25 ms·

The Decline of Usability: Revisited

229 points by myth2018 3y ago

theLiminator 3y ago
It's very sad, I agree that aesthetics/artistic sense of UX designers is absoutely trumping usability in very many modern applications. I always point to wikipedia as something that has great UX (though I think some of their recent choices have worsened usability). Like making their table of contents a hamburger dropdown.
- StableAlkyne 3y ago
  Part of it is that UX/UI designers are hired based on their portfolio. This imposes a bias towards those who can wow their interviews with flashy mockups/workflows on figma. If it comes down between someone whose design looks like it came out of Win98 but has the information density of a terminal, and someone whose design looks cool but has the information density of a picture book, most teams pick the latter. Those same people go on to design the applications that get shipped. The OP is right in that we lost the ability to design something like mIRC - the people doing the hiring value form over function.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
    > This imposes a bias towards those who can wow their interviews with flashy mockups/workflows on figma. Sounds a hell of a lot like leetcode-optimized interviewees...
    - theLiminator 3y ago
      I think a major part of UX design is that a lot of people enter the field thinking it's an art-adjacent field because they want to do something similar to art. They often lose sight of the goal of usability in pursuit of their own aesthetic sensibilities. A lot of UX designers hate that the most usable designs are actually some of the ugliest/plainest.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
        Yup. Don Norman got a lot of blowback from designers, when he published The Psychology of Everyday Things (which was changed to The Design of Everyday Things). He even wrote a sort of “let me explain” follow-up book, called Emotional Design. But I am actually going through exactly this, right now. I just got off a Zoom call, with our designer, because the first batch of test users couldn’t figure out that there are action buttons. Many designers want users to admire the UX; not use it.
  - esafak 3y ago
    Does anyone have a better idea for interviewing designers then?
- deleted 3y ago
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- myth2018 3y ago
  > aesthetics/artistic sense of UX designers is absoutely trumping usability in very many modern applications Indeed. And I get totally stupefied by how much freedom and authority they are given in relation to the other people supposed to provide inputs for the project. My stock broker did that. They had a web app that didn't just work -- it was acknowledged as very good. Fully customizable, you could open many sub-windows and monitor an arbitrary number of quotes depending on your strategy. The screen could turn into a mess, but it was your mess, and that's ok as long as it made sense to you, the user. I used their web app for more than a decade. Last year they replaced it by something they have the guts to call "the enhanced experience". That fuming pile of sh*t enforces a certain geometry for the screen that makes it absolutely clear that the kids who designed that garbage never traded stocks in their lives. But what scares me most is: what the hell the managers who approved that crap had in their minds?
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  > Like making their table of contents a hamburger dropdown I still go hunting for the TOC, get confused, and take a second to remember they hid it. Like, daily. It’s a couple extra seconds but it’s all the damn time.
enobrev 3y ago
I don't necessarily disagree with most points made here, but this has a close resemblance to the arguments so many seemed to have when gnome 3 was released because the "start button" (or "panels") was replaced. It's ok to miss it, especially if your parents' first computer was running Windows 95, but that doesn't mean the OS UX can't / shouldn't be improved. I personally consider the improvements significant. Experimentation is important and only change is constant. That said, change for the sake of change is a real problem and adding design trends and ego to the mix can make for a lot of waste and annoyance. Otherwise minor nits... > What is the "Archive" icon even supposed to depict? The lower part of a printer, with a sheet of paper sticking out? Storage Box. Seems obvious to me, but reasonable that it wouldn't be obvious to everyone. I probably wouldn't get it without the text, but I also accept that some concepts don't transfer to iconography easily. > "Sweep" is most likely a broom - but would you be able to determine that without the text? I can't imagine what else that would be.
- mrob 3y ago
  >> "Sweep" is most likely a broom - but would you be able to determine that without the text? >I can't imagine what else that would be. It could be a hand holding a fencing foil. The scale of the various parts is wrong, but it's also wrong if you assume it's a broom.
  - dmoy 3y ago
    Pedantically, it would have to be an epee, not a foil. The handguard on a foil is less curved.
- breadwinner 3y ago
  > that doesn't mean the OS UX can't / shouldn't be improved Of course, OS UX can be improved. But not all changes qualify as "improvement". See some issues caused by flat UI here: https://uxcritique-blog.tumblr.com/ https://uxcritique-blog.tumblr.com/
- fian 3y ago
  Due to my age and work experience, I'm also familiar with archiving involving storing physical documents in cardboard boxes. My current job really is paper free and graduate employees joining will never deal with archive boxes. Similarly, the icons on my mobile for making a call, answering a call and hanging up are all based on the shape of the handset for a corded phone. The Save button icon in many applications is based on a 3.5" floppy disk. I sometimes need to save data as a PDF, which in many cases involves "printing" to PDF. The icon is based on a paper printer, but the action I am using it for doesn't include any external device or paper. This makes me wonder about what icons we could use in the future where so many actions are done via a touch interface on a phone/tablet. There are less physical objects involved in common actions. So the skeuomorphic approach to icons for buttons is becoming less valid over time especially for younger people.
tacker2000 3y ago
My pet peeve nowadays is when apps or websites just crop the names of stuff (like files for example) and add “…”, so that you have to hover every element to see the full name in a tooltip. Information density has decreased even as screens have gotten bigger and LCDs have higher and higher resolutions. I dont know why designers feel the need to use such large margins, padding and whitespace everywhere.
- andrekandre 3y ago
  > I dont know why designers feel the need to use such large margins, padding and whitespace everywhere. probably because they are designing for mobile first?
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    Yes, mobile-first design has greatly accelerated the decline of usability in interfaces, but that decline also began before mobile-first really became a thing. All I know is that usability keeps getting worse as time goes on. Where is the floor?
    - esafak 3y ago
      > Where is the floor? You could try to cram it into an Apple Watch?
      - blackbear_ 3y ago
        That's still good compared to the chat-only interfaces of the future.
        deleted 3y ago
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        M95D 3y ago
        And I thought Next-Next-Finish was bad...
jampekka 3y ago
The trend seems to be to make everything into appliances, masses of individual ad-hoc tasks, all with their idiosyncratic logic and no way of interoperation or composing them to accomplish anything but the exact task intended. There's an App for That. Except when there isn't it Just Can't Be Done. P.S. Gnome 3 is way ahead of Blender in usability. Blender is nowadays very usable, but it's still not great. Having a billion buttons shoved away in menu hierarches is not power, it's more akin to having a billion idiosyncratic Apps. Edit: Want to add that Blender usability keeps on getting better. The increased use of the node interface is making Blender a lot more usable and powerful. Being able to connect any too ports is something that would require combinatorial explosion with buttons and menus.
