If you're interested, feel free to drop me a line at my username at google's mail service.
sdevonoes 6y ago
> It's a human problem, and like most problems of this genre there is no "best" answer For this specific problem (Google Meet UX/UI) sure anyone agree with: don't put a destructive action that requires no confirmation (leaving the meeting) next to a common action (mute/unmute yourself). If designers don't get that right, sorry but they are not competent designers. It's like a programmer that, in order to "balance enormous numbers of competing constraints and concerns" decides to not escape user-provided HTML in the frontend. Well, that programmer is not a competent one.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  Another classic case of this is your car's "key fob" buttons. You usually have three functions on three similarly sized buttons right next to each other: lock doors, unlock doors, and... SOUND THE DEAFENING ALARM. Really? Can anyone spot the one that doesn't belong next to the others?
  - frosted-flakes 6y ago
    On my key fob the alarm button is small, red, and inset into the side, and it requires a lot more force to push. I've never pushed it accidentally. On the face are Lock/Open trunk/Unlock, but it's not obvious that you have to hold the trunk button for two seconds for it to work (this is probably because you have to manually re-latch the trunk if you unlock it).
- statstutor 6y ago
  > next to a common action (mute/unmute yourself) I agree with this point, but if the designer had a phone call in mind (with a pre-pandemic mindset), then the design feels more reasonable. In a one-on-one call, 'mute' is much closer in intent to 'hang up' - i.e. I am not currently participating in this call.
hbosch 6y ago
> 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. To underline this point, I think in general design suffers from a lot of bikeshedding at tech companies. There are likely many designs tucked away in discarded files that addressed this specific pain point, too, but were discarded at the request of some PM, or manager, or director. Then there's the process of user testing and experiment design that is used to validate UI/UX of products like this. This design may have actually tested well even if it wasn't the team's favorite... I've worked places where that data is used to override a designer's opinion. Now apart from all that of course, Occam's razor probably applies as well I guess... perhaps this bit of UI was just poorly designed. But I see a lot of chatter on HN regularly about design being superfluous, subversive, unintuitive, "bad" when really I think many (most?) designers are unhappy with the designs that ship out as well.
mxcrossb 6y ago
I think the trade off here is that if you don’t put the end meeting button there, users will get frustrated because they can’t find the end meeting button.

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.

danielbarla 6y ago
I've often wondered why this kind of confirmation couldn't be conditional on the confidence that the click / touch was intentional? As an example, my favourite pet peeve was using Visual Studio with old-school, upfront locking source control (like TFS), and then accidentally drag and dropping a file or folder due to lag in remote desktop, or a failing mouse which sent two click events in 1 ms or something. VS duly pre-emptively locks the 10k files in the folder you just dragged, and begins a 5 minute operation you'll have to somehow undo later, even though it should be fairly obvious from the click events that it was non-intentional. Going back to the meeting example, surely solid, accurate taps in the center of the hang-up icon could be taken as intentional, but a kind of glancing, less accurate one needing confirmation?
- EarthLaunch 6y ago
  That type of approach is the way forward in UI. Maybe if we call it something silly like MLUX it will catch on sooner. Another instance of the same principle is that if an unexpected button/element appears and I click it in <30ms or whatever the fastest possible read+react time is, the click isn’t intentional and should be ignored or confirmed. This should scale over time based on user familiarity and speed. This culminates at: > as the technology became more sophisticated the controls were made touch-sensitive - you merely had to brush the panels with your fingers; now all you had to do was wave your hand in the general direction of the components and hope. [HHGTG]
  - tpxl 6y ago
    Changing the way buttons behave that is completely opaque to the end user is a good way backwards. > if an unexpected button/element appears and I click it in <30ms Easily solvable by locking the buttons for a few seconds (or less).
    - EarthLaunch 6y ago
      Disadvantage there is advanced users know where the button will land and have to wait.

amenod 6y ago

I agree with you about the tradeoffs and the importance of looking at the problem from all angles, but I would argues that this is clearly the case wher aesthetics won over usability, which should _never_ happen. It should be easy to visually separate the "hang up" button from other, much less destructive and more commonly uses buttons (especially "mute"), for example with some small amount of separating space. The only reason this is not done is that it "wouldn't look balanced" and designers would be unhappy. In my experience designers are the worst people to hire for UX because they often sacrifice usability for aesthetics. Programmers fare a bit better (usable UI usually doesn't conflict with the code quality), still not perfect though. Casual users are probably best, with some education in usability of course.

SilasX 6y ago
Yes! A comment from a few month ago resonated with me: devs are to blame for mediocre design, designers for terrible design. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24760194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24760194
mightybyte 6y ago
Completely agree. And the thing I love about your comment is that even though you've found solid argument for why the OP's criticism was right, you articulate the tradeoff and explain why you think it was the wrong one. This is a dramatically more effective and compelling approach IMO. If you happen to do design work and are looking for a job, I'd love to chat and see if there are any possibilities for collaboration. If you're interested, feel free to drop me a line at my username at google's mail service.

sdevonoes 6y ago

> It's a human problem, and like most problems of this genre there is no "best" answer For this specific problem (Google Meet UX/UI) sure anyone agree with: don't put a destructive action that requires no confirmation (leaving the meeting) next to a common action (mute/unmute yourself). If designers don't get that right, sorry but they are not competent designers. It's like a programmer that, in order to "balance enormous numbers of competing constraints and concerns" decides to not escape user-provided HTML in the frontend. Well, that programmer is not a competent one.

ryandrake 6y ago
Another classic case of this is your car's "key fob" buttons. You usually have three functions on three similarly sized buttons right next to each other: lock doors, unlock doors, and... SOUND THE DEAFENING ALARM. Really? Can anyone spot the one that doesn't belong next to the others?
- frosted-flakes 6y ago
  On my key fob the alarm button is small, red, and inset into the side, and it requires a lot more force to push. I've never pushed it accidentally. On the face are Lock/Open trunk/Unlock, but it's not obvious that you have to hold the trunk button for two seconds for it to work (this is probably because you have to manually re-latch the trunk if you unlock it).
statstutor 6y ago
> next to a common action (mute/unmute yourself) I agree with this point, but if the designer had a phone call in mind (with a pre-pandemic mindset), then the design feels more reasonable. In a one-on-one call, 'mute' is much closer in intent to 'hang up' - i.e. I am not currently participating in this call.

hbosch 6y ago

> 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. To underline this point, I think in general design suffers from a lot of bikeshedding at tech companies. There are likely many designs tucked away in discarded files that addressed this specific pain point, too, but were discarded at the request of some PM, or manager, or director. Then there's the process of user testing and experiment design that is used to validate UI/UX of products like this. This design may have actually tested well even if it wasn't the team's favorite... I've worked places where that data is used to override a designer's opinion. Now apart from all that of course, Occam's razor probably applies as well I guess... perhaps this bit of UI was just poorly designed. But I see a lot of chatter on HN regularly about design being superfluous, subversive, unintuitive, "bad" when really I think many (most?) designers are unhappy with the designs that ship out as well.

mxcrossb 6y ago

I think the trade off here is that if you don’t put the end meeting button there, users will get frustrated because they can’t find the end meeting button.