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The Decline of Usability (2020)

• Y-bar 3y ago
  The author mentions they reserve judgement about Mac OS because of lack of experience. But I would say the same decline is happening here. Especially Apple themselves seem infatuated with hiding things behind slow hover effects and way-too-subtle shades of grey. This is hurting discoverable portions of the interface, probably in the name of looking sleek, and once you have learned that something exists somewhere behind that hover animation you can't easily target it because the actual target area is not visible and active until after you have moved the mouse in the exact area. Most egregious is the Music app as well as notification actions. Edit: Another issue is the lack of distinct draggable area in window titles, never understood why one pixel makes the window draggable, then the one below which looks identical is not.
  • pcurve 3y ago
    Agreed about discoverability issues. Everything is hidden. Hiding power user features is one thing, but you can't hide the basic stuff. IMHO UI usability hasn't been Apple's strong suit for a long time. In fact, as someone who has to use both Mac and PC, MacOS is just as terrible in many ways in not worse. What they do well device integration usability across their ecosystem.
    • BruceEel 3y ago
      Agreed. For me personally macOS (or OS X back then) usability peaked at around ~Snow Leopard and it's been _mostly_ though not entirely downhill from there on. Hard to pick a 'worst offender', the System Settings panel in Ventura may be a good example, it is a literal struggle every single time I need to change something, typically as a result of some setting mysteriously changing itself back to what I do not want.
      • ben_w 3y ago
        From just a UI point of view, my preference is MacOS 8 — and I don't mean Mountain Lion, I mean Classic. The rest of the OS would be a nightmare today for so many reasons; but the UI was fantastic.
        • BruceEel 3y ago
          Ah yes, Mac OS 8, I have very, very limited experience with it, mostly in the form of one/two-week bursts on taking over from a coworker whenever he went on holiday. It's loooong time ago but on the negatives I remember getting very annoyed with this app called Toaster, on the positives I remember thinking how extremely pretty everything looked (still does) and being blown away by little things like, to set the icon for a folder or document you could just copy and paste one over from another file :)
        • pcurve 3y ago
          I loved MacOS 8 as well. It was a nice improvement from the System 7.6. The only thing I didn't like about MacOS was occasional system lock-up and application crashes due to real multi-threading. Back then, when your Mac crashed, it crashed hard... like your cursor didn't move. ;-)
      • gjvc 3y ago
        This thread correctly identifies "discoverability", perhaps aka "progressive disclosure", or "some form of incrementalism" as the measure by which good user interfaces are evaluated. Operating systems such as Windows, OSX, and Linux -- inevitability -- contain much complexity, and multiple modules, not all of which are necessarily in use by the users at any given time. Therefore, the problem of GUI design becomes one of navigating the complexity/depth-of-knowledge curve, as much as it does creating a usable set of features at each point along it. The most egregious offenders are the latest Windows, 10 and later, IMHO. When I was a kid, (coming from the world of RISC OS which had a much shallower GUI) trying to understand the big deep Windows interface, I joined the dots by telling myself "This is how they put it together. This is how they are trying to make the things work consistently and in concert." I rarely broke out of that story-telling loop. Now, when using Windows 10 or later, and a few clicks brings one to a Windows 2000 and before-era network dialogue box, the "fourth wall" as it were, of GUI design is broken, the story-telling loop above is replaced by a jarring feeling of bewilderment or all-too familiar frustration, and it's obvious they are shipping the org chart, and doing so over time, as much older GUI components are still available. At the risk of sounding nihilistic, I fear that both OS X and Windows have reached their respective local maximas of design, and we won't see any changes for the better (by the above metric) any time soon.
        • Condition1952 3y ago
          >Operating systems such as Windows, OSX, and Linux -- inevitability -- contain much complexity. Operating systems should be modular, allowing the user to reduce as much bloating complexity as possible and needed. I do not need unstoppable “gamed” and “studentd” services on my computer. The sealed system implemented by Apple has actually meant the overthrow of the root user by the corporation. Now I can’t reduce complexity, bloatware. The only solution seems to be praying that BSD or Linux become useable one day
          • gjvc 3y ago
            > Operating systems should be modular, allowing the user to reduce as much bloating complexity as possible and needed. Yup, updated my comment to clarify that point -- thank you. "the overthrow of the root user by the corporation" -- damn. Good turn of phrase :-(
      • Condition1952 3y ago
        I am not afraid of the decadence they’ve made of the settings panel because I use Alfred. I haven’t yet installed Ventura. I had to downgrade from Monterey because the cmd-L keyboard shortcut had stopped working on Contacs.app
        • nntwozz 3y ago
          You can remap cmd-L in settings globally or for each app, did you try that?
    • didntcheck 3y ago
      Yeah. I first started using MacOS seriously for a job a few years ago, and I was amazed at how poor the discoverability was, especially given its reputation. Important functions were hidden behind arcane modifier combinations or only available via "intuitive" gestures that you'd never work out on your own. I don't think this was just a case of unfamiliarity - as a usually-Linux user I've been unfamiliar with Windows functions before, but still managed to work them out without resorting to Google, even in the post-8 era And the window management as a whole seems like a case of form over function, with no way to see what windows are actually open, or switch between several of the same application, without multi-step processes (Expose/MC or cmd-tab cycling) And also the menu bar is a massive violation of the "controls should be obviously linked to the area they affect" principle, but it seems we're stuck with this space-saving measure from 40 years ago since it's now part of the brand identity
      • funcDropShadow 3y ago
        > And also the menu bar is a massive violation of the "controls should be obviously linked to the area they affect" principle, On other hand a menu bar at the corner of the screen has an infinite size if you are using a mouse, a trackball or a touchpad. But it's size is finite if you are using a touch display. Let me explain what I mean with infinite size. You can overshoot arbitrarily far when using the mouse and you would still be inside the menu, since top of the menu is the screen corner. While writing this, I've noticed that in a maximized Firefox under Gnome this isn't true anymore. There is at list one line of pixels above menu. When you click on them nothing happens. Therefore I cannot overshoot anymore. Another failure of modern UIs.