- deleted 3y ago
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swalling 3y ago
"One of the two "slacks" I'm a member of recently got a UI update - and the other didn't." This is because major changes at basically all business software companies are rolled out on a team-by-team basis, rather than per user account. Also note that from the screenshots that he is on Free tier Slack teams in both instances. When you do not pay for a business communication tool, you should not really have expectations of stability or coherence. You're getting a free sample of a product that is meant to be paid for. What he was experiencing was a beta or gradual rollout where Free teams were being used as test subjects to see how the redesign impacts user engagement. If you don't pay for a product, you are the product.
- jujube3 3y ago
  In this case, you cannot escape the enshittification by paying. Still not as bad as the "slacksticka" which is their icon now
  - swalling 3y ago
    You can't escape it, but if you pay for an enterprise plan you typically have huge amounts of advance notice (monthly or quarterly roadmap updates, plus an account team at your service and the ability to demand face time / feedback with the product managers). This makes a big difference to your process of change management in handling redesigns, and influence over even relatively minor UI updates.
    - beaugunderson 3y ago
      as someone who pays for Slack, you could only push out the absolutely godawful recent update to December. this is also the only UI update I'm aware of that had its own change.org petition (with thousands of signers!).
- deleted 3y ago
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paulddraper 3y ago
> What is the "Archive" icon even supposed to depict? The lower part of a printer, with a sheet of paper sticking out? It's a storage box (also known as a "banker's box"), used for long-term storage of documents or other office materials. [1] I guarantee everyone in a computer/IT setting has seen one. [1] https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/6275549/Office-Depot-Brand-Standard-Duty-Corrugated/ https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/6275549/Office-Depot-...
- marcus_holmes 3y ago
  I was confused by the author's ignorance about this, too. How do you work in the industry for 25+ years and not know what an archive box looks like?
  - Findecanor 3y ago
    Because an "archive box" is a thing that is not necessarily a common occurrence in office culture around the world. The author is Swedish. Google's translation of "archive box" is "arkivlåda". That is not a thing over here, and is not even in the dictionary. An image search for the Swedish word resulted in many boxes that looked very different. And even if I see it as a box, it looks also like a box of printer paper to me. (It's the "Fresh paper" icon! :) ) Either way, you are diverting away from the main issue of the paragraph: Would you recognise what the icon represents even without the text?
    - solardev 3y ago
      I've worked in America for 20 years and I never knew about this either. I just thought that was a regular cardboard box, and it never occurred to me the archive icon is trying to depict such a thing. I always just thought it was an ugly file folder or something. I never had to use such a box in real life.
      - albedoa 3y ago
        > I never had to use such a box in real life. Okay but that type of box was all over the national and global news this year: https://www.google.com/search?&q=trump+bathroom+documents&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?&q=trump+bathroom+documents&tb...
dannysuarezpab 3y ago
Interesting reading. We need more innovation in UI/UIX. Personally, my mental health is affected by bad experiences and get flooded by a lot of content from different sources we need new ways for content consumption.
arzig 3y ago
I actually think slack is both an example of poor design and good design. While the multi-tenant with zero shared ui elements is a monstrosity, I think they do a really good job at discoverability. One of the things application level menus aren’t great at is connecting what element must be focused to take the action. In something like word, it’s all a document so most things are applicable most of the time, but that breaks down in chat like slack where there is a notion of chats, files, links, users, etc and the localized contextual controls while not always great aren’t terrible either.
- eep_social 3y ago
  Slack, assuming you’re referring to the new design is exceptionally poor. Putting a sidebar on my sidebar so I can get notified while I’m being notified isn’t the discoverability I’m looking for. It’s as if they took a discord screenshot and copied it without even attempting to understand how it works.
  - imbnwa 3y ago
    Would absolutely rather use Discord than Slack
    - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
      I'm continuously surprised that Discord hasn't made a play in the Slack/Teams/etc space. They are dramatically more competent at it than their competition.
jonas21 3y ago
Is the author really holding up mIRC as an example of good usability? Aside from the standard window controls, I can't make sense of what a single thing on that screen does.
- hyperpape 3y ago
  In particular, the icons are really bad. I get that modern flat icons can be a little abstract, but they’re at least visually distinct at a glance. Here you have three icons in a row that feature tiny text (11pt? 10pt) text above equally tiny icons. It’s weird, because in the abstract I agree with a lot of the criticisms and principles in the post, but this example is so bad.
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    On the sort of low DPI monitor the interface was designed for, 10pt text is quite legible. Heck, even 8pt text is legible.
  - pseudalopex 3y ago
    > I get that modern flat icons can be a little abstract, but they’re at least visually distinct at a glance. They are not.
- appplication 3y ago
  This sort of reminds me of the grumps who complain that the masses haven’t embraced Vim, RSS feeds, arch linux, fediverse, etc. Like it’s fine that you like them, but I’m surprised you’re surprised other people don’t quite get the appeal.
  - myaccountonhn 3y ago
    As someone who uses all those techs, what makes me more sad is when I can’t continue to use this tech because some other company force me to use their shitty software that isn’t interoperable in any way and I am forced to use it because of work/friends. However, I am aware enough to understand why others don’t get the appeal. At least with email I can pick my client and they can pick theirs which is more “user friendly”. Slack etc forces me to use workflows I hate.
6510 3y ago
I hear Chinese supper apps are so full of features that people frequently show others how to do things or what they've discovered. My guess would be that in the new UI swindle finding a button gives a sense of accomplishment. Recognizing 2 or 3 gives a sense of knowing the application and makes a person curious what the other buttons do. If they cant take what they've learned to other applications the lock in is stronger. Empower the user but only slightly while simultaneously making them feel slightly dumb. Of course there is also the new culture where the mission is less important than not hurting peoples feelings. You cant just tell people anymore that their shit sucks and that they need to start over. Not do that often enough and the ugly bloated flat icon monstrosity is going to ship. No one can stop it now. In the end everyone got used to the new slashdot design and all worked out... (lol)
- Qwertious 3y ago
  >I hear Chinese supper apps are so full of features Do you mean "super apps"? I legitimately can't tell if that's a typo or not.
seanwilson 3y ago
