14 ms·

I really miss a consistent user experience. A core idea that I as a user can rely on to predict how a new app will work. I was in awe when I discovered as a kid

by Flow 5y ago

I really miss a consistent user experience. A core idea that I as a user can rely on to predict how a new app will work. I was in awe when I discovered as a kid that user interface were a research area. Things like Fitt's Law and so on. It was not just opinion. Today I get the feeling it's mostly just opinion. Either the designer's opinion or the wish to copy the look of something. Whenever I see a hamburger menu I silently think "Here someone has given up". And there are a lot of behaviors that are not functioning well. Is something a button? Should I click it or double-click it? How about long-press on it? How can I know when there's no visual clues? Things like "Hide cursor while typing" in Windows. It has not worked properly for decades and today only work in some super old apps like Notepad. Another thing is type-ahead. I remember in classic MacOS, people pressed shortcuts and started to type the filename or whatever. It was all perfectly recorded and replayed. In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow. I feel confused and disrespected as a user every day and I've been using WIMP graphical user interfaces since 1986. Sure, computers do more today, but there's less consideration of almost everything.

nojs 5y ago
> Whenever I see a hamburger menu I silently think "Here someone has given up" Can you explain what you don’t like about hamburger menus?
- toxik 5y ago
  It is the “etc” of UI design. It’s a cop out most of the time.
- happymellon 5y ago
  Is a dumpster of features, you have no idea what you'll find in there. Has someone hidden the zoom buttons in there? How about print? Perhaps that's also where save is, or tab colour? Most things in the hamburger menu are completely unrelated but exist for the removal of context. Button outlines so you have no idea what you can and cannot click on as well, which is mentioned in the fine article, are all modern design patterns. Looks over functionality. Hamburger menu is just peak modern menus. Lazy.
  - rezonant 5y ago
    So on desktop applications, I assume you prefer all your functions to be on toolbars, and you have similar disdain whenever you encounter a File menu? I guess if there's a lot of functions, you probably need some tabs on your toolbar- so the Office Ribbon interface is idyllic I assume?
    - eqvinox 5y ago
      The difference between a file menu and an hamburger icon is that the file menu hides file operations while the hamburger icon hides… anything. something. dead bodies.
      - rezonant 5y ago
        Almost every desktop application has a File menu whether or not it deals with files. The File menu has an "Exit" item. Does it Exit the File? OBS has "Always on Top" as an option within "File". Or we can look at it from the other side. "Where do I find the settings for this app?". Is it in File, Edit, View, Tools or Help. The answer depends on the app. Menus can be well organized or poorly organized but I don't think we should be banishing menus. The hamburger icon is just an iconic, space efficient way to say "menu"
        heisenzombie 5y ago
        There are guidelines for what should be in menu bars, what order the items should be in, and how they should behave for different sorts of application. For example, on Mac: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/menus/menu-bar-menus/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... And on Windows: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/cmd-menus https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/cmd-m... > "Where do I find the settings for this app?". Is it in File, Edit, View, Tools or Help? On Mac, it should be in the "App" menu and called "Preferences...", it should be the first item in the menu, except if you have an "About YourAppName" item which always goes at the top with a seperator underneath. On Windows, it should be in the "Tools" menu, and called "Options...". 4 On Linux, it should be under the "Edit" menu, and called "Preferences". If it's not, then the app (in my opinion) is broken. Of course, many apps are lazily ported across platforms or "hamburgerized". The Windows situation is obviously also more messy because of the newer "ribbon" standards complicating things a bit, but there are right answers. (edit: fixed links)
- eitland 5y ago
  It is just a menu. But instead of being an ordinary honest menu where half the items has their defined places on each OS and the rest can be found easily it is a jumbled mess. And since there are no standards as for where to put things in a hamburger menu they can move around between each release of the application. And the only reason to use it instead of an honest menu is because Chrome does it so therefore it must be a good idea. Period. It is somewhat ironic that even as desktop screens get larger and larger applications has to "maximize real screen estate" by removing menus, while simultaneously working to remove real screen space improvements like the option of Tree Style Tabs on Firefox (yes, it kind of works and it is still awesome but it get harder and harder by the year).
- jug 5y ago
  Isn’t it because it’s the “Misc” counterpart to the preferences tabs?
spoils19 5y ago
> I feel confused and disrespected as a user every day I definitely agree with this, and I like your use of the word disrespect. I think the younger generation has encroached onto the sanctity of "the platform", if you will, and now us old timers are suffering. I time myself for my actions every day since I started noticing these despicable UI trends, and on average I waste about 2-3 hours a week trying to discover what behaviors work with flat UI applications. But, take a natively designed application from Windows 2000, and it's extremely easy to understand and use! And, dare I say it, more pleasing to the eye than flashy, animated graphics of today.
- AnonCoward4 5y ago
  > But, take a natively designed application from Windows 2000, and it's extremely easy to understand and use! And, dare I say it, more pleasing to the eye than flashy, animated graphics of today. Coming from that era, I strongly disagree. While I agree with the article, that some elements are harder to spot as interactable, I would still say that they are way more coherent than programs from W2K era and that one just got used to the broken design of the UIs of that era/platform. While usually understanding the UI even in W2K, I don't think that the dumbing down of UI (and reducing palette/layers adds to that) for the dumb users is necessarily a bad thing. At the end of the day I am also a dumb user. Actually using GTK3 for a while now and moving to GTK4 however might also trick me to not notice a downgrade in discoverability, so in that particular instance I might get tricked by getting used to a certain design language even if they simplify it to the point of actually decreasing UX for users that are unfamiliar with GTK compared to GTK3.