  • estebarb 3y ago
    Recently I bought a MBP and I'm surprised by how hard to use it is. Printing by both sides? Not supported, you must do it by hand. And some apps print the pages in reverse order, so you end up having to sort the pages. Use numberpad . as . instead of ,? You have to download an app to use a sane default. Alt+. in terminal? No luck if you aren't using an English keyboard. Run a downloaded app? Run it, accept failure, settings, security, look for blocked app, enable it. It is even worse than Windows Vista. Give some app permissions? Yeah, you must know which permissions, as you cannot search by app... And so on...
    • matthew_stone 3y ago
      It has been possible to print double-sided since at least Lion/2008…
      • estebarb 3y ago
        Only if you have a printer that supports it. Otherwise you have to do it by hand https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/how-to-print-double-sided-on-mac https://www.businessinsider.com/guides/tech/how-to-print-dou...
        • yawaramin 3y ago
          If the hardware itself doesn't support it, how would the software?
          • jt2190 3y ago
            The issue is that the printer manufacturer needs to provide a printer driver for MacOS that gives MacOS access to that printer capability. (One could argue that Apple should write the driver, and they might for very popular devices.)
          • estebarb 3y ago
            Windows approach: Print even pages first, ask the user to move the printed pages back to the printer and then print the odd pages later. The result is ready to be read. In Mac you need to print first one side, move the pages manually, print the other side. But you have to remember to add an extra page if the page count is odd, have caution if an app tries to be intelligent and sort the pages in a different way... In Windows all those calculations are done by the system. It is easy! Just print and follow instructions. In Mac is painful.
  • holoduke 3y ago
    Or what about the scrollbar hiding automatically so its really hard to manualy grab the scrollbar handle and scroll with your mouse. Specially in long lists super annoying.
    • grishka 3y ago
      There's a setting to always show the scrollbars.
      • CamperBob2 3y ago
        Ah, yes, the "Beware of the Leopard" school of design. Everything is possible, nothing is forbidden, but the defaults are terrible and the controls are hidden as well as they could possibly hide them.
      • hermitcrab 3y ago
        https://www.appsntips.com/keep-scroll-bars-from-disappearing-on-mac/ https://www.appsntips.com/keep-scroll-bars-from-disappearing...
  • Chris2048 3y ago
    Perhaps they are creating a problem to push you onto their solution. When you can't discover things yourself, that annoying AI voice-assistant might become needed.
  • Yemeth 3y ago
    > and way-too-subtle shades of grey MacOS went downhill when Jonathan Ive decided to throw out all colors in favor of the 'content'. To this day I spend too much time deciphering blue-greyish icon shapes in the Finder's side bar.
    • eyelidlessness 3y ago
      I may be misremembering, but I’m pretty sure the monochrome icons began well before Ive had influence on the software. OS X moved towards shape rather than color in eg iconography to support UI scaling (which had been an effort, and a more ambitious one, for years prior); and then eventually to support adaptive theming most recognizable (for its value anyway) in dark mode.
  • dgb23 3y ago
    Somewhat related: As someone who likes working on a single screen I typically like to open things in full-screen mode by default. MacOS plays a sluggish animation when switching between screens. You can't turn it off, you can just switch between two similarly slow ones. I can't imagine a good reason for this. What is their model of a user and how did they derive "slow animation when switching windows is good" from that?
    • silvestrov 3y ago
      Same with animation when switching to/from full screen. I mostly just want it to happend in an instant.
    • Y-bar 3y ago
      It's been a staple Human Interface Guideline that applications should re-open in the layout and position they were when they quit. Personally I barely use full screen at all in Mac OS, but I can see why you want it. It is default in some apps, it should be default in all apps, it isn't.
    • jt2190 3y ago
      > MacOS plays a sluggish animation when switching between screens... Perhaps: System Settings... Accessibility > Display: Reduce Motion
      • dgb23 3y ago
        That just switches from one slow animation to another.
        • IIsi50MHz 3y ago
          And I don't want or need, for my own use, some Accessibility-defined systemwide setting that tells all apps to try not having motion. It sounds nice to have…should I ever need that. But at least from Apple's description it seems invasive and like it might possibly disable untold things that I don't want to mess with. I want to speed up or eliminate certain decorative things, like this particular animation. Since there's no obvious no-side-effects way, I just grumble and occasionally rediscover UI performance when I use some other system.
  • aequitas 3y ago
    > hiding things behind slow hover effects I can’t for the life of me understand why it’s a good idea to hide the close button for notifications or virtual desktops behind a long mouseover on any spot that is not the actual location of where the close button pops up.
  • sillywalk 3y ago
    Somebody whose name I can't remember said something like Apple Designs a UI that people want to buy - it looks cool in the apple store - not use.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
  I for one miss the 3-D buttons of the Windows 95 era. It was obvious what could be clicked and what could not.
  • yard2010 3y ago
    It was so good that Google incorporated this idea in Material Design
    • YoshiRulz 3y ago
      And then all but killed it >:( https://m3.material.io/styles/elevation/overview#f9947307-4818-4d94-b98a-fa1cb5498eb1 https://m3.material.io/styles/elevation/overview#f9947307-48... My first smartphone ran KitKat and IMO it was Google's best work to date, design-wise.
  • ben_w 3y ago
    Absolutely agree; I think the anti-skeuomorphic "clean" fashion of the last decade has been terrible for discoverability even in mobile apps, and it's somewhat ironic that the same design cues have gone back to WIMP devices, giving us interfaces designed to look like touch screen mobile apps even though the tech is different — and design cues matching a different technology in order to give a sense of familiarity is the actual definition of skeuomorphic.
    • flohofwoe 3y ago
      Tbf, Apples baroque "skeuomorphic phase" with wood paneling, shiny metal and cloth was absolutely terrible even back then and most likely responsible for the "skeumorphic backlash" that followed. Subtle 3D hints for interactive elements always made sense, and don't need to look "old fashioned".
  • attractivechaos 3y ago
    This! I hate iOS’ flat design and the trend after that. When that UI first came out, texts and buttons looked so similar that I often had to poke to distinguish them. Now iOS is not as bad but I still prefer its original 3D design. I guess Jobs would never approve the current iOS UI.
• pacifika 3y ago
  Ok so where are the good examples, anyone doing anything of note to address this?