> In discussions like these, there's usually at least one person who shows up to demand data or research, but curiously never presents anything to back up their own claims about modern UI superiority. It's easy to make fun of particularly bad modern examples, but I personally think people really take for granted that the baseline of usability for many areas has hugely increased over the last 20 years. My recollection of some things that made older GUIs less usable, especially for non-techy people: vital functionality had to hunted for in menus or (much worse) right-click context menus, annoying modals everywhere, scary technical language, having to read the manual, lack of undo/redo/autosave, complex install processes, information overload sometimes, confusing file systems (like c:\ and weird file extensions), sharing and collaborating on files was cumbersome. This is really obvious if you've ever had to help friends/family use something over the phone, as you realise how much knowledge you have to build up to confidently use some software. It's really amazing what non-techy people can easily do on their phones and computers now, like real-time collaborative editing of a document (with automatic saving and unlimited undo) over a video call. Things like this used to be a nightmare to setup and use, and now it's taken for granted.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > the baseline of usability for many areas has hugely increased over the last 20 years. I genuinely think the opposite has happened. Most of the things you cite as being problems with UI of the 2000s is really better applied to software of the late 80s/early 90s, although in all eras there have been both fantastic and terrible UIs. But from a usability perspective, I think things peaked in the early 2000s. > It's really amazing what non-techy people can do easily on their phones and computers now It truly is! But that's about functionality improving, not about usability improving.
  - chiefalchemist 3y ago
    A few years ago, my then employer, due to a certain client's requirement, had everyone take a certification course on application security. One of the things that stuck in my head was the course advocating for cryptic error messages. The reason given was that the message shouldn't highlight a particular kink in the armor (if you will) that an able hacker could then try to exploit. Too vague and cryptic was best. I admit, it makes a lot of sense. Annoying as a user, but necessary for application safety and security.
local_crmdgeon 3y ago
Uber is also completely fucking unusable now. Just ads and upsells
garrickvanburen 3y ago
the discoverability aspect of usability ("what can this system do") has fallen the worst. I'm looking at you Google Assistant/Alexa/Siri/ChatGPT.
blahedo 3y ago
Way back in 2008 or so, shortly after the "ribbon" arrived in the MS Word interface, I was teaching a CS class that had a unit on UI, so we spent a bunch of time deconstructing it and comparing it to the menu-based interfaces we were all (then) still used to. I was careful to point out that unfamiliarity with the new interface wasn't necessarily the same as it being bad, especially if with a little additional training and practice we could become more efficient and/or it aided in discoverability for newer users. Although I didn't use the same words as the OP I was unironically suggesting that MS must have done a bunch of research to show that these interfaces would be an improvement in usability. Joke's on me! Fifteen years later and I still can't fucking find anything I want to do in the ribbon. I use various MS products at least a couple times a week (though day-to-day is more Libreoffice when it can't just be vim) and despite regular use I still find that I routinely have to google "how do I X in Microsoft Word/Excel/etc" for values of X that are very standard tasks that I am deeply confident I would be able to find on my own in a menu. And once I do find out how to do something, even if it's something I'm going to be doing a bunch, there's no indication of a shortcut or keyboard equivalent that I could train myself on, to become an actual power user of the interface. It's all completely maddening.
- inamberclad 3y ago
  I think this kind of user abuse is intentional. If people put the time and energy, and emotional effort into understanding a piece of software, they're less likely to jump ship.
  - brutusborn 3y ago
    Wouldn’t that suggest it is accidental? Making it harder to understand a piece of software seems to cause people to look for easier to understand alternatives.
    - shiroiuma 3y ago
      If the software has a small marketshare and is struggling to get new users, then this would be true. When the software is already hugely dominant, the same dynamic does not apply. Trying to lock-in customers when they're not customers yet is a bad idea, but when they're already your customers, it makes business sense.
pugworthy 3y ago
I guess I always look at UI as like movies. Sure, we know a good movie when we see it, and "everyone" knows what a good movie is. Yet that's totally wrong as one person's "Dumb and Dumber" is another person's "Titanic" - and you should look at that comment from both perspectives. People still make bad movies that should be good. And make good movies that should be bad. If it was easy, everyone would make good movies.
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  People might disagree on what's a great movie, but I don't think anyone disagrees on the very worst movies. No one actually thinks Gigli was a good movie.
  - bigstrat2003 3y ago
    I would be willing to bet any amount that at least one person unironically loves Gigli. Art is subjective, that's the whole point.
- ykonstant 3y ago
  >I guess I always look at UI as like movies. That is a big part of the problem; designers are tasked with creating something to be used by a vast array of people: those with diminishing eyesight, unsteady hands, professionals who need adaptable elements for advanced workflows, newbies who need to be onboarded quickly and smoothly, dilettantes who want to make use of basic software functionalities, hackers who want to extend or modify the software... an endless list of situations, people and workflows; and all that designers see is aesthetics. UI is much more than aesthetics, and a UI designer is much more than an artist expressing themselves or their brand; or at least, it should be.
qwery 3y ago
Criticism of GUI design trends like this is always attacked for being out of touch -- "you just want everything to cater to your weird taste", "most of the users aren't experts", "iOS enabled my papa to send emails, he never even worked out how to turn on the Macintosh II SE", and so on -- this comes from a well-intentioned place but doesn't really hold up under scrutiny. The problems described here are problems for less-experienced/non-technical/casual users, too. In fact, it seems reasonable to assume that friction arising from the design of the UI will have a greater impact on non-expert users. Highly proficient and experienced users are able to work around problems more easily, recognise the (changed) patterns more easily, etc. They are also more able to articulate what the problems are and are more likely to dedicate time to doing so. When your non-technical family member faces some inscrutable change to their workflow, they seek your help to get their task done, not to analyse the design or intent behind the UI -- and you know that, so you use your expertise to adapt their workflow to the new design and they thank you for it. When your professional family member faces some inscrutable change to their workflow, they tell you how shit software is these days and find a solution on their own. So on one hand you hear "help me get my thing done" and on the other you hear "software used to be better". It's not surprising that people treat the cases differently -- even though both are problems stemming from UI design decisions. editendum: I guess it's worth pointing out explicitly that usability is not universal. Some software is complicated because it's for doing complicated work.
userbinator 3y ago
