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So why does everything look the same (even to the same colours, locations (responsive & fixed) and sizes) after spending all that money and effort? And when som

So why does everything look the same (even to the same colours, locations (responsive & fixed) and sizes) after spending all that money and effort? And when something looks/behaves different, 'normal' (not in IT) people find it annoying to use? How can my wife find trivial operations in our shite IT banking site, but is lost on Instagram for some of the same settings? Our bank has an IT spending which is a rounding error on Insta's budget. I agree with what you say somewhat, but I believe about the massive difference between UI/UX. If I have to sign up to something for the first time or have to buy something, I want pretty pictures. If I have to work with something often (all day let's say), I want UX and I couldn't give a shite about UI; I want things easy to find, fast (not latency) etc. Combined would be great, but tell me what has that, because I always see one, never both done to perfection. If there is a 50/50 mix, it's usually annoying as hell on both sides. My most productive interfaces are ugly as hell ; no animations, no overhead and everything crammed on a screen and very fast. I would never 'sign up' for an application like that seeing it first, but I would never use any application long term for productivity like most people say is 'beautiful' because it's inefficient.

blowski 3y ago
> but is lost on Instagram for some settings Are they settings that Meta wants you to change?
troupo 3y ago
> I agree with what you say somewhat, but I believe about the massive difference between UI/UX. There's bo difference. The GUIs have started rapidly going downhill right after some idiots decided they are different and the rest of idiots believed it to be true. How can you have a UI without understanding how it functions and how it's used?
greatpostman 3y ago
Note that meta has A/B tested their ux to death. Any opinions you have don’t hold water to the aggregate opinion
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- mrits 3y ago
  When looking at the aggregate you can get things like the two political party system in the US that is a perfect compromise but doesn't function for anyone in the aggregate.
- notahacker 3y ago
  They've A/B tested Meta's goals of increasing user time on site and ad views, not user goals like discovering how to change the setting for something that annoyed them. A/B testing isn't immune to being as broken as the UX in some of the gnarlier bits too. Perhaps some of the links that simply don't work on the Facebook mobile app are busy signalling that they get way more clicks than the one that successfully loaded the content...
  - greatpostman 3y ago
    I don’t agree with this viewpoint. Major companies with billions in R&D and some of the smartest people on the planet are not making fundamental ux mistakes.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      Dead wrong. Google's terrible at UX. I once spent about five full minutes figuring out how to navigate my dad's phone app on his Android phone, so I could help him use it, after an OS upgrade. There were some tabs that didn't look like tabs and didn't indicate which was active, turns out. He'd have had no hope of figuring it out on his own. Once was helping my grandma add contacts in Gmail. She had failed repeatedly. Kept hitting "add contact" and it'd blank the form she was on, without adding the contact. This was because there were two same-color-and-weight add-contact buttons on the page, with the same copy, and one submitted the form, while the other gave you a blank contact form. You pretty much had to be familiar with how HTML nesting worked to have good shot at guessing which was the one you wanted, just by looking at it. That second one's an older version of the UI, but holy shit it was bad. They definitely make mistakes, and really obvious ones at that. Money and "smart" doesn't mean shit.
chefandy 3y ago
> So why does everything look the same (even to the same colours, locations (responsive & fixed) and sizes) after spending all that money and effort? And when something looks/behaves different, 'normal' (not in IT) people find it annoying to use? Really though? Does your web browser interface look the same as your sms/messaging interface, look the same as your car's annoying infotainment interface, look the same as your mail client, look the same as this website, look the same as your search engine? Do all of those things really look the same as they did 10 years ago? We use so many interfaces that are subtly shifting and being improved that the ones that work well for right now don't even stick out to us, and that's part of the problem. If you don't really notice that you're using an interface and are entirely focused on solving the problem you need to solve with that tool, then that's probably a really well designed interface. It's probably so smooth and intuitive that it seems like designing it that way would be obvious, but it's really, really not. > If I have to work with something often (all day let's say), I want UX and I couldn't give a shite about UI; I want things easy to find, fast (not latency) etc. Combined would be great, but tell me what has that, because I always see one, never both done to perfection. If there is a 50/50 mix, it's usually annoying as hell