  • Y-bar 3y ago
    It's not unlike a tragedy of the commons, clicking through Wikipedia maybe "Collective action problem" is even more apt? Individual app makers do things which they like and want without considering the wider implications of cross-app usability in the operating system. In isolation many apps may be acceptable, but that falls down in the wider context. The problem would be less of a problem if everyone did the same thing (bad or good UI) in a similar manner, because then there is predictability which is a powerful concept in user interaction.
  • pseudalopex 3y ago
    The good examples are the software they replaced.
  • davidebaldini 3y ago
    Trinity Desktop Environment is a somewhat maintained fork of KDE3 with the same functional and understandable GUI.
• bradley13 3y ago
  All true. It goes even farther: hiding the file structure, and even the concept of files. Ask a nontechnical Windows or Mac user where their files are stored - they have no idea. Ask if they are in the cloud - no idea. Worse - just as with UIs - there is no consistency where different apps store their data. We also shouldn't forget the idiocy of hiding file-extensions. To add insult to injury Windows lies to non-English speakers. In German, for example, it will tell you your home directory is in "Benutzer", but there actually is no such directory, there is only "Users". These attempts to hide complexity wind up creating confusion and more complexity.
  • ben_w 3y ago
    > In German, for example, it will tell you your home directory is in "Benutzer", but there actually is no such directory, there is only "Users". Fantastisch. /s Reminds me of a different issue we had back at my first permanent iOS role. We wrote about a "button" in the app description, the German translation of which is "Knopf"; this triggered Apple's naughty word filter, presumably because "Knopf" is also a translation of "knob", but "Knopf" doesn't have the penile connotations in German that "knob" has in English.
  • thetomcraig 3y ago
    > Ask a nontechnical Windows or Mac user where their files are stored - they have no idea. This. The move towards “everything on the cloud” was a double edged sword for non-power users. It’s great that you don’t have to make Grandma plug in a external USB drive and use Time Machine, but yes nobody knows where things are anymore. Does Grandma know what “the cloud” even is? I feel like Apple is the biggest proponent of moving away from the idea of “files” and having your “content” be something you shuttle around between different apps. But each one has a slightly different “share” and “import” and “export” paradigm as well. And now there is an iCloud Drive “files” app! What does that mean? And how do I know if it’s on my phone or I’m just seeing a representation of what’s on my iCloud Drive? Does the cloud icon mean I’ve downloaded it or not, what if it’s it slightly dark gray or slightly light gray? </rant>
  • grishka 3y ago
    > We also shouldn't forget the idiocy of hiding file-extensions. That must be the number one reason why .jpg.exe with a jpg-looking icon still works on a surprising number of people. And that's with even the most non-technical users knowing what file extensions are and how they work.
• quantum_bit 3y ago
  He's right about Gnome for sure. I used to use Ubuntu 14.04-16.04 from 2014 to 2019 along with macOS all these years. Although macOS has a lot of problems, I returned to Ubuntu (22.04) since July in a new workplace, and it is horrible. This weird empty horizontal top panel and menus behind the hamburger button are just madness.
  • Condition1952 3y ago
    Sorry for being obnoxious but I think it’s worse than madness, it’s cruelty. The GUI makes you look for basic stuff every time, such as gas Lightning
  • shrubble 3y ago
    Gnome is pathetically bad at this point. The old desktop CDE is almost as good overall despite its many quirks...
  • bombolo 3y ago
    [dead]
  • ok123456 3y ago
    Try PopOS if you want a Linux desktop environment that's not painful to use and looks modern. Gnome 4 just looks alien. They've abandoned every common desktop metaphor and replaced it with a scuffed android launcher.
  • jwells89 3y ago
    I can mostly live with GNOME, but making the top bar mostly composed of empty space and omnipresent while apps try as hard as possible to avoid proper menus makes no sense at all. The space for menus is right there!
• scioto 3y ago
  When iOS introduced the long press, that pretty much did it for me: I couldn't tell what user interface element did what when I pressed on it, so I tried tapping everything. And now we have to long-press on things to make them do other things. I can't spend time tapping then long-pressing on elements to do what I think or hope the app can do.
  • euroderf 3y ago
    A UI convention for "long-press-able" might be a start.
    • mdaniel 3y ago
      May I vote for ellipsis overlaid on one corner of the element? -------...- | Primary | ----------- unobtrusive, "..." indicates more was omitted in every context I can think of, and it can be any number of colors because it's so visually distinct (err, of course, except for the same color as the background, but if someone was that evil, we're right back where we started from in the "I dunno, guess" realm)
    • layer8 3y ago
      IMO it should behave like right-click (context menu) on the desktop, which generally doesn’t require an indication.
  • layer8 3y ago
    Apple should have established long press for the purpose of context menus in iOS, from the start. When I got my first iPhone around 2009, I was rather surprised that this wasn’t a standard convention, like right-click on the desktop. It seemed so obvious that that’s how things should work. Instead we now have long press for random purposes.
  • grishka 3y ago
    iOS didn't introduce it. Windows Mobile definitely had it before 2007. Not sure about Palm OS though.
• tazjin 3y ago
  > Despite being endlessly fawned over by an army of professionals Yes, but these "professionals" consider everything in the vacuum of whatever software they're working on. Streamlined, cross-program UX is not just not considered, but actively discouraged. Everything needs to be its own island. This is why as things progress I move more and more things into Emacs, with only the browser and a few websites remaining outside of it at this point. In Emacs you can't isolate your application to the point where I somehow have to learn your paradigm.
• bee_rider 3y ago
  Why have desktop UI’s gotten so bad lately? My theory is that before we had UX experts, they had to hire, like, actual graphics designers.
  • api 3y ago
    I think a lot of it is the other way around: graphics design driven by branding rather than UX. I also think the death of native development has a lot to do with it. The web is now the UI layer of desktop, but that means there is no consistent design language across the system.
    • simulo 3y ago
      This is very similar to what Grudin suggests in his HCI history "From tool to partner": Apple used to be very usability and research focussed in the 80s and early 90s, but turned away from it with Jobs and went more look-driven — and had great success with it. Other companies followed. (Which does not mean that companies ignored graphic design before, but it was the more utilitarian parts of graphic design that were important focussing on distinct shapes, readability etc.)
      • api 3y ago
        True but I don’t think this gets it quite right. The big problem with classic Mac was the cooperative multitasking weird OS and the unstylish and clunky hardware. The UI needed polish and modernization but was not fundamentally bad. The complete loss of OS coherence has a lot more to do with the web than anything else.