Slack is not some backwater cottage industry. It's a big company with thousands of employees and millions of users - many of whom are paying good money for their software. ...and therein lies the root cause underlying the majority of these useless changes: Too many people for the amount of required work. In much the same way that "design by committee" often leads to horribly complex abominations, I've noticed that the bigger the development team (and perhaps the company behind the product), the worse the software turns out to be; and usability is no exception. At the other extreme, products of a single developer very rarely make hostile UI changes, because they mostly can't afford to. Then sometimes they get bought out by a bigger company, and the useless changes start showing up shortly afterwards.
- pmontra 3y ago
  I saw this happen many times: 1. We have to add this feature, we need an icon, menu item, anything, for it. 2. It doesn't fit well in any of our menus, we should stop a moment and think about the UI, maybe like this and that. 3. Great but it takes too long, we need this tomorrow, on this Friday, or at any very demanding deadline. 4. Ok, so we add an icon there or into the options and people will figure out. We'll fix it later. 5. Later never happens because we're again at step 1 very soon.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  Firebase seems a case in point. You have to do all this weird Google cloud shit to get something basic working. I posit that using Firebase is more complicated at the outset than installing an ORM and using postgres. And being nosql it gets worse from that point on. So it’s raison detre of making it easy to build apps is lost.
- rob74 3y ago
  Slack gets a lot of flak, but in my experience they're far from having the worst web app UI. For instance, have you tried the abomination that is the AWS management console? Not sure about the pricing for Slack and for AWS, but I bet companies tend to pay a lot more for AWS, so you'd think they would be able to come up with an acceptable interface - but no, it's a Rube Goldberg-esque monstrosity where even the simplest tasks require you to traverse at least five slow-loading pages...
notbeuller 3y ago
So many, many rants could come from this and my blood is boiling in fervent agreement. But two thoughts: as hard as it is to use the contrast-less, contextless obscure icons and "is it checked or toggled or active", try working with someone and having to explain "click that thing, I don't know what it is, no, the other one, to the left, arghghhg." But really, maybe these aren't our interfaces anymore - the lack of scrollbars on macOS is because of the touch, pinch and swipe touch interfaces, and the people that are now very happily consuming content (and creating, although less so) without having to worry about that extra bit of information. But the rest of us suffer, and the "increase contrast" and "reduce motion" checkboxes don't do nearly enough to reconfigure the UI. I never really appreciated the Mac modding community[1] (kaleidoscope?) and the powerful frameworks they had to build UIs, 90% of which I'd happily switch to today if I could. [1] https://botsin.space/@osxthemes/111416576638238992 https://botsin.space/@osxthemes/111416576638238992
- Miiko 3y ago
  > lack of scrollbars on macOS Do you know that you can tell your Mac to "always show scroll bars" on System Settings -> Appearance page? Anyway, while I tend to agree that Snow Leopard UI was the best and it went downhill since then, the latest macOS is still very usable and I do not suffer on Mac at all (unlike Windows 11, where I had to install a 3rd party app to at least partially revert what they did with UI)
  - bigstrat2003 3y ago
    Sadly the UI isn't even the worst part of Windows these days. It's the ads. It's beyond belief that I should get ads in software that I paid for, yet here we are. I got so sick of it that I switched to daily driving Linux. It's not perfect (I'm a gamer and games can have issues even though they mostly work great), but at least I don't have ads on my desktop.
    - shiroiuma 3y ago
      Microsoft did the right thing in putting ads on the Windows desktop. They can make more money that way, and increase shareholder value. For every user like you that gets angry and switches to Linux, there's countless others that don't, and MS makes more profit showing them annoying ads, so it's a net gain for them.
gavinhoward 3y ago
For a long time, I've contemplated building a Qt competitor, a cross-platform library for building GUI's. I'm still considering it, but if I did do it, it would need to address accessibility and usability first. And this post is a good example of why. I think I'd take usability guidelines from 20-30 years ago instead of modern ones.
- ykonstant 3y ago
  I have been praying for a GUI library that at least supports a skeuomorphic style for UI elements; this, however, requires some creative designers without preconceptions ready to take on a challenge. The challenge is to create a forward-looking skeuomorphic design with subdivisions adapted to different devices and workflows (separated e.g. by screen size and by expected expertise of the user). This is hard to do when most designers are stuck in the non sequitur that skeuomorphism means a dated 90s feel (a baffling lack of imagination for a seemingly creative profession) or that a single design instance should support all devices (I will not use a word processor on my phone unless absolutely necessary, and I sure as hell don't want to touch-click gigantic rectangles on my widescreen Microsoft). And of course, as you say, it is important to read the rich HCI research conducted over many decades since the 60s, and not dismiss it as "old".
  - gavinhoward 3y ago
    Well, I'll say that I won't just support skeumorphic design; it will be the only option. :) The rest of your post lays out my plan perfectly. Yes, it will be a challenge, but I think you are absolutely right that UI's need to be designed for their audience, like blog posts and other writing. Now the question is: if you need to use such a library in a commercial context, would you happily pay for it? I can't justify the time unless I could make money.
squigglydonut 3y ago
Design has nothing to do with usability. Companies do not value designers. At least that has been my experience. When I was young and gullible I was hireable. Now I am too stubborn to compromise on my values to be a part of the bureaucracies and pandering.
- andrei_says_ 3y ago
  There’s a whole book dedicated to turning gullible obedient designers happily producing malicious dark patterns into designers who own their responsibility to society and the end users. It’s called Ruined by Design, by Mike Monteiro. He also has a talk on the same topic. Both are highly recommended. In short, a designer has a responsibility to use the craft for good and refuse to weaponize it. For this to be a real possibility, we need a union standing behind the designer.
quickthrower2 3y ago
Cloud and SaaS. It is all about constantly mutating interfaces, underlying concepts and resources.
effdee 3y ago
> What is the "Archive" icon even supposed to depict? It looks like a labelled archive box to me. <https://www.google.com/search?q=archive+box&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=archive+box&tbm=isch>
- creshal 3y ago
  It would've been a lot more clear with old-style coloured isometric icons. Making everything vague, monochrome silhouettes definitely wasn't an improvement.
gifvenut 3y ago
The author has some valid points, but let’s not forget that people used to critizice those old UIs at the time as well, ever since the first GUIs appeared to replace command line interfaces.
2d8a875f-39a2-4 3y ago
The issue is really that "Usability" in the sense of "helping people achieve their goals" isn't really a priority for most of these vendors. When they talk about "usability" they really mean: engagement, retention, distinctive branding, and optimising for whatever KPIs are important for their business. Then there are the economic pressures of supporting multiple platforms, so you get shit like Electron and PWA where for a fraction of the price you can present the same semi-usable interface on different platforms - where it looks like your signature style but doesn't look like any other apps on the platform.