on both sides. You don't have an particularly accurate understanding of these roles. If a UI doesn't let advanced users solve their problems efficiently, then it's a shitty UI. "Pretty Pictures" where not appropriate is bad UI design no matter how pretty it is and people who don't think so are visual designers (at best) trying (and failing) to be UI designers. A well designed UI is an effective UI. All of those pretty UI mockups you see on sites like Dirbbbbbbble and behance are nothing more than aesthetic explorations. There's no way you could even know if they were good or bad UIs because you don't know exactly what problems they were trying to solve, for whom, and in what context. UX encompasses the entire experience. If you have a great UI but the world's shittiest email confirmation workflow, then you have a UX problem with a great UI. This misconception is why developers think adding the ability to select color themes in their application with a horrible UI will address UX problems-- which to any actual software designer is complete nonsense. > My most productive interfaces are ugly as hell[...] A couple I'm friends with had a broken kitchen faucet handle for ages-- it would just fall off unless you held it on while operating the faucet. Unfortunately, one of the necessary connector pieces was no longer available, so it wasn't a trivial fix. Once, when I was pet sitting their rabbits, I got so annoyed by the thing that I went home and made a wooden piece to fit in where the missing part went, and fixed it while they were still on vacation. It was supposed to be a surprise but I totally forgot about it, and a few months later my wife said to them "hey do you like having your kitchen faucet fixed?" They looked at her, perplexed, walked over to the kitchen faucet, tried to pull it off, and it obviously didn't come off. They were shocked! Why? Because they were so used to holding that damned handle on the faucet that it just became an part of their using that faucet. So not to be flip, but, the sky is blue, water is wet, and technical people are tolerant of and used to using shitty interfaces. Open source user interfaces are almost exclusively used by technical people; there are a few exceptions like Firefox, but Firefox's interface is managed by a team of foundation-funded full-time professional designers, (actually they do a lot of really great open usability work.) One exception I can think of is Inkscape. Most open source interfaces are absolutely awful. Why were they designed that way? They weren't. In fact, they weren't designed at all. They were assembled, ad hoc, to expose functionality in a way that made sense to whoever was creating the functionality. Those interfaces, more often than not, are more representative of their implementation than the problem they're solving, and unless you have a working mental model of how software works, and often specifically how that exact process works, the interfaces are practically useless. There's a big difference between harder-to-learn-but-amazing interfaces-- vim, emacs, oboe, airbrush, airplane, etc. -- and interfaces that are entirely unedited. People are always going to be most productive using interfaces that they're used to, and that often mistakenly leads them to believe that what they're used to is objectively good. If you ask nearly any group of professional photographers how many hate Adobe, most will raise their hands. Ask them how many have used Gimp, they'll almost all raise their hand. If you ask them how many used Gimp more than once, they'll almost all lower them. Ask them why, and they will almost guaranteed cite the poor interface. While many dedicated and experienced FOSS developers (which I am) will cite Adobe's marketing practices as the reason people use Photoshop instead of Gimp, I call bullshit. You'll find many more photographers using Affinity Photo than Gimp, and considering Gimp is free, that says a lot. Who will you find using Gimp? Developers that need a photo editor. Why? They're so used to holding on the faucet that they don't even recognize when they see a properly working one. (And they'll often get really mad for even implying it needs to be fixed.) You also don't see that split with Inkscape. Most people who professionally work with vector art choose Illustrator as their primary tool, but most of them cite exactly the reasons developers assume people continue to use photoshop: overall smoothness, ecosystem integration, file type compatibility, etc. There are some legitimate shortcomings in Inkscape-- the type tools are just not as good which matters for graphic designers, for example. But lots of people who do vector art professionally do use inkscape. Regarding Instagram et al, before you question whether or not the interface designer did a good job communicating, you need to know what they were supposed to be communicating. I'll bet they did a fantastic job at surfacing what what marketing people thought was useful for marketing, sucking in people's attention, and funneling them into profitable paths. The problem isn't that they're bad at it— the problem is that they're good at it while working for an organization that has shit motives. Similarly, the developers that make Instagram are still very very good developers even if a lot of their energies go into making super shady privacy-smashing telemetry. The problem isn't developers or software development, it's the goals handed to those developers.