    • jwells89 3y ago
      From my perspective as a dev, this is what happened: UI designers who had been trained on usability, who had a good grip on what was/wasn’t feasible technically, and knew to take content variability into account were almost wholesale replaced with more generalist print/graphic designers who were great at pumping out pretty branded PSDs, but not so great at producing usable UIs. My guess is that this happened because real UI designers are harder to come by and cost more, while generalists are more common and cost less. I’ve not hired for these positions though so I don’t know for sure.
• li2uR3ce 3y ago
  Despite the gutting of desktop usability for the sake of being mobile compatible, many environments still have zero presence on mobile. Can I PLEASE have my fucking scrollbar back now? I once spent a lot of my time and the time and the time of a developer trying to find a setting because there was no indication that a window had more content (a checkbox) to scroll down to. Something that would have been obvious before the onslaught of hidden scrollbars. The trouble is that having my pointer over the navigation pane--practically a guaranteed position--causes the scrollbar on the other pane to be hidden. Without the visual cue of a scrollbar there was no reason to move my pointer over to the other pane to discover there's more. Hell you might not even know it's a separate pane now that we've gotten rid of every defining border. I shared a screenshot with the developer, assured them that I was using the current version, only to have him say "scroll down." No doubt, I'm the fucking idiot (/s). Just like on mobile, you're supposed randomly interact with every UI element in hopes of discovering how it works only to have that learned skill be unique to one fucking app. Tap it, slow tap it, slow tap it for a different amount of time, tap it faster, spam it... "google it"... oh, this time you're supposed to drag it to something that doesn't even look like a UI element. Stupid grandpas! "Is the checkbox checked?" was never as ambiguous as "is the slider switch on?" Also, the checkbox uses less screen space! I'd argue that they optimized for neither screen space or user friendliness. It's optimized for a look and you can even make it worse by making it flatter. Go ahead make it look like two squares! Is the darker area the switch part? Who cares! It looks so clean and distraction free! I was so distracted by knowing what state the switch was in. Sorry, time for my meds. I usually make it half way through the day.
  • CoastalCoder 3y ago
    This feels like a modern rewrite of "Falling Down" :) * That's not a criticism. I agree with your take on it.
  • grishka 3y ago
    Microsoft in particular seems hellbent on putting touchscreens in everything. They REALLY want to make it happen but seemingly no one is having it. There's ONE person I know who owns a touchscreen laptop and genuinely touches its screen on purpose. On your scrolling complaint — well, there's this desktop-specific thing that OP doesn't mention but that becomes very apparent once you start looking for it in old-school desktop UIs. Controls never, ever scroll. Only content does. If controls don't fit into a window, you don't make it scrollable — you split it into tabs or you put the extra controls into a separate window that opens via a button. This appears to be universal at least for Windows and macOS.
• notbeuller 3y ago
  macOS is absolutely and infuriatingly the same as the examples here. I’ve yet to find anyone that actively defends this style - just like I have yet to find people to actively defend open office workspaces. (In apples case, both were designed by the same people.)
  • hkpack 3y ago
    I actually don't agree much with the article. I think that all modern OSes (macOS, Windows and even Linuxes) are much much better from the usability perspective than years ago. Some UI elements and patterns are indeed problematic, but it doesn't really that of a big deal, and some of them are the results of compromises. Most of these complains are because people don't like change and it is ok. I recently started using Windows 11 after a decade on macOS (have to port some apps there), and was very surprised by the UI improvements in the core components. I asked couple of colleagues about those, and most of them hated the change and were not using new features.
• knallfrosch 3y ago
  > Despite being endlessly fawned over by an army of professionals, Usability, or as it used to be called, "User Friendliness", is steadily declining. En contraire. The more usability professionals you hire, the worse your usability gets. It seems every dev team nowadays has at least a part-time designer. They come up with new, fresh ideas all the time and, of course, want to see it implemented. If it were only the Devs, you'd just use Google Material or "read the docs" for whatever it is you were building. As it is though, people think that you need "brand recognition across platforms", which basically means that you do whatever the hell you want and the more guidelines you break, the better. It has the added advantage that you really only need to design once and ship to all platforms. Who cares if iOS/Windows/Mac/Android are different? Just implement your own pop-up dialog!
  • YoshiRulz 3y ago
    > If it were only the Devs, you'd just use Google Material [...] Which is all well and good until Google replaces the Material Design team with designers with no UX training... Sorry, I just can't complain enough about M3.
  • bombolo 3y ago
    [dead]
• awinter-py 3y ago
  > Google, for example, have gotten increasingly into some kind of A/B testing of late and ... no AB test ever performed in the history of user research has correctly measured the intense hormonal rage pheromones released by power users when a button is moved for any reason
• eviks 3y ago
  Rather spot-on criticism of all the flat-white-space-low-info-density design paradigms Though > On the desktop, however, a scroll bar is very useful for determining your current position in the content without having to break away from what you're presently doing and reach for the mouse. You don't need a scrollbar for that, a tiny brightly colored (currently non-existing) indicator would suffice. Along with > If you're accustomed to a title bar being for handling the window and nothing else, it's very easy to misclick and activate an application feature you didn't intend to. These are just a bunch of poor design features before "the decline" since they nudge the poor user to hunt down small slivers of windows (horizontal/vertical bar, and seriously, those tiny arrows on the scroll bar?) when instead they could have most of the window's area to perform these functions with some, dare I say, Windows key?