- strix_varius 3y ago
  > optimising for whatever KPIs are important for their business. Or, for their promo packet. "Our usability research showed that our UI redesign was not worth the cost to the users" is a sentence I've never heard in fifteen years of software development. But I have seen dozens of decks that include a slide of hand picked quotes from a small sample of test users extolling the virtues of the presenter's Q3 project.
fifticon 3y ago
This is evident in physical products. We have perfected 'crap for the masses', unfortunately. Standard problems: - I just bought a (bulk) phone charging station. Even though I attempted to pay more to get a non-shitty product, it has no on/off button. Instead, I can unplug it manually from the socket each morning :-/. - music volume: When I stream music from my android phone to one of our not-cheap bluetooth speakers, the volume can be adjusted in something like 16 possible increments. In practice, there are 3-4 possibilities: (A) so low you can't hear anything, and the frequency distribution is off. (B) almost but not quite audible. (C) audible, but a bit too loud. (D) so loud you fear structural damage to your kitchen. In practice, I toggle back and forth between B and C, and wish just that interval had analog subdivisions. - two relatively expensive bluetooth speakers (sigh) in our house have no 'tangible' power buttons, only icon-marked areas where you can hover your finger for the same effect. I lack words to describe how annoying it is to have to visually ascertain your finger is near where the almost-invisible icon is. I have marked them with nail-polish, but it is not enough. They are both cylinder-shaped, so there are 360 choices. As I see it, there should be good money to make, in just offering physical knobs on your gadget, and possibly analog controls. As a caveat, precisely the physical knobs have often been the failure points in expensive Hi-Fi gear I've owned over the years, in particular the channel/input selector, and the volume controls. Sigh.
- strix_varius 3y ago
  Glomming onto your comment to add my gripes with the Google home speakers I now deeply regret installing in every room in my house: 1. Touching the speakers adjusts their volume. They are convex hulls with no handles, and there are no visible markers indicating where they are sensitive to this input, so moving them while in operation is dangerous: they are as likely to hit 100% volume as 0%. 2. Alternatively, volume can be adjusted verbally: "Hey Google, set volume to 10 percent." However, I ended up covering my newborn's ears and running out of a room recently when the speaker didn't understand the "percent." That's how I discovered that you can also say "set volume to N," with N being 0-10, and the speaker will multiply by ten to get a percent. This decision is baffling for a voice interface, which could have consistency and user safety by treating all inputs as percentages. As it stands, 1% = too quiet to hear, 1 = quiet, 10% = quiet, and 10 = so loud the speaker cannot hear you say "hey Google, stop."
emilmiosa90 3y ago
[flagged]
fifticon 3y ago
He touches upon the tragedy of modern simplified lobotomy crayon full-screen UIs: They are horrible to use for any usecase they weren't specifically built for: In slack and teams, I often end up screenshotting something, because the information I want to consult, cannot be displayed at the same time I am in another editing view. This includes scrolling (not in slack/teams, that single thing actually works): Often you cannot scroll back up in history to see earlier discussion as you are typing. Which segues to my pet peeve: In the dumbed-down modern online discussion forums, the UI and search for finding earlier discussion is horrible. There is no calendar/timeline navigation, but just an endless contextless scrolling, where you can scroll back for 20 minutes to reach "7 months ago". This is annoying on technical forums, where a feature discussion from 2 years ago may be very relevant to figure out the hows and whys.
fifticon 3y ago
Oh, and the (lack of) window borders: This is a concrete and practical problem - I often get into fights with multiple open browsers. I will have 2 or 3 browser windows open, each containing an ongoing selection of related open tabs concerning a given separate task/subject. As I try to resize, position and minimize-maximize those 3 windows, I will have trouble figuring out the right area to get hold of "window N". (because of the modern minimalist way of drawing it, especially in dark mode). This problem is made worse by the modern violation of the title bar itself. Originally, the title bar would be exactly that, with identical design across multiple applications. Nowaways, the titlebar is a free-for-all anything-goes, with everything-but-the-actual-titlehandle stuffed into it. And worse, if it gets cramped for space, the title-handle (by which you move and handle the window..) is the first to lose and go! So you find yourself begging your application window "is there any place I can interact with you to move you?" Surely we live in the age of the instant geniuses.
- eviks 3y ago
  The right area for a resize of the right window border is ~33% of the window's area at the right (with an Alt or some other key) instead of a tiny window border. Similarly minimizaion is much better done with a shortcut/mouse gesture rather than with a tiny button in the corner (though it's not easy to find out about these better UI actions)
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    That's fine, but I'd still prefer to have real window borders. Not only because they make manipulating the window easier, but because the visual separation itself makes the entire system easier to visually parse and use.
    - eviks 3y ago
      Visual border and resize border are two different UI things, and regarding the latter, precision-hunting for a tiny line instead of a thick area doesn't make manipulation easier, that's just a persistent mistake of the previous generations of UI geniuses
jacknews 3y ago
I was nodding along, until the author presented mIRC as an example of what should be. Maybe if you grew up with this app, it's efficient or whatever. But at a glance, I have no clue at all what any of those icons do. It's just a chat app. Perhaps you should be able to control it, or at least learn it's afordances, with chat?
danjc 3y ago
Microsoft have outdone themselves on New Outlook where the transition animations actually delay state change. For example, where I'm used to clearing a folder by pressing CTRL+A followed by Del, it's now necessary to wait after the first step because selecting all messages takes a while to animate.
agent327 3y ago
If you are a developer, you really should observe your users struggle with your software. It will make it very clear that all that clever stuff you thought of just confuses the hell out of everybody. And since I am a developer, I have never felt as much shame as when I realised what horrific workflow I had accidentally foisted upon my unsuspecting customers.
1letterunixname 3y ago
Mac classic UI/UX: Tog on Interface (1992) Bruce Tognazzini 0201608421
fsckboy 3y ago
>Another example is why the Mac, Atari and Amiga all put the menu bar at the top of the screen: it's an oft-used target and should be easy to move the pointer to. This is an adaptation of Fitt's law. this oft-repeated argument is so dumb. Perhaps it's that different people's brains work differently, but so what. I have more than one window open; I'm looking at one of them, that's my context. Why would I want to roll the mouse out of my context to go to the top of the screen (shared context) only to discover that the the other window has the focus, and thus the menu? If I clicked on the menu in the context of my window, it would be given the focus and I would not be interrupted/distracted; my attention is the premium here. It's just such a flawed argument. I'm fine with you having it the way you prefer it; I'm not fine with you forcing me to have it the way you prefer it; and even more aggrieved to be given a nonsensical reason.