blowski 3y ago

> but is lost on Instagram for some settings Are they settings that Meta wants you to change?

troupo 3y ago

> I agree with what you say somewhat, but I believe about the massive difference between UI/UX. There's bo difference. The GUIs have started rapidly going downhill right after some idiots decided they are different and the rest of idiots believed it to be true. How can you have a UI without understanding how it functions and how it's used?

greatpostman 3y ago

Note that meta has A/B tested their ux to death. Any opinions you have don’t hold water to the aggregate opinion

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
mrits 3y ago
When looking at the aggregate you can get things like the two political party system in the US that is a perfect compromise but doesn't function for anyone in the aggregate.
notahacker 3y ago
They've A/B tested Meta's goals of increasing user time on site and ad views, not user goals like discovering how to change the setting for something that annoyed them. A/B testing isn't immune to being as broken as the UX in some of the gnarlier bits too. Perhaps some of the links that simply don't work on the Facebook mobile app are busy signalling that they get way more clicks than the one that successfully loaded the content...
- greatpostman 3y ago
  I don’t agree with this viewpoint. Major companies with billions in R&D and some of the smartest people on the planet are not making fundamental ux mistakes.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    Dead wrong. Google's terrible at UX. I once spent about five full minutes figuring out how to navigate my dad's phone app on his Android phone, so I could help him use it, after an OS upgrade. There were some tabs that didn't look like tabs and didn't indicate which was active, turns out. He'd have had no hope of figuring it out on his own. Once was helping my grandma add contacts in Gmail. She had failed repeatedly. Kept hitting "add contact" and it'd blank the form she was on, without adding the contact. This was because there were two same-color-and-weight add-contact buttons on the page, with the same copy, and one submitted the form, while the other gave you a blank contact form. You pretty much had to be familiar with how HTML nesting worked to have good shot at guessing which was the one you wanted, just by looking at it. That second one's an older version of the UI, but holy shit it was bad. They definitely make mistakes, and really obvious ones at that. Money and "smart" doesn't mean shit.