• easeout 3y ago
  > What about Apple? > I can't comment on the current state of MacOS since the time I've spent actually using a Mac during the last 8 years or so probably totals to a few hours. Apple used to be good at this, and I hear they still do a decent job at keeping things sane, even post-Jobs. The macOS menu bar is still compulsory. First party apps generally still fill it out properly with commands for everything a user can do and put the common ones in their usual places. For third party apps it depends on whether the developer put time into platform norms. Many Electron apps don't: Slack makes many commands available only through UI popup menus; VS Code puts them in the command palette so you can only find them by search. Of course these apps have key shortcuts but you can't learn them from a menu bar item that doesn't exist. The focused window gets a heavy shadow. I think that's also compulsory. But first party apps and recently the system frameworks are guilty of cramming toolbars into title bars and leaving a drag area that doesn't span the width of the window. That's permanent. At least the window title is still written and you know you can drag that. A window's file proxy icon is often missing until you hover on the title. The bar at the top of the window may or may not be visually divided from the content area. First party apps also remove color and/or silhouette distinctiveness from those toolbars' buttons. App icon silhouettes are also gone. Scroll bars are of course hidden by default but can be always shown. The result is probably more usable than what's described in this article on other platforms, but off peak for macOS. Aside: iOS started the hidden-unless-scrolling scroll indicators trend, I think. Platform guidance was that you're supposed to flash them on first appearance of any scroll view whose content doesn't all fit. (To try it out, go to the Home Screen and then back to Safari.) This is the signal to the user that there is more to see. Users don't consciously think about it but they pick up the right expectation. You just call a method[1] after the view transition animation finishes. This has become arcane knowledge in the iOS field: No one remembers this is important to do in the absence of persistent scroll bars, and where it's not automatic due to using system frameworks in a high level way, many apps just don't get this right. [1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiscrollview/1619435-flashscrollindicators https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiscrollview...
• alistairSH 3y ago
  Even worse, the trend away from good UX is leaking from software to hardware. Who at Kia thought this was a good idea? Three steps to open the door. Requires two hands. Good luck if you’re an amputee, have arthritis, can’t see the door unlock touch zone, or just can’t figure it out. https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=50&v=Rv5so7szIMM https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=50&v=Rv5so7szIMM Then there’s Elon’s obsession with that stupid F1-style steering wheel. And VW’s off choice to control 4 windows with 2 switches in their EVs. So weird. It just goes on and on. Don’t these companies hire engineers with UX experience? Sigh.
  • mceachen 3y ago
    FWIW, those door handles are a copy of the Tesla Model 3 door handles (along with their usability issues). It’s very similar to everyone copying Apple’s auto-hiding scroll bars—usability be damned.
    • alistairSH 3y ago
      I thought the Tesla version popped out automatically. The Kia version requires the user to push the forward edge to manually pop the back edge out. 1. Unlock with barely visible touch zone. 2. Push forward edge, which flips out back edge/main handle 3. Grab and pull main handle.
  • couchand 3y ago
    Cars are particularly bad these days, where once they were a model of streamlined usability. My father-in-law's van has three large knobs next to each other on the dash. Which one adjusts the volume, which one the fan speed, and which one switches gears? Hope you don't pick the wrong one while driving at highway speeds!
    • mumblemumble 3y ago
      I used to work at a place where the company car we'd have to drive when visiting the home office was often one of the higher-end Mercedes sedans. (I don't remember which one.) The controls were such a confusing, overdesigned mess. Over the course of 2 or 3 years of regular visits to the office, I don't think anyone on my team was ever able to figure out how to turn off the air conditioning. We never figured out how to turn off the radio, either, but at least we did figure out how to turn the volume all the way down.
• the_af 3y ago
  I cannot prove it, but I think some of these UI and UX horrors are caused by the ever present need for software to change in order to demonstrate it is alive. Imagine you reach peak usability in $YourApp, in the year of our lord 2023. It's maybe not perfect, but there's no conceivable way your app's usability can improved past this point. Users are reasonable proficient, everything mostly clicks into place past the inherent hurdles of learning to use an app. Can this situation stand? Well, no. If you keep your UI as is, the software world will often perceive your app to be "stale" or even dead. So you have to change. But if you change anything after you reached peak usability, you will necessarily worsen your UX, sometimes in catastrophic ways. I cannot prove it, but I think this is one of the reasons (not the only one) that explains why some app's (and desktop environments!) decent UIs get ruined so thoroughly.
  • pjerem 3y ago
    You are even more right considering your modern app is subscription based so you must justify the monthly fee. Also you are paying an entire UX team which was useful for your nearly perfect v1, you’d better feed them some job.
  • hliyan 3y ago
    More than that, you will have to find a new product to demonstrate the value of your continued employment at the company. The team is incentivised to keep tinkering.
  • silvestrov 3y ago
    I think architecture has the same problem. The best way to stand out in the 50s/60s was to break with every good rule of traditional architecture and create the Brutalist style. They completely ignored the human emotional aspect of buildings and living spaces.
    • JohnFen 3y ago
      > They completely ignored the human emotional aspect of buildings and living spaces. But it turns out they didn't, since the majority of today's architectural design is even more alienating. Brutalism often seems downright cozy in comparison.
• codeptualize 3y ago
  There is a misconception that consistency == usability. It's an important part of usability but there is a lot more to it. Tunnel vision on consistency (or anything really) doesn't lead to good outcomes. The big picture is what matters: can someone do what they need to do? Articles like these also have lots of opinions, no research and stats, nor have decent explanations of how much impact these "problems" actually have. Granted I have not seen much research on desktop apps, but in other fields things have measurable improved a lot. Even going by opinion, my memory from that time was that everything was pretty bad. How often do you lose work because of crashes or not enough undo steps? And could you do the same things you can do now? Also don't forget about all the horrible Java software that didn't use the OS UI. People romanticize (software of) the past. The stuff I use today is magic compared to the old crap. Obviously not everything is perfect and I do recognize/understand some of the criticism in the article, but focussing on the little things really misses the big picture that is usability: completing the task that you need to complete, and that is easier than ever. > You're old and angry! You bet! Now get off my lawn, punk. Fair enough, I'll see myself out.
  • yawaramin 3y ago
    > How often do you lose work because of crashes or not enough undo steps? Crashes and too few undo steps are not a UI/UX problem, they are a software quality/hardware limitations (enough memory or storage to hold all those steps) problem. Software reliability has definitely gotten better in many aspects, as long-lived software applications and operating systems have been through the crucible of time and learned from their reliability mistakes. But UI/UX is in many aspects worse than ever. > Also don't forget about all the horrible Java software that didn't use the OS UI. The article actually says the same thing: 'A few rogue applications didn't play by the rules,...' > completing the task that you need to complete, and that is easier than ever. Do me a favour–try getting an older person who has not used Zoom before, to host a meeting and accept guest join requests. You will really understand the sorry state we are in once you see them struggle to do this.
