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Do you think muggles actually care about this? I tend to doubt it but I am asking with an open mind.

• brundolf 5y ago
  I think small bits of irregularity in a UX breed uncertainty, which breeds anxiety, probably even moreso for non-technical people who can’t quantify what they’re seeing. It may not be something conscious that they can articulate, but I’m confident that it matters.
• saurik 5y ago
  I also always wonder this, as it constantly seems like the only people I know who care are people who have gone out of their way to study UI; everyone else seems to find bespoke UIs "fun". It certainly doesn't seem to have hurt game developers much that every game has an unrelated UI..
  • rapsey 5y ago
    Also desktop cross platform native GUIs. Programmers always complain about this, but most users are on windows and for them the GUI is just going to be ugly. No user is going to care that it is native.
• DecoPerson 5y ago
  Absolutely do non-tech-savvy people care about this. It’s like a film — they may not be able to explain it, but they know a good film from a bad one. I’m the “tech guru” for many of those who know me, and I’ve seen people of all ages struggle with mobile UIs. There’s two axes with two values, making four categories that I find problems fall into: - Simple concept + familiar UI: User is at fault (usually a misconception). I rarely see problems in this category. - Complex concept + familiar UI: User struggles to understand what they’re trying to achieve. A little bit of extra info helps them make sense of the situation. Very easy to help the user over the phone in this situation. Often, thanks to good UI, the user figures it out themselves. - Simple concept + strange UI: The user knows what they want to do but can’t understand what the UI is conveying, can’t find the UI controls, can’t express what they want via the UI controls, or sometimes don’t even realise something is interact-able. Even if the user understands the concept, they often struggle to succeed after stumbling their way through the app for any length of time, and need assistance. Apple iOS’s “swipe from different corners to get notifications & control panel & home & etc” and “three fingers/hold to do textual things” are good examples of this. - Complex concept + strange UI: Situations in this category can get so difficult & time-consuming that it’s often easy to just do what the user is asking for on their behalf, or give them a step by step process they can repeat. The things that make a UI familiar or otherwise are subtle, like what makes a film good or bad. UI/UX designers come up with all these “clever” ways to do things, like the breadcrumbs interface on the Notion app, but many users simply don’t figure out how to use them. And they don’t think to use an element/gesture when they seek to achieve the very things which that element/gesture achieves.
  • throwaway2037 5y ago
    I am a near-luddite on my mobile phone, but über-geek on a desktop. This weekend, I was trying to open a text file attached to a Gmail message, then search and copy some text. Step 1: Use Gmail Android App to search my inbox for old emails with attachments with some text to me. Cool, found the email. Step 2: Open the text file attachment. Gmail Android App does not open text files natively (weird, right?), so it defers. I tried a few different choices. None of them allowed me to both search, then copy some text. (Note: I have a /very/ vanilla Android mobile setup.) I spent fifteen minutes, then gave up and opened the original email on a desktop Linux web browser. I found the text, then copied, and sent back to my mobile phone by email. Then, I opened the email in Gmail app, copy/paste. Sheesh. I thought: Am I an idiot? I felt like a struggling grandparent using a phone with the "big dialing pad" after that experience. (No offence to the big dialing pad -- always a big fan of the UX!)
    • fsflover 5y ago
      > I spent fifteen minutes, then gave up and opened the original email on a desktop Linux web browser. I guess you might be interested in GNU/Linux smartphones, Librem 5 and Pinephone.
• mook 5y ago
  My impression is that lots of users have been so affected by frequent encounters of bad UI that they just internalized it as they're "bad at computers/technology" and become afraid of doing anything. Maybe they'll go read a book (on paper) or something. Whatever they do, complaining about the bad UI to the people who might have done something about it isn't it.
  • tomcam 5y ago
    I think users almost always tend to blame themselves for bad UI because it makes them feel stupid. Therefore I think they tend not to complain.
    • throwaway2037 5y ago
      When users raise an issue like this, I try to show empathy right away. I know they are already on edge thinking: "Am I the stupid one?" Of course, there are users with nothing but packing peanuts in their brains, but the good users with real brains... be good to them when they raise an issue!
      • tomcam 5y ago
        Same. My default position is that the UI is wrong, not the customer. Obviously not always true, but for me, a good working assumption.
  • throwaway2037 5y ago
    I agree. The knee jerk reaction of many otherwise highly educated corporate users when there is a UI issue: "Oh, I must be doing something wrong." So often, something is wrong on the server that is causing horrible lag or weird errors. It is more amazing when you meet a very resilient user (think: senior sales staff -- they'll do /anything/ for a sales commission!). They just assume this is normal operating procedure. Only when things are horrible, do they ask for help. Then, you stand behind their desk and watch in horror at all the bugs they workaround (many times per hour!) in your app, but never report... Hat tip to these amazing users!