  - ephbit 5y ago
    > While I agree with the article, that some elements are harder to spot as interactable, I would still say that they are way more coherent than programs from W2K era ... Maybe that's the thing. More coherence might be nicer, yes. But it might also not make UIs easier to use. Maybe sqeezing apps into a tight framework of UI coherence, makes the overall appearance of what's on the screen more appealing but at the same time loose usability. Think of special applications like technical ones (Blender) or office (Thunderbird, LibreOffice) and also simple ones like a notepad application. Now try to find a common set of UI elements to use for all of them. What you'll probably get, is an OK notepad but a disturbingly bloated Blender. TLDR Niceness does IMO conflict with usability and the former sure shouldn't be prioritized over the latter.
linguae 5y ago
I feel the same way. It's like we're back to the MS-DOS era where every application had its own interface and you had to learn each application's way of performing tasks. macOS and to a lesser extent Windows prided themselves on consistency across applications. But this required developers to voluntarily conform to those platform's guidelines, and in the case of Windows, the goal of consistency was challenged by (1) Windows' backwards compatibility and (2) Microsoft's own disregard for consistency at times, such as Microsoft Office using its own UI toolkit instead of relying on the UI elements of the version of Windows Office is running on (for example, Office 97 introduced flat toolbars, a different style of menu bar, and the Tahoma font, which deviated from Windows 95/NT 4 and its button-style toolbars and its use of MS Sans Serif); this theme even carried over to Windows NT 3.51 where Office's UI was out of place; see http://toastytech.com/guis/nt351word.png http://toastytech.com/guis/nt351word.png for a screenshot). Contrast that with the Web, where there are no common UI/UX guidelines. Sadly this philosophy has spread to the desktop, where increasingly each application seems to have its own UI/UX without regard for the platform's guidelines. There is one good thing I could think of about the loss of consistency across applications: the underlying operating system matters less when the application works the same across platforms. Ironically this may help with the adoption of desktop Linux; Chrome, Slack, Zoom, and VSCode generally work the same. To paraphrase, this fulfills Netscape's vision in the mid-1990's of reducing the operating system to a bunch of device drivers. One would think that Microsoft and Apple don't want Windows and macOS to be reduced to a bunch of device drivers. Then again, perhaps Microsoft's and Apple's business models don't require the long-time maintenance of these desktop-oriented operating systems. Microsoft makes a lot of money from Office and Azure, and Apple makes a lot more money from the iOS platform than from the Mac. Still, I personally lament the rise and triumph of the siloed app, and the decline of platforms that promoted UI/UX consistency through a set of standard human interface guidelines, and I feel personal computing is generally getting worse instead of better.
- hulitu 5y ago
  If you look at Windows 1.0 GUI and Windows 10 UI they look verry similar. Makes you think what Microsoft was doing all these years.
ehnto 5y ago
Part of the discussion is that user interface is now a conduit for branding, probably the major conduit for software focused companies. You can't have consistent UI branding across devices unless you replace the UI to suit your branding. So rather than user interface being refined over the years into a consistent usable tool for each platform, by people specifically interested in UI and the paradigms of that platform, it's re-implemented year-over-year, with UX playing second fiddle to branding and design.
lelanthran 5y ago
> And there are a lot of behaviors that are not functioning well. The worst of which are dropdowns, lists or menus that inserts new items right over where your mouse is so that you accidentally click on the wrong thing. All browsers do this for the dropdown that appears when typing in the URL bar. I type a few letters, see the site I want is 3 down in the dropdown, hit the down arrow three times and press enter, only to find that the item changed as I was hitting the down arrow. And don't get me started on user elements that have a new position in the menu system for every release, if they even have a decent menu system.
- mjevans 5y ago
  That is the worst thing. Updating a UI while the user is interacting with it. Everything that reaches the screen should remain FIXED in place unless moved //by the user//. This might happen E.G. because something was loading and now gets a resize event; so some list suddenly changes the position of everything rather than force the user to click something else to resize the misbehaving entry. (Scrolling could also do this, if it's based on a distinct UI element that is not 'activate the list'.) I think of this frequently when I interact with bad offenders, Like Waze on my phone. I have like 2 addresses starred in addition to the home and work slots. It should PIN those, in a fixed (probably alphabetical) order under the home and work slots. If it's not going to do that for starred items (maybe I have 300 addresses?) it should give me a different widget to pin them.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    I would add that adding to an end of a list dynamically can be okay (if it doesn’t cause previous content to jump as you mention).
    - mjevans 5y ago
      It's less egregious, but remember that clicking away from the list (e.g. to close it) is also often an input option. Even though that's a lower input priority it could still disrespect the user's desires if they were trying to leave the list.
porker 5y ago
> In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow. On Win10 I'm getting regular delays in keypresses and just enough lag when typing to be noticeable. I've been trying plugging in two USB keyboards as a poor man's split keyboard, and the amount of software (looking at you IntelliJ in particular) that does something that means the characters arrive out of order when typing is hugely frustrating.