    • codeptualize 3y ago
      >are not a UI/UX problem Never said UI, but they are absolute usability & user experience problems. Arguably the most important ones! This is exactly what I mean by missing the big picture. What do you think has more impact on completing a task and the experience of completing that task? A working maybe slightly inconsistent toolbar, or the thing crashing and loosing your work? > The article actually says the same thing: 'A few rogue applications didn't play by the rules,...' Fair enough, although I would say it was a lot more than a rogue few.. > Do me a favour–try getting an older person who has not used Zoom before Great example of something that you couldn't do and now can, times are truly great right now. It's great that you mention old people, I have helped some learning to deal with computers, back then, and also more recently. It's so much easier now. Old computers with the software we are talking about was/is really hard to learn for them, now with ipads and smartphones they can do so many things. Can't say I have tried zoom specifically, but Hangouts, face time, whatsapp, email, even installing games and apps, no problem at all! They can achieve so many more things because we have come so far and things are more usable than ever.
• hkpack 3y ago
  "Inmates are running asylum" [1] - is one of my favourite books, was written in 2004, which describes how bad most of the interfaces are and the reasons behind it. Design solves problems which are not always obvious to the actual users. Using computers was always frustrating experience, but it improved dramatically over the last two decades for sure. I don't know how anyone couldn't see that. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum-Products/dp/0672326140 https://www.amazon.com/Inmates-Are-Running-Asylum-Products/d...
  • atoav 3y ago
    > but now UI is better than ever Now the question is, for whom? Users are not a uniform block. I suspect: For those unwilling to learn the tools they use on a regular basis. Because for those who are willing to put in the work, most general purpose software got worse, in terms of how many layers of menus you have to click through, how well default shortcuts are thought out, etc. This is the old poweruser vs one-time user tension. Granted, good design can resolve that tension in a way that makes both classes of user happy, but that costs development time and research. In doubt today's software company often priorizes habing an "intuitive UI" over making it efficient. The first onboarded user counts more than rhe one using the thing a hundred times a day. That is a design decision and it is made for economic reasons. However if the typical web startup designed a supermarket cash register we would still be waiting in the line because the animations take their time, the multi step process takes more clicks, etc.
• ho_schi 3y ago
  Apple? The people which removed the menu from the window and keep it separate to tease all users? Maximized windows and full-screen are itself a pain. I cannot use MacOS. Finder is especially bad. The partially weird idea of GNOME (Hamburger-Menu) is also a copy of CSD-Style. Putting that aside GNOME did some really good things (keyboard-centric usage, dash and overview instead of a desktop, no desktop-icons and system-tray). Evolution does a great job in this regard, they use menu-bar and CSD-menu at same time (configurable). And Evolution doesn’t follow the strict GNOME release cycle, which has some bad side-effects (Epipany and WebKitGtk should also do that). PS: GNOME has copied a lot of bad ideas from MacOS and killed at same time a lot of bad patterns from Windows (e.g. desktop metapher).
  • yawaramin 3y ago
    The separated window menu which is always attached to the top of the screen, is a usability win. It gives you much more leeway to move your mouse and hit the target you're aiming for. See: Fitt's Law.
    • mmphosis 3y ago
      I agree with you, except personal preferences get in the way. I would prefer the detached menu bar at the top of a monitor, others like the menu bar on every window, others want neither, or a hamburger menu, or a jumble of confusing tabs, or ... Preferences are my preference. The interface can be switched around and modified, turned off, turned on, completely removed, installed again. Not just the menu bar, but all sorts of interfaces: windows/tabs > checkbox/radio/list/combo/popup-menus and at various levels: virtual system > system > application > document/file > paste/clipboard/shelf > view/drawer. For example, why can't we have different running Apps appearing as tabs within a single window? I think we could have much much richer interfaces.
    • p_l 3y ago
      It was a win on original Mac with tiny screen. On 4k 27", when not scaling to make it look like 1080p, the menu is nowhere close to what I am working on, and often had to move over multiple other applications.
• sannysanoff 3y ago
  [flagged]
• kazinator 3y ago
  The decline in usability ("enshittification") is due to a readily evident change in incentives behind the software. You're no longer selling a shrink-wrapped application in a competitive market, where you compete on usability. You're giving it away, while figuring out how to extract value out of the user in other ways. Online services that have captive users (e.g. the one and only government site you have to use for some service) don't have any incentive to improve their user experience. But that is not new. There was no previous version of that which had a better user experience; the previous version was an obstinate bureaucracy driven by paper pushing in the backrop of rigid protocols. What you see is just the computerization of that.
• ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  100% on target. Windows, which advanced the state of the GUI nicely in the ‘90s, has regressed into an absolutely infuriating, incompetent UI disaster.
  • SoftTalker 3y ago
    I have always felt that the pinnacle of Windows usability was Windows 2000 Professional. Clean, mostly intuitive, few gratuitous animations. It's been downhill ever since.
    • ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
      I didn't have any problem with XP. I can't recall a single major irritant in its UI.
      • mdaniel 3y ago
        Did you leave the cartoon UI enabled? Because I recall XP not being a terrible release once one put back the "yes, I'm a professional, less crayola, please" UI elements
        • ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
          Oh yeah! I turned that off so fast that I forgot about it. You're absolutely right. I remember deriding that as the Fisher-Price UI. And I hated, HATED the "my this' and "my that" fad that dominated the early '00s. Yeah, I know it's MY computer, because it's on MY desk full of MY documents. So goddamned infantile. Sadly, I've seen some resurgence of the "my" BS lately.
• wredue 3y ago
  “I NEED TO SAVE SCREEN REAL ESTATE SO I CAN… CHECKS NOTES… PUT A BUTTON THAT TAKES THE ENTIRE SCREEN” Yeah. This one always gets me with the whole “moving to the title bar saves screen space”. The other thing that really grinds my gears today is how many applications steal focus multiple times during launch. The number of people that have accidentally posted passwords in team chats cause of bullshit focus stealing is too damn high!
  • euroderf 3y ago
    Yeah, is there a web page that tells you how to disable this focus-stealing-on-launch in most OSs ? That would be a public service.
• osigurdson 3y ago
  It has taken me a least a year to learn the right gesture combination to close apps on iPhone 13. Many operations are very subtle. However, I seem to be far less bothered by modern usability than some others. My brain is hard wired for novelty it seems. I would not want to use Windows 2000 for example.