229 points by myth2018 3y ago

It's very sad, I agree that aesthetics/artistic sense of UX designers is absoutely trumping usability in very many modern applications. I always point to wikipedia as something that has great UX (though I think some of their recent choices have worsened usability). Like making their table of contents a hamburger dropdown.

StableAlkyne 3y ago
Part of it is that UX/UI designers are hired based on their portfolio. This imposes a bias towards those who can wow their interviews with flashy mockups/workflows on figma. If it comes down between someone whose design looks like it came out of Win98 but has the information density of a terminal, and someone whose design looks cool but has the information density of a picture book, most teams pick the latter. Those same people go on to design the applications that get shipped. The OP is right in that we lost the ability to design something like mIRC - the people doing the hiring value form over function.
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
  > This imposes a bias towards those who can wow their interviews with flashy mockups/workflows on figma. Sounds a hell of a lot like leetcode-optimized interviewees...
  - theLiminator 3y ago
    I think a major part of UX design is that a lot of people enter the field thinking it's an art-adjacent field because they want to do something similar to art. They often lose sight of the goal of usability in pursuit of their own aesthetic sensibilities. A lot of UX designers hate that the most usable designs are actually some of the ugliest/plainest.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 3y ago
      Yup. Don Norman got a lot of blowback from designers, when he published The Psychology of Everyday Things (which was changed to The Design of Everyday Things). He even wrote a sort of “let me explain” follow-up book, called Emotional Design. But I am actually going through exactly this, right now. I just got off a Zoom call, with our designer, because the first batch of test users couldn’t figure out that there are action buttons. Many designers want users to admire the UX; not use it.
- esafak 3y ago
  Does anyone have a better idea for interviewing designers then?
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myth2018 3y ago
> aesthetics/artistic sense of UX designers is absoutely trumping usability in very many modern applications Indeed. And I get totally stupefied by how much freedom and authority they are given in relation to the other people supposed to provide inputs for the project. My stock broker did that. They had a web app that didn't just work -- it was acknowledged as very good. Fully customizable, you could open many sub-windows and monitor an arbitrary number of quotes depending on your strategy. The screen could turn into a mess, but it was your mess, and that's ok as long as it made sense to you, the user. I used their web app for more than a decade. Last year they replaced it by something they have the guts to call "the enhanced experience". That fuming pile of sh*t enforces a certain geometry for the screen that makes it absolutely clear that the kids who designed that garbage never traded stocks in their lives. But what scares me most is: what the hell the managers who approved that crap had in their minds?
hotnfresh 3y ago
> Like making their table of contents a hamburger dropdown I still go hunting for the TOC, get confused, and take a second to remember they hid it. Like, daily. It’s a couple extra seconds but it’s all the damn time.

