4 ms·

This seems to hit all the high points of a lot of the iOS and macOS interactions, but I think fails to hit any the low points. It doesn't take much user testin

This seems to hit all the high points of a lot of the iOS and macOS interactions, but I think fails to hit any the low points. It doesn't take much user testing to find that a lot of these interactions are frustrating to a good segment of users. The article doesn't even mention discoverability and just briefly mentions affordances, two things that are severely lacking in these interactions. I had to resize the browser window to read the content of the article and carefully position the scroll bar so I could read the content without being constantly distracted by the looping, unpausable animations.

mhink 3y ago
> [...] so I could read the content without being constantly distracted by the looping, unpausable animations. Interesting note: the page doesn't respect the `prefers-reduced-motion` media query.
graypegg 3y ago
One thing I was surprised to read being praised was the I-beam loupe in iOS. I don’t think any other interaction fills me with more rage than trying to paste content where I set the I-beam. You set the I-beam in a spot, and then… hold? Sometimes the “paste, copy, select all” menu comes up. Or it just prolongs the loupe being on screen. So you have to carefully slide down, without moving left or right, and then pinpoint exactly where the I-beam is with your finger, hold, and now you can paste. It will happily jump to a word or line ending on any step of that process. Or! I’ve made some typo that’s inexplicably locked in the iOS dictionary now, so I have to remove one letter… which it will happily swap back to the incorrect one after I spent 10 seconds fiddling with a virtual magnifying glass to correct it. Why is that not a signal to iOS that I’m precisely editing this text?
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I can't tell you how many times I've 1. tapped on the I-beam wanting to copy or paste some text, 2. waited... waited... for the “paste, copy, select all” menu to come up, 3. gave up waiting assuming I did something wrong, 4. went to re-tap the I-beam but as I did the menu finally appeared, BUT my tap dismissed it. Now I don't know--do I wait and tap again? How long should I wait? How long after I tap will I know if it was successful? Just a totally bonkers and frustrating experience, to do something that should not be complicated. This happens a lot on mobile and especially on the web. You tap or click on something, and there is no immediate feedback about whether or not that action did or will do anything. The computer churns for an indeterminate number of seconds, and then you finally get the UX feedback--or you don't. Awful.
  - graypegg 3y ago
    The lack of feedback is exactly the problem, you’re 100% right. Touch interfaces are still so useless with any sort of precise control which is when you need some sort of feedback and assurance that what you want to do, is what’s happening. I’m surprised we haven’t seen some new touch-ui equivalent to “right click” become the norm. Something that signals “I’ve chosen precisely what I want to interact with, DON’T CHANGE MY SELECTION, and give me the actions I can preform on them”. How did “long press” get saddled with that and 4 or 5 other actions?!
gwern 3y ago
Designers are not immune to "the cobbler's children go unshod" / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law - if someone writes a post boasting about how minimalist or simple their page is, then it will surely have implementation flaws or load 100kb of unnecessary JS; if it boasts about performance, then everything will be uncached and it blows 1s unnecessarily before rendering; if it talks about the challenge of "frequency & novelty", then it will surely be an unending scroll of rapidly flickering distracting looped GIFs; and so on. It is amusing, but also a good lesson in that you can't take these tu quoques or 'doctor heal thyselfs' too seriously. I mean, the last Edward Tufte book I bought (_Seeing With Fresh Eyes_) could've benefited from a few more fresh eyeballs on it inasmuch as it had material better left out and tons of typos in it! Am I going to throw out everything I learned from Tufte or say that he wasn't an expert in scientific communication after all?
pmontra 3y ago
> I had to resize the browser window to read the content of the article and carefully position the scroll bar I had to remove the floating share bar at the bottom using UbO element picker. That wasn't a good first impression.

mhink 3y ago

> [...] so I could read the content without being constantly distracted by the looping, unpausable animations. Interesting note: the page doesn't respect the `prefers-reduced-motion` media query.

graypegg 3y ago

One thing I was surprised to read being praised was the I-beam loupe in iOS. I don’t think any other interaction fills me with more rage than trying to paste content where I set the I-beam. You set the I-beam in a spot, and then… hold? Sometimes the “paste, copy, select all” menu comes up. Or it just prolongs the loupe being on screen. So you have to carefully slide down, without moving left or right, and then pinpoint exactly where the I-beam is with your finger, hold, and now you can paste. It will happily jump to a word or line ending on any step of that process. Or! I’ve made some typo that’s inexplicably locked in the iOS dictionary now, so I have to remove one letter… which it will happily swap back to the incorrect one after I spent 10 seconds fiddling with a virtual magnifying glass to correct it. Why is that not a signal to iOS that I’m precisely editing this text?

ryandrake 3y ago
I can't tell you how many times I've 1. tapped on the I-beam wanting to copy or paste some text, 2. waited... waited... for the “paste, copy, select all” menu to come up, 3. gave up waiting assuming I did something wrong, 4. went to re-tap the I-beam but as I did the menu finally appeared, BUT my tap dismissed it. Now I don't know--do I wait and tap again? How long should I wait? How long after I tap will I know if it was successful? Just a totally bonkers and frustrating experience, to do something that should not be complicated. This happens a lot on mobile and especially on the web. You tap or click on something, and there is no immediate feedback about whether or not that action did or will do anything. The computer churns for an indeterminate number of seconds, and then you finally get the UX feedback--or you don't. Awful.
- graypegg 3y ago
  The lack of feedback is exactly the problem, you’re 100% right. Touch interfaces are still so useless with any sort of precise control which is when you need some sort of feedback and assurance that what you want to do, is what’s happening. I’m surprised we haven’t seen some new touch-ui equivalent to “right click” become the norm. Something that signals “I’ve chosen precisely what I want to interact with, DON’T CHANGE MY SELECTION, and give me the actions I can preform on them”. How did “long press” get saddled with that and 4 or 5 other actions?!

gwern 3y ago

Designers are not immune to "the cobbler's children go unshod" / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law - if someone writes a post boasting about how minimalist or simple their page is, then it will surely have implementation flaws or load 100kb of unnecessary JS; if it boasts about performance, then everything will be uncached and it blows 1s unnecessarily before rendering; if it talks about the challenge of "frequency & novelty", then it will surely be an unending scroll of rapidly flickering distracting looped GIFs; and so on. It is amusing, but also a good lesson in that you can't take these tu quoques or 'doctor heal thyselfs' too seriously. I mean, the last Edward Tufte book I bought (_Seeing With Fresh Eyes_) could've benefited from a few more fresh eyeballs on it inasmuch as it had material better left out and tons of typos in it! Am I going to throw out everything I learned from Tufte or say that he wasn't an expert in scientific communication after all?

pmontra 3y ago

> I had to resize the browser window to read the content of the article and carefully position the scroll bar I had to remove the floating share bar at the bottom using UbO element picker. That wasn't a good first impression.