- sgt 5y ago
  Delays on keypresses.. in 2022. Are we going backwards?!
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    No, forward. Because the delay is probably because all of the telemetry and tracking, that has to be activated and synced with the servers, before it can responds to your request. All that amazing technology, unthinkable 20 years ago. So definitely forward to big brother Panopticon.
  - cornel_io 5y ago
    IntelliJ is really bad about this sometimes. I get that their software does an incredible amount of really tough stuff behind the scenes (which is why I won't be switching any time soon), but God I wish they prioritized input responsiveness over everything else.
    - peebeebee 5y ago
      Haha, I love the “My IDE is so sluggish, it must be doing important stuff”. It really isn’t. IntelliJ is just horribly laggish. VSCode, an electron (!) app with 100 plugins isn’t even that slow.
      - ratww 5y ago
        Yes. Even if it were doing important stuff, this "important stuff" shouldn't be affecting typing. We have multicore machines now, there's no excuse anymore. Imagine if it were the opposite, and moving the mouse or speaking into a microphone caused the compilation to fail in subtle ways. Well, background compilation/typechecking/whatever is messing with user interaction.
fho 5y ago
> In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses This does not seem to be the case, is it? I recently, accidentally hit Win+term+Enter into a Windows VM (intending it to hit the Linux host machine) and was surprised when a terminal popped up.
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  If it's some kind of timing/performance/hardware interface issue, it's quite possible different machines will act differently.
  - Moru 5y ago
    It might also be working today but not tomorrow, then you accidentally start "Archies terminologies dictionary" as a websearch instead.
    - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
      Just call it fuzzy search and now it's a feature.
    - fho 5y ago
      This actually has happened to me on Gnome several times ;-)
k8sToGo 5y ago
Notepad is not old anymore because it has been recently replaced.
- hulitu 5y ago
  > Notepad is not old anymore because it has been recently replaced. They said the same thing about my parents dog which died last year.
  - InCityDreams 5y ago
    "Notepad", cool name for a dog.
Derbasti 5y ago
> In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow. The worst offender is the login prompt. In Gnome, from the lock screen, I simply start typing my password. As soon as I type the first letter of the password, the password prompt appears, and when I'm done I hit enter and it unlocks. On Windows, the first letter merely makes the prompt appear, but does not yet type into the prompt. In fact, it will only start feeding letters into the prompt once the little prompt-appearing-animation has finished. If I just start typing my password, it will eat the first three or four letters. So I hit enter, wait for the animation to finish, and only then start typing. That's not the end of the world, honestly. But it is a learned gesture that the system taught me by failing to do what I'd asked it to do. It just goes to show the attention to detail that makes a UI feel fluid and frictionless.
- hulitu 5y ago
  Win 10 tought me to type again at least CTRL+ALT if i want my password to be accepted from the first time. Clicking with the mouse sometimes works before entering the password. It seems that at MS and also in other areas (Android, Gnome) people want just to code new things but not debug or fix bugs. They also must be as simple as possible because: 1. code reuse sucks. 2. Thinking is hard.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  That is one of the main reasons why I switched from XCode to CLion. XCode lost keystrokes, which drove me crazy. The other thing was that I could reliably type faster than XCode could display the letters, which made me feel like I'm drunk. CLion seems to be quite excellent at recording and replaying everything, including stuff I type while the auto-completion is loading. Plus it has a really fast key to screen loop.
  - natdempk 5y ago
    All of the Jetbrains editors also have these bugs in some places too unfortunately. The main one I run into is when you open the fuzzy goto modal (CMD + O) there’s a delay before the window opens where if you paste/type anything it goes into the file you’re editing instead of the search box. It’s been like this for at least 5 years.
wolpoli 5y ago
> In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow. Every time I bump into these interaction issues, my stomach churns a little bit. Right now, Windows 11 is especially bad because they have new and old code working side by side. It'll take a few years for Microsoft to rewrite enough of the Shell so everything will be consistent again.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  By then Microsoft will have moved on to the next bit of Apple envy and it will all be out of sync again.
  - WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
    Windows 11 looks like KDE envy tbh
  - thomastjeffery 5y ago
    Windows 11 is that next bit. They never finished windows 10. I still have to dig through windows 7's control panel to change my microphone volume.
gurkendoktor 5y ago
> Things like Fitt's Law and so on. It was not just opinion. Here's another one: "users were roughly 37% faster at finding items when visual indicators varied both in color and icon compared to text alone" Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/visual-indicators-differentiators/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/visual-indicators-different... The whole point of the settings app shown in the OP's screenshots is to quickly find the relevant section in the sidebar. But even before the great design madness of 2012, designers have started to remove icon colors everywhere. (Except for app icons, where Google and Apple have now removed shapes instead, sigh.) From the sidelines, it doesn't look like the trend is reversing in GNOME land. https://twitter.com/hadessuk/status/1506316793413087241 https://twitter.com/hadessuk/status/1506316793413087241
- tauntz 5y ago
  > "users were roughly 37% faster at finding items when visual indicators varied both in color and icon compared to text alone" Reminds me of https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/927/386/c4d.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/927/386/c4d...