chefandy 3y ago

> So why does everything look the same (even to the same colours, locations (responsive & fixed) and sizes) after spending all that money and effort? And when something looks/behaves different, 'normal' (not in IT) people find it annoying to use? Really though? Does your web browser interface look the same as your sms/messaging interface, look the same as your car's annoying infotainment interface, look the same as your mail client, look the same as this website, look the same as your search engine? Do all of those things really look the same as they did 10 years ago? We use so many interfaces that are subtly shifting and being improved that the ones that work well for right now don't even stick out to us, and that's part of the problem. If you don't really notice that you're using an interface and are entirely focused on solving the problem you need to solve with that tool, then that's probably a really well designed interface. It's probably so smooth and intuitive that it seems like designing it that way would be obvious, but it's really, really not. > If I have to work with something often (all day let's say), I want UX and I couldn't give a shite about UI; I want things easy to find, fast (not latency) etc. Combined would be great, but tell me what has that, because I always see one, never both done to perfection. If there is a 50/50 mix, it's usually annoying as hell on both sides. You don't have an particularly accurate understanding of these roles. If a UI doesn't let advanced users solve their problems efficiently, then it's a shitty UI. "Pretty Pictures" where not appropriate is bad UI design no matter how pretty it is and people who don't think so are visual designers (at best) trying (and failing) to be UI designers. A well designed UI is an effective UI. All of those pretty UI mockups you see on sites like Dirbbbbbbble and behance are nothing more than aesthetic explorations. There's no way you could even know if they were good or bad UIs because you don't know exactly what problems they were trying to solve, for whom, and in what context. UX encompasses the entire experience. If you have a great UI but the world's shittiest email confirmation workflow, then you have a UX problem with a great UI. This misconception is why developers think adding the ability to select color themes in their application with a horrible UI will address UX problems-- which to any actual software designer is complete nonsense. > My most productive interfaces are ugly as hell[...] A couple I'm friends with had a broken kitchen faucet handle for ages-- it would just fall off unless you held it on while operating the faucet. Unfortunately, one of the necessary connector pieces was no longer available, so it wasn't a trivial fix. Once, when I was pet sitting their rabbits, I got so annoyed by the thing that I went home and made a wooden piece to fit in where the missing part went, and fixed it while they were still on vacation. It was supposed to be a surprise but I totally forgot about it, and a few months later my wife said to them "hey do you like having your kitchen faucet fixed?" They looked at her, perplexed, walked over to the kitchen faucet, tried to pull it off, and it obviously didn't come off. They were shocked! Why? Because they were so used to holding that damned handle on the faucet that it just became an part of their using that faucet. So not to be flip, but, the sky is blue, water is wet, and technical people are tolerant of and used to using shitty interfaces. Open source user interfaces are almost exclusively used by technical people; there are a few exceptions like Firefox, but Firefox's interface is managed by a team of foundation-funded full-time professional designers, (actually they do a lot of really great open usability work.) One exception I can think of is Inkscape. Most open source interfaces are absolutely awful. Why were they designed that way? They weren't. In fact, they weren't designed at all. They were assembled, ad hoc, to expose functionality in a way that made sense to whoever was creating the functionality. Those interfaces, more often than not, are more representative of their implementation than the problem they're solving, and unless you have a working mental model of how software works, and often specifically how that exact process works, the interfaces are practically useless. There's a big difference between harder-to-learn-but-amazing interfaces-- vim, emacs, oboe, airbrush, airplane, etc. -- and interfaces that are entirely unedited. People are always going to be most productive using interfaces that they're used to, and that often mistakenly leads them to believe that what they're used to is objectively good. If you ask nearly any group of professional photographers how many hate Adobe, most will raise their hands. Ask them how many have used Gimp, they'll almost all raise their hand. If you ask them how many used Gimp more than once, they'll almost all lower them. Ask them why, and they will almost guaranteed cite the poor interface. While many dedicated and experienced FOSS developers (which I am) will cite Adobe's marketing practices as the reason people use Photoshop instead of Gimp, I call bullshit. You'll find many more photographers using Affinity Photo than Gimp, and considering Gimp is free, that says a lot. Who will you find using Gimp? Developers that need a photo editor. Why? They're so used to holding on the faucet that they don't even recognize when they see a properly working one. (And they'll often get really mad for even implying it needs to be fixed.) You also don't see that split with Inkscape. Most people who professionally work with vector art choose Illustrator as their primary tool, but most of them cite exactly the reasons developers assume people continue to use photoshop: overall smoothness, ecosystem integration, file type compatibility, etc. There are some legitimate shortcomings in Inkscape-- the type tools are just not as good which matters for graphic designers, for example. But lots of people who do vector art professionally do use inkscape. Regarding Instagram et al, before you question whether or not the interface designer did a good job communicating, you need to know what they were supposed to be communicating. I'll bet they did a fantastic job at surfacing what what marketing people thought was useful for marketing, sucking in people's attention, and funneling them into profitable paths. The problem isn't that they're bad at it— the problem is that they're good at it while working for an organization that has shit motives. Similarly, the developers that make Instagram are still very very good developers even if a lot of their energies go into making super shady privacy-smashing telemetry. The problem isn't developers or software development, it's the goals handed to those developers.