• davidkuennen 5y ago
  Having a cross platform app (Flutter) with tens of thousands of users for a few years now I can tell you that not a single person has cared to far. I get 20-50 mails daily through a very easy to use feedback and support function, but in none of those thousands of mails has anyone ever cared about how transitions are made or that a button doesn't look like a native iOS button. They care about the value the app provides. About new functions or (in my case) report bad data to fix. That's why they download an app. Not because they want the button to look natural. That's to say. I frequently get feedback about how they love the UX/UI of my app. If there isn't a valid reason to create a native app these days I consider it a waste of time.
  • blub 5y ago
    When one is drowning in a torrent of superfluous UI changes and the UX mediocrity of Windows, Android or Linux, poor software seems inevitable. Those that do notice, likely assume that the dev can’t do better or doesn’t care. What would you do if somebody did complain about your UI or UX, rewrite the framework’s UI controls and animations? Switch frameworks? You’d probably thank them for the feedback and say you’ll add it to your task list, where it will linger for weeks or months until it’s closed “won’t fix” because only few people asked about it.
  • baisq 5y ago
    I notice non-native apps. Even if it is very subtle: Apple has some menus around the iCloud settings interface that are actually a webview. But what am I supposed to do, mail the dev telling them to make a native app instead? If they haven't made one, I understand that they can't afford it.
    • WA 5y ago
      The iCloud settings are slow, because the backend is slow, not because it is a WebView.
      • baisq 5y ago
        On your phone, open Settings, then tap on your name (apple id), then tap on "payment and shipping", "subscriptions", or "media and purchases" -> "view account". All of those are webviews.
• smokey_circles 5y ago
  > Do you think muggles actually care about this? Yes, you nugget. That's why UX is a thing. Just because you know how to traverse your thinking patterns doesn't mean anyone else (wizzards included) can. Surefire way to write garbage applications and APIs: don't think about the user. I beat this mentality out of any junior that crosses my path. You're not paid to write code, you're paid to deliver a product. You studied how to write code. Massive difference
• timeon 5y ago
  As example there are cases when custom input fields on login screen are not triggering key chain access. Something anyone can notice.
• neilalexander 5y ago
  Yes, I absolutely think they do, whether they realise it or not. Overall I believe that computers have never been harder to use and this "nobody cares" attitude is exactly why. To use my father as an example, he sat at work with computers on his desk for 20 years, running everything from Windows 3.11 to Windows XP. He never had a problem using or understanding the computers in front of him because generally any pattern that he learned in one place would apply pretty much everywhere else on the system. Buttons had a uniform look. Radio controls worked the same way. Menus were in predictable places and had similar structures. Toolbar icons, if present, had a uniform appearance. Folders and files were presented uniformly. Tooltips appeared over many things if you hovered your mouse pointer over them. Embossing, solid, thick and dotted lines all had meaning designed to guide the user in certain directions. Disabled controls looked visibly non-interactive. Even "Open", "Print" and "Save" dialogs were globally consistent. In that regard, older versions of Windows were beautiful in their simplicity — they were uniform and predictable. The same is true of classic Mac OS also. The reason for this is because both Microsoft and Apple spent a lot of time and energy working with real world users to figure out what made sense and what needed work. The result was that they both ended up with clear user interfaces that had learnable visual cues. Then this aesthetic design trend started and now user interfaces have never been more unclear. Overwhelmingly UI elements are now flat or inconsistent in their appearance. It isn't clear at a glance which objects are interactive and which aren't, or what the side effects will be when you click on given thing. To make this worse, Electron happened, effectively leaving developers (who usually have completely insufficient understanding of user experience or design) to roll their own user interface toolkits and to build applications that end up looking nothing like anything else on the system. So now you don't just have to contend with the fact that the operating system controls aren't as friendly as they used to be, but now every application is out there trying to play by its own rules too, with their own designs and their own learning curves. Now we're in a situation where very little of what you learn in one application makes sense or applies in another, which is the epitome of user hostility. I spend a lot of time trying to remotely diagnose wildly inconsistent applications over the phone and try to help him make sense of the mess that is modern day desktop computing. He rightly finds it confusing and overwhelming. Even in my own experience, modern macOS isn't much better. At this point, Microsoft's "Official Guidelines for User Interface Developers and Designers" (2001) and Apple's "Human Interface Guidelines" (1995) should be mandatory reading for everyone who thinks they know better. There's real psychology and methodology to building a good user experience. Every single detail matters.