fxtentacle 5y ago
I still remember the good old days where keyboards had Function keys and apps would prominently display a F2 next to the save button, an F10 next to quit. Even for computer illiterate people, that made using keyboard shortcuts a bliss. Save was ALWAYS on F2 no matter what you did, so people would put physical stickers on their keyboard to make the F2 button say "Save" on the keycap.
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  What system was this? I've used every version of Windows (literally), DOS since the 80s, Macs since the 90s, Linux since the 90s, Atari ST, and several different 8-bit micros and I don't recall ever using F2 to save. I do believe your anecdote but it's completely escaped me what platform might have used F2. Also worth noting that keyboards do still have function keys. In fact I use F2 as my `tmux` control prefix. :)
  - dspillett 5y ago
    I remember F2 being save in the DOS era, or maybe I'm misremembering and it was F3... But for many years I've associated F2 with edit or rename.
    - hnlmorg 5y ago
      I do remember when ctrl+shift+insert was common for paste (rather than ctrl+v). I can't remember off hand was copy was beyond it being a similar key combination. Still trips me up these days using cmd instead of ctrl on macs.
      - dspillett 5y ago
        ctrl+insert for copy and shift+insert for paste are still a thing in the majority of places in Windows, though I think only the ancients like me use them (people newer to the game being taught ctrl+C & ctrl+V from the start). Not long ago I even spotted it being usable in an app that blocked ctrl+C/ctrl+V.
  - 5y ago
bajsejohannes 5y ago
> Another thing is type-ahead. I remember in classic MacOS, people pressed shortcuts and started to type the filename or whatever. It was all perfectly recorded and replayed. In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow. The arguably worst offender in MacOS these days is the emoji picker. Press ctrl+cmd+space, and depending on how recently you opened it, it can take some hundreds of milliseconds to open (on an m1). All while eating your keypresses.
- Aeolos 5y ago
  Yes, this one is particularly weird. How can a grid of unicode characters take 500-1000ms to display on a machine with an m1, 16GB of memory and a blazing fast NVME disk?
- armagon 5y ago
  Huh. I didn't know this existed.
dm319 5y ago
Goodness the start bar on Windows. For something that is meant to be a key part of both the mouse and the keyboard workflow, how can it be so slow? My work computers can hang for so long on it, that it is quicker to find the application shortcut on the desktop.
- hulitu 5y ago
  Maybe because telemetry :).
- donatzsky 5y ago
  I believe it's not really an integrated part of the Explorer shell anymore, but rather a separate process that gets launched every time you open the start menu.
  - coffeeking 5y ago
    Yes, there are separate processes, however a new instance is not started each time you open it - the same window is re-shown. Taskbar: explorer.exe Start menu: StartMenuExperienceHost.exe Searching: SearchApp.exe So, when you hit a key with the start menu focused, it closes the start menu and opens the search window (with the search text initialised with that key). Perhaps keystrokes are lost during the switch.
- dspillett 5y ago
  > how can it be so slow? Because it is trying to be all things to all people: including supporting sponsored content and integrating with any fancy new/copied idea that the company is pushing (which may be quietly deprecated in the next major revision, but the hooks left adding abstraction load to everything else so that the few who actually found it useful don't complain).
  - totalkrill 5y ago
    Just you wait until they want to be able to run apps inside of it. Because they probably will want to do that. Unfortunately
DrBazza 5y ago
> Is something a button? Should I click it or double-click it? How about long-press on it? How can I know when there's no visual clues? Since Windows 7 (or 8, I can't remember) and the "Metro" style apps, in the Control Panel in particular one of the controls (IIRC it was something like the 'show/hide icons in task tray'), that was previously a button, became a "hyperlink", essentially clickable text. Clickable text that was the same colour as unclickable text. What. The. **
geon 5y ago
When swiping between fullscreen windows, Macos sends the keystrokes to the last window until the animation has completed. The ”g” of all my git commands ends up in vs code if I’m too quick. Very annoying.
hn_version_0023 5y ago
This reminds me of one of my personal bugaboos, which seems especially bad in Microsoft Windows: windows that spawn child windows that require input focus, but that don’t grab focus leaving you typing into nothing at all! Truly its crazy making.
- drdec 5y ago
  IMHO, a worse practice is when you are happily typing along and the system throws up a dialog randomly, grabbing the focus and thereby "pressing" one of the buttons when you thought you were typing. Who knows what you just agreed to.
  - account42 5y ago
    I'm glad that KDE has options to prevent that: https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kwin/kcontrol/windowbehaviour/index.html#action-focus-focusstealin https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kwin/kcontrol/windowbehaviour... Generally if you were interacting with the computer then whatever new thing should get focus iff its appearance was a direct result of your current interaction.
marcus_holmes 5y ago
I would love it if we could all just decide on a single WIMP interface and stick to that. I understand that this would annoy designers. But they're annoying me so I think this is fair. My go-to example at the moment is Figma, which is a design tool that I find almost impossible to use because it has so many hidden, unexplained "features" in its UI. If I accidentally brush the keyboard I have to quit the application and restart because I have no idea how to get back to the state I was in.
lkxijlewlf 5y ago
Used to be they had time to get UI better. Now, if you have the same UI for 6 months people think you've stalled and start looking for new. Everything has to be constant churn, constant change. Far too many people today get bored way too easily.
marwis 5y ago
Indeed Windows sucks but PowerToys has a much faster launcher replacement on alt+space
thrower123 5y ago
> today only work in some super old apps like Notepad. Old applications that actually follow the platform UX and accessibility guidelines