enobrev 3y ago

I don't necessarily disagree with most points made here, but this has a close resemblance to the arguments so many seemed to have when gnome 3 was released because the "start button" (or "panels") was replaced. It's ok to miss it, especially if your parents' first computer was running Windows 95, but that doesn't mean the OS UX can't / shouldn't be improved. I personally consider the improvements significant. Experimentation is important and only change is constant. That said, change for the sake of change is a real problem and adding design trends and ego to the mix can make for a lot of waste and annoyance. Otherwise minor nits... > What is the "Archive" icon even supposed to depict? The lower part of a printer, with a sheet of paper sticking out? Storage Box. Seems obvious to me, but reasonable that it wouldn't be obvious to everyone. I probably wouldn't get it without the text, but I also accept that some concepts don't transfer to iconography easily. > "Sweep" is most likely a broom - but would you be able to determine that without the text? I can't imagine what else that would be.

mrob 3y ago
>> "Sweep" is most likely a broom - but would you be able to determine that without the text? >I can't imagine what else that would be. It could be a hand holding a fencing foil. The scale of the various parts is wrong, but it's also wrong if you assume it's a broom.
- dmoy 3y ago
  Pedantically, it would have to be an epee, not a foil. The handguard on a foil is less curved.
breadwinner 3y ago
> that doesn't mean the OS UX can't / shouldn't be improved Of course, OS UX can be improved. But not all changes qualify as "improvement". See some issues caused by flat UI here: https://uxcritique-blog.tumblr.com/ https://uxcritique-blog.tumblr.com/
fian 3y ago
Due to my age and work experience, I'm also familiar with archiving involving storing physical documents in cardboard boxes. My current job really is paper free and graduate employees joining will never deal with archive boxes. Similarly, the icons on my mobile for making a call, answering a call and hanging up are all based on the shape of the handset for a corded phone. The Save button icon in many applications is based on a 3.5" floppy disk. I sometimes need to save data as a PDF, which in many cases involves "printing" to PDF. The icon is based on a paper printer, but the action I am using it for doesn't include any external device or paper. This makes me wonder about what icons we could use in the future where so many actions are done via a touch interface on a phone/tablet. There are less physical objects involved in common actions. So the skeuomorphic approach to icons for buttons is becoming less valid over time especially for younger people.

tacker2000 3y ago

My pet peeve nowadays is when apps or websites just crop the names of stuff (like files for example) and add “…”, so that you have to hover every element to see the full name in a tooltip. Information density has decreased even as screens have gotten bigger and LCDs have higher and higher resolutions. I dont know why designers feel the need to use such large margins, padding and whitespace everywhere.

andrekandre 3y ago
> I dont know why designers feel the need to use such large margins, padding and whitespace everywhere. probably because they are designing for mobile first?
- JohnFen 3y ago
  Yes, mobile-first design has greatly accelerated the decline of usability in interfaces, but that decline also began before mobile-first really became a thing. All I know is that usability keeps getting worse as time goes on. Where is the floor?
  - esafak 3y ago
    > Where is the floor? You could try to cram it into an Apple Watch?
    - blackbear_ 3y ago
      That's still good compared to the chat-only interfaces of the future.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - M95D 3y ago
        And I thought Next-Next-Finish was bad...

jampekka 3y ago

The trend seems to be to make everything into appliances, masses of individual ad-hoc tasks, all with their idiosyncratic logic and no way of interoperation or composing them to accomplish anything but the exact task intended. There's an App for That. Except when there isn't it Just Can't Be Done. P.S. Gnome 3 is way ahead of Blender in usability. Blender is nowadays very usable, but it's still not great. Having a billion buttons shoved away in menu hierarches is not power, it's more akin to having a billion idiosyncratic Apps. Edit: Want to add that Blender usability keeps on getting better. The increased use of the node interface is making Blender a lot more usable and powerful. Being able to connect any too ports is something that would require combinatorial explosion with buttons and menus.

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swalling 3y ago

"One of the two "slacks" I'm a member of recently got a UI update - and the other didn't." This is because major changes at basically all business software companies are rolled out on a team-by-team basis, rather than per user account. Also note that from the screenshots that he is on Free tier Slack teams in both instances. When you do not pay for a business communication tool, you should not really have expectations of stability or coherence. You're getting a free sample of a product that is meant to be paid for. What he was experiencing was a beta or gradual rollout where Free teams were being used as test subjects to see how the redesign impacts user engagement. If you don't pay for a product, you are the product.

jujube3 3y ago
In this case, you cannot escape the enshittification by paying. Still not as bad as the "slacksticka" which is their icon now
- swalling 3y ago
  You can't escape it, but if you pay for an enterprise plan you typically have huge amounts of advance notice (monthly or quarterly roadmap updates, plus an account team at your service and the ability to demand face time / feedback with the product managers). This makes a big difference to your process of change management in handling redesigns, and influence over even relatively minor UI updates.
  - beaugunderson 3y ago
    as someone who pays for Slack, you could only push out the absolutely godawful recent update to December. this is also the only UI update I'm aware of that had its own change.org petition (with thousands of signers!).
deleted 3y ago
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paulddraper 3y ago