  • NavinF 3y ago
    That sounds like a good thing. Apps should almost never be killed. The OS automatically kills suspended apps when it needs more ram
    • nmlt 3y ago
      Apple support recently told me to kill all other apps to make the Files app work. It was taking ages to download and save data.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • osigurdson 3y ago
      That would be true if it were not for state.
• tiberriver256 3y ago
  Craigslist was the pinnacle of UX success
• doctor_radium 3y ago
  Slightly off topic, but possibly my biggest annoyance with web design is trying to find where the designer hid the Logout link. This, on a web site designed with endless negative space. I swear for a while the site of either my electric or gas utility literally didn't have one. I'd eventually just shrug and close the tab.
  • gumby 3y ago
    If they could hide the close button they would.
• ProxCoques 3y ago
  UX designer here who has done nothing but design web, mobile and related UI since about 2000, mostly working for or at large consumer brands (and now thinking of retiring). I'd definitely agree with the idea that change for change's sake is responsible for a lot of usability problems. But a bigger problem is the near extinction of any professional discussion or capable analysis of design by the people who are doing it. Most designers I work with don't have the vocabulary or knowledge about what makes something "usable" in the wider sense, let alone the ability to actually solve subtle interaction design or information display problems. With no knowledge or interest in basic heuristics, they literally don't know where to start. So they just live in Figma playing with colours, shapes and effects, pausing only to show some variations of the same UI for "user testing". It's become a wilfully ignorant, "non-technical" cult of innovation that's completely lost sight of its original purpose. To say I'm ashamed of my profession is no exaggeration. We've failed so badly.
  • shrimp_emoji 3y ago
    Sounds like the syndrome plaguing GNOME. :)
    • sillywalk 3y ago
      I've always assumed that GNOME developers don't actually use GNOME. edit - (Not to disparage a ton of work by a ton of people )
  • cuddlecake 3y ago
    As a frontend dev, what are good resources to learn about principles and heuristics that I can apply in my work? I have some knowledge, albeit very primitive, that I picked up from an HCI introduction and some good designers, but nothing too technical / formal yet.
    • ProxCoques 3y ago
      It's more about trying to work out what motivates people to do things while using some reasonably simple tools like the N/N web heuristics to guide you. More a way of thinking straight about what qualifies as a good design under a certain condition, and what hypotheses to research and test out of that. So it's contextual. It may seem like there should be a more logical formula, but there's really not a lot of technical/formal things (along the lines of, say, accounting or structural engineering) that lead you to the best approach. My frustration is not that people don't necessarily know about these things (although I bet if I mentioned Bruce Tog to anyone at work they'd give me a blank stare), but that they can't marshal them in their work.
• jonjacky 3y ago
  See also this author's Short Thoughts on Computers and Programming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32935466 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32935466
• nathias 3y ago
  Usability has increased, the problem is we are not the intended users, we are cattle to be sold as data or attention to the users who publish their adds.
• Ensorceled 3y ago
  The past decade or so, I've found myself in a constant battle with UI/UX team members. A big part of the battle seems to be a shift from power/tool user to consumer design paradigms. 20 years ago, most software was tools for professionals, now most software (on a usage level at least) is consumer software (literally consumers of video, social media etc.) Designers can't seem to switch modes and keep trying to apply "content consumption" rules and techniques to "jobs to be done" projects. A favourite is removing visible tools with 3-dot menus in the name of "cleaner" or "more intuitive" user interface that turns one-click actions into two clicks: 2 clicks hundreds of times a day for the tool users. Tables that show 10 items with 4 details each in the same screen real estate that used to show 20 items with 6-8 details. Dashboards that show 4 graphs instead of 10. Menus that take up the top 10-20% of the app. Massive H1 titles. One of my aunts changes around her furniture constantly, not because she has an idea of a better layout but because she's bored with the current layout. This seems to be a common personality trait in PMs and/or UX people. Adding a 4th table view to the product? ... "we should use this entirely different style" not because it's "better". Since COVID, I've run a weekly Google meet with friends ... it changes in some way pretty much every time we get together, most recently the request to join process has changed, again, and not for the better.
  • mk89 3y ago
    The best is that if you (junior or senior) bring this up, you're either shut down by management because you don't have the right expertise (how dare you, especially if you like me are mostly working in backend) or by the UX guy saying 1) it's a best practice, and 2) if they ran a research/survey, they found that it makes "almost no difference" - the major points are xyz (which is something really worse that requires immediate work). At a certain point just accept the way it is, and wait until the better way of doing things becomes the new best practice...
    • _y5hn 3y ago
      Not just a front end problem. As a customer of facebook, netflix, hbo,prime, disney+ etc., it continually amazes that these expensive devs can't make the backend remember what I watched and not. Combined with an "engaging" front end that hides what I'm interested in and shifts the interface randomly, the experience is pretty low.
• dangus 3y ago
  I think the idea that UI was consistent between 1992 and 2012 is laughable. It’s nostalgia and rose colored glasses. Cross platform applications were often based on entirely different codebases and looked nothing like each other or their native host OS. Examples: AOL Instant Messenger, Microsoft Office (persists to this day), Internet Explorer Macintosh compared to Windows. If applications like Slack are bad at being a part of the host OS then we can’t ignore the fact that this isn’t anything new. Numerous applications completely disregarded their host OS design language. Examples: Every Java application, RealPlayer, WinAmp, iTunes, America Online, Macromedia/Adobe Flash and Shockwave apps, HyperCard, the list goes on and on.
• ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  The defiance of purposeful and decades-old UI standards isn't just annoying and counter-productive; it can be life-threatening: https://jalopnik.com/did-jeeps-recalled-gear-shifter-contribute-to-the-death-1782255715 https://jalopnik.com/did-jeeps-recalled-gear-shifter-contrib...
• sannysanoff 3y ago
  It happened to me to be part of a project where design was made by a young female friend of mine. After reviewing it (lots of gray semitones, including dark gray text on black, and subtle difference between active and not active elements), I asked her "but..... why?". She honestly answered that she perfectly differentiates one from another. Later I learned that grown men have drastically different color perception than younger women.