by Flow 5y ago

nojs 5y ago

> Whenever I see a hamburger menu I silently think "Here someone has given up" Can you explain what you don’t like about hamburger menus?

toxik 5y ago
It is the “etc” of UI design. It’s a cop out most of the time.
happymellon 5y ago
Is a dumpster of features, you have no idea what you'll find in there. Has someone hidden the zoom buttons in there? How about print? Perhaps that's also where save is, or tab colour? Most things in the hamburger menu are completely unrelated but exist for the removal of context. Button outlines so you have no idea what you can and cannot click on as well, which is mentioned in the fine article, are all modern design patterns. Looks over functionality. Hamburger menu is just peak modern menus. Lazy.
- rezonant 5y ago
  So on desktop applications, I assume you prefer all your functions to be on toolbars, and you have similar disdain whenever you encounter a File menu? I guess if there's a lot of functions, you probably need some tabs on your toolbar- so the Office Ribbon interface is idyllic I assume?
  - eqvinox 5y ago
    The difference between a file menu and an hamburger icon is that the file menu hides file operations while the hamburger icon hides… anything. something. dead bodies.
    - rezonant 5y ago
      Almost every desktop application has a File menu whether or not it deals with files. The File menu has an "Exit" item. Does it Exit the File? OBS has "Always on Top" as an option within "File". Or we can look at it from the other side. "Where do I find the settings for this app?". Is it in File, Edit, View, Tools or Help. The answer depends on the app. Menus can be well organized or poorly organized but I don't think we should be banishing menus. The hamburger icon is just an iconic, space efficient way to say "menu"
      - heisenzombie 5y ago
        There are guidelines for what should be in menu bars, what order the items should be in, and how they should behave for different sorts of application. For example, on Mac: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/menus/menu-bar-menus/ https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline... And on Windows: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/cmd-menus https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/uxguide/cmd-m... > "Where do I find the settings for this app?". Is it in File, Edit, View, Tools or Help? On Mac, it should be in the "App" menu and called "Preferences...", it should be the first item in the menu, except if you have an "About YourAppName" item which always goes at the top with a seperator underneath. On Windows, it should be in the "Tools" menu, and called "Options...". 4 On Linux, it should be under the "Edit" menu, and called "Preferences". If it's not, then the app (in my opinion) is broken. Of course, many apps are lazily ported across platforms or "hamburgerized". The Windows situation is obviously also more messy because of the newer "ribbon" standards complicating things a bit, but there are right answers. (edit: fixed links)
eitland 5y ago
It is just a menu. But instead of being an ordinary honest menu where half the items has their defined places on each OS and the rest can be found easily it is a jumbled mess. And since there are no standards as for where to put things in a hamburger menu they can move around between each release of the application. And the only reason to use it instead of an honest menu is because Chrome does it so therefore it must be a good idea. Period. It is somewhat ironic that even as desktop screens get larger and larger applications has to "maximize real screen estate" by removing menus, while simultaneously working to remove real screen space improvements like the option of Tree Style Tabs on Firefox (yes, it kind of works and it is still awesome but it get harder and harder by the year).
jug 5y ago
Isn’t it because it’s the “Misc” counterpart to the preferences tabs?

spoils19 5y ago

> I feel confused and disrespected as a user every day I definitely agree with this, and I like your use of the word disrespect. I think the younger generation has encroached onto the sanctity of "the platform", if you will, and now us old timers are suffering. I time myself for my actions every day since I started noticing these despicable UI trends, and on average I waste about 2-3 hours a week trying to discover what behaviors work with flat UI applications. But, take a natively designed application from Windows 2000, and it's extremely easy to understand and use! And, dare I say it, more pleasing to the eye than flashy, animated graphics of today.

AnonCoward4 5y ago
> But, take a natively designed application from Windows 2000, and it's extremely easy to understand and use! And, dare I say it, more pleasing to the eye than flashy, animated graphics of today. Coming from that era, I strongly disagree. While I agree with the article, that some elements are harder to spot as interactable, I would still say that they are way more coherent than programs from W2K era and that one just got used to the broken design of the UIs of that era/platform. While usually understanding the UI even in W2K, I don't think that the dumbing down of UI (and reducing palette/layers adds to that) for the dumb users is necessarily a bad thing. At the end of the day I am also a dumb user. Actually using GTK3 for a while now and moving to GTK4 however might also trick me to not notice a downgrade in discoverability, so in that particular instance I might get tricked by getting used to a certain design language even if they simplify it to the point of actually decreasing UX for users that are unfamiliar with GTK compared to GTK3.
- ephbit 5y ago
  > While I agree with the article, that some elements are harder to spot as interactable, I would still say that they are way more coherent than programs from W2K era ... Maybe that's the thing. More coherence might be nicer, yes. But it might also not make UIs easier to use. Maybe sqeezing apps into a tight framework of UI coherence, makes the overall appearance of what's on the screen more appealing but at the same time loose usability. Think of special applications like technical ones (Blender) or office (Thunderbird, LibreOffice) and also simple ones like a notepad application. Now try to find a common set of UI elements to use for all of them. What you'll probably get, is an OK notepad but a disturbingly bloated Blender. TLDR Niceness does IMO conflict with usability and the former sure shouldn't be prioritized over the latter.

linguae 5y ago

I feel the same way. It's like we're back to the MS-DOS era where every application had its own interface and you had to learn each application's way of performing tasks. macOS and to a lesser extent Windows prided themselves on consistency across applications. But this required developers to voluntarily conform to those platform's guidelines, and in the case of Windows, the goal of consistency was challenged by (1) Windows' backwards compatibility and (2) Microsoft's own disregard for consistency at times, such as Microsoft Office using its own UI toolkit instead of relying on the UI elements of the version of Windows Office is running on (for example, Office 97 introduced flat toolbars, a different style of menu bar, and the Tahoma font, which deviated from Windows 95/NT 4 and its button-style toolbars and its use of MS Sans Serif); this theme even carried over to Windows NT 3.51 where Office's UI was out of place; see http://toastytech.com/guis/nt351word.png http://toastytech.com/guis/nt351word.png for a screenshot). Contrast that with the Web, where there are no common UI/UX guidelines. Sadly this philosophy has spread to the desktop, where increasingly each application seems to have its own UI/UX without regard for the platform's guidelines. There is one good thing I could think of about the loss of consistency across applications: the underlying operating system matters less when the application works the same across platforms. Ironically this may help with the adoption of desktop Linux; Chrome, Slack, Zoom, and VSCode generally work the same. To paraphrase, this fulfills Netscape's vision in the mid-1990's of reducing the operating system to a bunch of device drivers. One would think that Microsoft and Apple don't want Windows and macOS to be reduced to a bunch of device drivers. Then again, perhaps Microsoft's and Apple's business models don't require the long-time maintenance of these desktop-oriented operating systems. Microsoft makes a lot of money from Office and Azure, and Apple makes a lot more money from the iOS platform than from the Mac. Still, I personally lament the rise and triumph of the siloed app, and the decline of platforms that promoted UI/UX consistency through a set of standard human interface guidelines, and I feel personal computing is generally getting worse instead of better.

hulitu 5y ago
If you look at Windows 1.0 GUI and Windows 10 UI they look verry similar. Makes you think what Microsoft was doing all these years.

ehnto 5y ago

Part of the discussion is that user interface is now a conduit for branding, probably the major conduit for software focused companies. You can't have consistent UI branding across devices unless you replace the UI to suit your branding. So rather than user interface being refined over the years into a consistent usable tool for each platform, by people specifically interested in UI and the paradigms of that platform, it's re-implemented year-over-year, with UX playing second fiddle to branding and design.

lelanthran 5y ago

> And there are a lot of behaviors that are not functioning well. The worst of which are dropdowns, lists or menus that inserts new items right over where your mouse is so that you accidentally click on the wrong thing. All browsers do this for the dropdown that appears when typing in the URL bar. I type a few letters, see the site I want is 3 down in the dropdown, hit the down arrow three times and press enter, only to find that the item changed as I was hitting the down arrow. And don't get me started on user elements that have a new position in the menu system for every release, if they even have a decent menu system.

mjevans 5y ago
That is the worst thing. Updating a UI while the user is interacting with it. Everything that reaches the screen should remain FIXED in place unless moved //by the user//. This might happen E.G. because something was loading and now gets a resize event; so some list suddenly changes the position of everything rather than force the user to click something else to resize the misbehaving entry. (Scrolling could also do this, if it's based on a distinct UI element that is not 'activate the list'.) I think of this frequently when I interact with bad offenders, Like Waze on my phone. I have like 2 addresses starred in addition to the home and work slots. It should PIN those, in a fixed (probably alphabetical) order under the home and work slots. If it's not going to do that for starred items (maybe I have 300 addresses?) it should give me a different widget to pin them.
- kaba0 5y ago
  I would add that adding to an end of a list dynamically can be okay (if it doesn’t cause previous content to jump as you mention).
  - mjevans 5y ago
    It's less egregious, but remember that clicking away from the list (e.g. to close it) is also often an input option. Even though that's a lower input priority it could still disrespect the user's desires if they were trying to leave the list.

porker 5y ago

> In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow. On Win10 I'm getting regular delays in keypresses and just enough lag when typing to be noticeable. I've been trying plugging in two USB keyboards as a poor man's split keyboard, and the amount of software (looking at you IntelliJ in particular) that does something that means the characters arrive out of order when typing is hugely frustrating.