• hjkl0 3y ago
  This is just a rant about some minor usability issues in a very small selection of applications used by the author, and mostly Gnome. There’s is nothing behind it. The title is click-bait and the article is a waste of time. There’s some very dubious claims, such as: > There was a time (roughly between 1994 and 2012) when a reasonably computer-literate user could sit down in front of almost any operating system and quickly get to grips with the GUI, no matter what their home base was. Windows, MacOS, CDE, OpenStep, OS/2 and even outliers like Amiga, Atari and BeOS all had more in common than what set them apart. Personally, having used many of these systems during those years, I completely disagree. There is no further context or evidence to support this claim. It’s just “the premise”. This is then contrasted with vague generalizations about the current situation: > Today, it seems we're on another track completely. Despite being endlessly fawned over by an army of professionals, Usability, or as it used to be called, "User Friendliness", is steadily declining. During the last ten years or so, adhering to basic standard concepts seems to have fallen out of fashion While there is no evidence for the claim that usability was better in the 90s, there are some examples to show that it’s worse now. But these are more like pet-peeves, and there’s no evidence or theory to show why they’re good or bad, just more vague generalizations. > Since Windows 2 (not 2000 - I'm really talking about Windows 2), users have been able to resize windows by dragging their top border and corners. Not so with Slack, anymore. This is not the decline of usability. It’s the decline in respect for the reader. There really was a time when a title faithfully represented the text that followed it, right? It must have been sometime around 1994.
• sharts 3y ago
  The problem is that UI/UX people are product and design people whose backgrounds were predominantly in art or similar. 99% of these folks have no background psychology, human factors, information science or the cognitive sciences. What can be expected when you hire these people?
  • easeout 3y ago
    Like any other kind of employee, you the stakeholder are responsible to get them trained in the role you delegate to them, or to evaluate that they meet your needs before hire. Designers I know do art for fun, but at work they design to solve business problems. They have a lot to say about this topic. In any case it isn't due to some character flaw on their part.
• raffraffraff 3y ago
  One of my frequent hobby horses is the area of portable music players (formerly called Walkmans or MP3 players, currently "DAPs"). I simply don't understand who would want to buy any of the currently available players because they'll are so terrible to use. The good ones were killed off by a combination of streaming services and Android devices. There are no more light-weight, simple players with high capacity, physical buttons and good battery life. You know, the kind of thing you could put into your pocket take on your run without bruising yourself. The kind of thing that has a legible screen, sane menu layout, that can read tags from your files and let you simply drag playlists into them. I know that there are people out there who want the same thing, but manufacturers are instead releasing gigantic bricks with protruding knobs and weird edges, huge battery-draining touch screens, running some dreadful Android hack of an OS. "This one had TWO DACS!". Really! Well I'm not in a sound-proofed listening room with €10000 monitors, I'm on a bus with some IEMs. Reviews rarely discuss the most important aspects of a portable music device, and instead gush like wine critics about the ... I don't know, smell(?) or taste(?) of the music. I'm only half joking. The more prestigious the reviewer the more bollocks they write, and half the time I can't even find mention of the weight or size. Or when they do, they're plain wrong (eg: "The Shanling Q1 is a light weight portable device"... No it's f*cking not, it's an awful brick with a shitty OS, bad battery life, overly sensitive buttons. I don't care how well it sounds if I can't get playlists into it and don't want to use it because it's a heavy blob with a shitty interface. 13 years ago Rockbox on the Sansa Clip+ was great. If we could simply produce that with today's tech I'd take it in front of any of these ludicrous hulking house-bricks that cost an arm and a leg. Am I off-topic?
  • rmellow 3y ago
    Your comment sent me on a multi day journey into DAPs. Indeed, it's heartbreaking how otherwise capable hardware is ruined by bad design decisions (UI, form factor, touchscreens, ...) I found a workable solution after many hours: 1. Bought a Hifi Walker H2 on Amazon. It suffers from poor UI design, including typos. Otherwise, the hardware is great. 2. Installed RockBox on it. After a little customization, it resolves the crappy UI. The one pain point is RockBox will not support Bluetooth or USB DAC, if you care about these features.
• dang 3y ago
  Discussed at the time (of the article): The Decline of Usability - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901541 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22901541 - April 2020 (695 comments)
• friend_and_foe 3y ago
  I read someone say it here and I really liked the way of framing it, UI elements are the API to interface with the human and changes should be regarded as breaking changes. Beyond that, I think there is a lot of disdain for users these days and a lot of design that doesn't think about the user, and goes for form over function, and even a lot of deliberate gimping to manipulate the user. UX in the modern day is a complete disaster, and it's not just software, it's everything. Cars, furniture, light switches, light bulbs, stoves, washing machines, you name it the UX is being destroyed. Bad UX used to be in the almost exclusive realm of government services, not anymore. It's like everyone just forgot what the point of all this is.
• hermitcrab 3y ago
  User interface design definately seems to increasingly favour aesthetics over usability. Form over function. It is very frustrating. For example the Chrome browser on Windows is hard to move around because there is almost no title bar to drag once you have a few tabs open. That seems such a basic thing to get wrong.
• sfc32 3y ago
  The strangest thing is that despite all the years of UX research, many websites today are covered in pop-ups all over the content, often containing flashing video, which has not been requested by the user. Then there is is the massive "cookie acceptance" buttons on every page. All on major, mainstream sites. The web is really becoming unusable due to UX problems.
• vonwoodson 3y ago
  Man, I'm sick of flat UI's and "Modern" design in general, even outside of computing. I watched a YT video of the "Millennium Aesthetic" and (not that I recommend that one in particular) was reminded about the world of design that wasn't a combination of IKEA and a metro station's schematic map. At this "modern design" point it feels "lazy and cheap" rather than "clean and futuristic". Have we really been living this "Flat" UI for over a decade now...? Lame. Boring. Ugly. Old.
• naruhodo 3y ago
  In LibreOffice applications there are huge menus and toolbars that enumerate all of the options available to me. A throwback to a simpler time. And yet, I can never find the option that does $SIMPLE_TASK that I want to do right now. IMO, the single best thing a UI designer could do for all of these applications is add a search box to quickly take me to the commands or dialogues I need to use. But yes, keep the menus, please.
• mediumsmart 3y ago
  macOS has a good user interface. I have no complaints. The last good UI on windows was 98SE. GNU/Linux is a special case, a good UI would add insult to injury. Edit: reading all the comments I should add that you have to setup macOS the way you want before it’s nice. And to do that you need some research if it’s the first time.