sgt 5y ago
Delays on keypresses.. in 2022. Are we going backwards?!
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  No, forward. Because the delay is probably because all of the telemetry and tracking, that has to be activated and synced with the servers, before it can responds to your request. All that amazing technology, unthinkable 20 years ago. So definitely forward to big brother Panopticon.
- cornel_io 5y ago
  IntelliJ is really bad about this sometimes. I get that their software does an incredible amount of really tough stuff behind the scenes (which is why I won't be switching any time soon), but God I wish they prioritized input responsiveness over everything else.
  - peebeebee 5y ago
    Haha, I love the “My IDE is so sluggish, it must be doing important stuff”. It really isn’t. IntelliJ is just horribly laggish. VSCode, an electron (!) app with 100 plugins isn’t even that slow.
    - ratww 5y ago
      Yes. Even if it were doing important stuff, this "important stuff" shouldn't be affecting typing. We have multicore machines now, there's no excuse anymore. Imagine if it were the opposite, and moving the mouse or speaking into a microphone caused the compilation to fail in subtle ways. Well, background compilation/typechecking/whatever is messing with user interaction.

fho 5y ago

> In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses This does not seem to be the case, is it? I recently, accidentally hit Win+term+Enter into a Windows VM (intending it to hit the Linux host machine) and was surprised when a terminal popped up.

adhesive_wombat 5y ago
If it's some kind of timing/performance/hardware interface issue, it's quite possible different machines will act differently.
- Moru 5y ago
  It might also be working today but not tomorrow, then you accidentally start "Archies terminologies dictionary" as a websearch instead.
  - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
    Just call it fuzzy search and now it's a feature.
  - fho 5y ago
    This actually has happened to me on Gnome several times ;-)

k8sToGo 5y ago

Notepad is not old anymore because it has been recently replaced.

hulitu 5y ago
> Notepad is not old anymore because it has been recently replaced. They said the same thing about my parents dog which died last year.
- InCityDreams 5y ago
  "Notepad", cool name for a dog.

Derbasti 5y ago

> In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow. The worst offender is the login prompt. In Gnome, from the lock screen, I simply start typing my password. As soon as I type the first letter of the password, the password prompt appears, and when I'm done I hit enter and it unlocks. On Windows, the first letter merely makes the prompt appear, but does not yet type into the prompt. In fact, it will only start feeding letters into the prompt once the little prompt-appearing-animation has finished. If I just start typing my password, it will eat the first three or four letters. So I hit enter, wait for the animation to finish, and only then start typing. That's not the end of the world, honestly. But it is a learned gesture that the system taught me by failing to do what I'd asked it to do. It just goes to show the attention to detail that makes a UI feel fluid and frictionless.

hulitu 5y ago
Win 10 tought me to type again at least CTRL+ALT if i want my password to be accepted from the first time. Clicking with the mouse sometimes works before entering the password. It seems that at MS and also in other areas (Android, Gnome) people want just to code new things but not debug or fix bugs. They also must be as simple as possible because: 1. code reuse sucks. 2. Thinking is hard.
fxtentacle 5y ago
That is one of the main reasons why I switched from XCode to CLion. XCode lost keystrokes, which drove me crazy. The other thing was that I could reliably type faster than XCode could display the letters, which made me feel like I'm drunk. CLion seems to be quite excellent at recording and replaying everything, including stuff I type while the auto-completion is loading. Plus it has a really fast key to screen loop.
- natdempk 5y ago
  All of the Jetbrains editors also have these bugs in some places too unfortunately. The main one I run into is when you open the fuzzy goto modal (CMD + O) there’s a delay before the window opens where if you paste/type anything it goes into the file you’re editing instead of the search box. It’s been like this for at least 5 years.

wolpoli 5y ago

> In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow. Every time I bump into these interaction issues, my stomach churns a little bit. Right now, Windows 11 is especially bad because they have new and old code working side by side. It'll take a few years for Microsoft to rewrite enough of the Shell so everything will be consistent again.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
By then Microsoft will have moved on to the next bit of Apple envy and it will all be out of sync again.
- WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
  Windows 11 looks like KDE envy tbh
- thomastjeffery 5y ago
  Windows 11 is that next bit. They never finished windows 10. I still have to dig through windows 7's control panel to change my microphone volume.

gurkendoktor 5y ago

> Things like Fitt's Law and so on. It was not just opinion. Here's another one: "users were roughly 37% faster at finding items when visual indicators varied both in color and icon compared to text alone" Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/visual-indicators-differentiators/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/visual-indicators-different... The whole point of the settings app shown in the OP's screenshots is to quickly find the relevant section in the sidebar. But even before the great design madness of 2012, designers have started to remove icon colors everywhere. (Except for app icons, where Google and Apple have now removed shapes instead, sigh.) From the sidelines, it doesn't look like the trend is reversing in GNOME land. https://twitter.com/hadessuk/status/1506316793413087241 https://twitter.com/hadessuk/status/1506316793413087241

tauntz 5y ago
> "users were roughly 37% faster at finding items when visual indicators varied both in color and icon compared to text alone" Reminds me of https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/927/386/c4d.jpg https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/927/386/c4d...

fxtentacle 5y ago

I still remember the good old days where keyboards had Function keys and apps would prominently display a F2 next to the save button, an F10 next to quit. Even for computer illiterate people, that made using keyboard shortcuts a bliss. Save was ALWAYS on F2 no matter what you did, so people would put physical stickers on their keyboard to make the F2 button say "Save" on the keycap.

hnlmorg 5y ago
What system was this? I've used every version of Windows (literally), DOS since the 80s, Macs since the 90s, Linux since the 90s, Atari ST, and several different 8-bit micros and I don't recall ever using F2 to save. I do believe your anecdote but it's completely escaped me what platform might have used F2. Also worth noting that keyboards do still have function keys. In fact I use F2 as my `tmux` control prefix. :)
- dspillett 5y ago
  I remember F2 being save in the DOS era, or maybe I'm misremembering and it was F3... But for many years I've associated F2 with edit or rename.
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    I do remember when ctrl+shift+insert was common for paste (rather than ctrl+v). I can't remember off hand was copy was beyond it being a similar key combination. Still trips me up these days using cmd instead of ctrl on macs.
    - dspillett 5y ago
      ctrl+insert for copy and shift+insert for paste are still a thing in the majority of places in Windows, though I think only the ancients like me use them (people newer to the game being taught ctrl+C & ctrl+V from the start). Not long ago I even spotted it being usable in an app that blocked ctrl+C/ctrl+V.
- 5y ago

bajsejohannes 5y ago

> Another thing is type-ahead. I remember in classic MacOS, people pressed shortcuts and started to type the filename or whatever. It was all perfectly recorded and replayed. In modern Windows, press Win-key and start to type, oops, it missed the first keypresses, presented the completely wrong results and made a mess of your workflow. The arguably worst offender in MacOS these days is the emoji picker. Press ctrl+cmd+space, and depending on how recently you opened it, it can take some hundreds of milliseconds to open (on an m1). All while eating your keypresses.

Aeolos 5y ago
Yes, this one is particularly weird. How can a grid of unicode characters take 500-1000ms to display on a machine with an m1, 16GB of memory and a blazing fast NVME disk?
armagon 5y ago
Huh. I didn't know this existed.

dm319 5y ago

Goodness the start bar on Windows. For something that is meant to be a key part of both the mouse and the keyboard workflow, how can it be so slow? My work computers can hang for so long on it, that it is quicker to find the application shortcut on the desktop.

hulitu 5y ago
Maybe because telemetry :).
donatzsky 5y ago
I believe it's not really an integrated part of the Explorer shell anymore, but rather a separate process that gets launched every time you open the start menu.
- coffeeking 5y ago
  Yes, there are separate processes, however a new instance is not started each time you open it - the same window is re-shown. Taskbar: explorer.exe Start menu: StartMenuExperienceHost.exe Searching: SearchApp.exe So, when you hit a key with the start menu focused, it closes the start menu and opens the search window (with the search text initialised with that key). Perhaps keystrokes are lost during the switch.
dspillett 5y ago
> how can it be so slow? Because it is trying to be all things to all people: including supporting sponsored content and integrating with any fancy new/copied idea that the company is pushing (which may be quietly deprecated in the next major revision, but the hooks left adding abstraction load to everything else so that the few who actually found it useful don't complain).
- totalkrill 5y ago
  Just you wait until they want to be able to run apps inside of it. Because they probably will want to do that. Unfortunately

DrBazza 5y ago

> Is something a button? Should I click it or double-click it? How about long-press on it? How can I know when there's no visual clues? Since Windows 7 (or 8, I can't remember) and the "Metro" style apps, in the Control Panel in particular one of the controls (IIRC it was something like the 'show/hide icons in task tray'), that was previously a button, became a "hyperlink", essentially clickable text. Clickable text that was the same colour as unclickable text. What. The. **

geon 5y ago

When swiping between fullscreen windows, Macos sends the keystrokes to the last window until the animation has completed. The ”g” of all my git commands ends up in vs code if I’m too quick. Very annoying.

hn_version_0023 5y ago

This reminds me of one of my personal bugaboos, which seems especially bad in Microsoft Windows: windows that spawn child windows that require input focus, but that don’t grab focus leaving you typing into nothing at all! Truly its crazy making.

drdec 5y ago
IMHO, a worse practice is when you are happily typing along and the system throws up a dialog randomly, grabbing the focus and thereby "pressing" one of the buttons when you thought you were typing. Who knows what you just agreed to.
- account42 5y ago
  I'm glad that KDE has options to prevent that: https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kwin/kcontrol/windowbehaviour/index.html#action-focus-focusstealin https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kwin/kcontrol/windowbehaviour... Generally if you were interacting with the computer then whatever new thing should get focus iff its appearance was a direct result of your current interaction.

marcus_holmes 5y ago

I would love it if we could all just decide on a single WIMP interface and stick to that. I understand that this would annoy designers. But they're annoying me so I think this is fair. My go-to example at the moment is Figma, which is a design tool that I find almost impossible to use because it has so many hidden, unexplained "features" in its UI. If I accidentally brush the keyboard I have to quit the application and restart because I have no idea how to get back to the state I was in.

lkxijlewlf 5y ago

Used to be they had time to get UI better. Now, if you have the same UI for 6 months people think you've stalled and start looking for new. Everything has to be constant churn, constant change. Far too many people today get bored way too easily.

marwis 5y ago

Indeed Windows sucks but PowerToys has a much faster launcher replacement on alt+space

thrower123 5y ago

> today only work in some super old apps like Notepad. Old applications that actually follow the platform UX and accessibility guidelines