> What is the "Archive" icon even supposed to depict? The lower part of a printer, with a sheet of paper sticking out? It's a storage box (also known as a "banker's box"), used for long-term storage of documents or other office materials. [1] I guarantee everyone in a computer/IT setting has seen one. [1] https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/6275549/Office-Depot-Brand-Standard-Duty-Corrugated/ https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/6275549/Office-Depot-...

marcus_holmes 3y ago
I was confused by the author's ignorance about this, too. How do you work in the industry for 25+ years and not know what an archive box looks like?
- Findecanor 3y ago
  Because an "archive box" is a thing that is not necessarily a common occurrence in office culture around the world. The author is Swedish. Google's translation of "archive box" is "arkivlåda". That is not a thing over here, and is not even in the dictionary. An image search for the Swedish word resulted in many boxes that looked very different. And even if I see it as a box, it looks also like a box of printer paper to me. (It's the "Fresh paper" icon! :) ) Either way, you are diverting away from the main issue of the paragraph: Would you recognise what the icon represents even without the text?
  - solardev 3y ago
    I've worked in America for 20 years and I never knew about this either. I just thought that was a regular cardboard box, and it never occurred to me the archive icon is trying to depict such a thing. I always just thought it was an ugly file folder or something. I never had to use such a box in real life.
    - albedoa 3y ago
      > I never had to use such a box in real life. Okay but that type of box was all over the national and global news this year: https://www.google.com/search?&q=trump+bathroom+documents&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?&q=trump+bathroom+documents&tb...

dannysuarezpab 3y ago

Interesting reading. We need more innovation in UI/UIX. Personally, my mental health is affected by bad experiences and get flooded by a lot of content from different sources we need new ways for content consumption.

arzig 3y ago

I actually think slack is both an example of poor design and good design. While the multi-tenant with zero shared ui elements is a monstrosity, I think they do a really good job at discoverability. One of the things application level menus aren’t great at is connecting what element must be focused to take the action. In something like word, it’s all a document so most things are applicable most of the time, but that breaks down in chat like slack where there is a notion of chats, files, links, users, etc and the localized contextual controls while not always great aren’t terrible either.

eep_social 3y ago
Slack, assuming you’re referring to the new design is exceptionally poor. Putting a sidebar on my sidebar so I can get notified while I’m being notified isn’t the discoverability I’m looking for. It’s as if they took a discord screenshot and copied it without even attempting to understand how it works.
- imbnwa 3y ago
  Would absolutely rather use Discord than Slack
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    I'm continuously surprised that Discord hasn't made a play in the Slack/Teams/etc space. They are dramatically more competent at it than their competition.

jonas21 3y ago

Is the author really holding up mIRC as an example of good usability? Aside from the standard window controls, I can't make sense of what a single thing on that screen does.

hyperpape 3y ago
In particular, the icons are really bad. I get that modern flat icons can be a little abstract, but they’re at least visually distinct at a glance. Here you have three icons in a row that feature tiny text (11pt? 10pt) text above equally tiny icons. It’s weird, because in the abstract I agree with a lot of the criticisms and principles in the post, but this example is so bad.
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  On the sort of low DPI monitor the interface was designed for, 10pt text is quite legible. Heck, even 8pt text is legible.
- pseudalopex 3y ago
  > I get that modern flat icons can be a little abstract, but they’re at least visually distinct at a glance. They are not.
appplication 3y ago
This sort of reminds me of the grumps who complain that the masses haven’t embraced Vim, RSS feeds, arch linux, fediverse, etc. Like it’s fine that you like them, but I’m surprised you’re surprised other people don’t quite get the appeal.
- myaccountonhn 3y ago
  As someone who uses all those techs, what makes me more sad is when I can’t continue to use this tech because some other company force me to use their shitty software that isn’t interoperable in any way and I am forced to use it because of work/friends. However, I am aware enough to understand why others don’t get the appeal. At least with email I can pick my client and they can pick theirs which is more “user friendly”. Slack etc forces me to use workflows I hate.

6510 3y ago

I hear Chinese supper apps are so full of features that people frequently show others how to do things or what they've discovered. My guess would be that in the new UI swindle finding a button gives a sense of accomplishment. Recognizing 2 or 3 gives a sense of knowing the application and makes a person curious what the other buttons do. If they cant take what they've learned to other applications the lock in is stronger. Empower the user but only slightly while simultaneously making them feel slightly dumb. Of course there is also the new culture where the mission is less important than not hurting peoples feelings. You cant just tell people anymore that their shit sucks and that they need to start over. Not do that often enough and the ugly bloated flat icon monstrosity is going to ship. No one can stop it now. In the end everyone got used to the new slashdot design and all worked out... (lol)

Qwertious 3y ago
>I hear Chinese supper apps are so full of features Do you mean "super apps"? I legitimately can't tell if that's a typo or not.

seanwilson 3y ago

> In discussions like these, there's usually at least one person who shows up to demand data or research, but curiously never presents anything to back up their own claims about modern UI superiority. It's easy to make fun of particularly bad modern examples, but I personally think people really take for granted that the baseline of usability for many areas has hugely increased over the last 20 years. My recollection of some things that made older GUIs less usable, especially for non-techy people: vital functionality had to hunted for in menus or (much worse) right-click context menus, annoying modals everywhere, scary technical language, having to read the manual, lack of undo/redo/autosave, complex install processes, information overload sometimes, confusing file systems (like c:\ and weird file extensions), sharing and collaborating on files was cumbersome. This is really obvious if you've ever had to help friends/family use something over the phone, as you realise how much knowledge you have to build up to confidently use some software. It's really amazing what non-techy people can easily do on their phones and computers now, like real-time collaborative editing of a document (with automatic saving and unlimited undo) over a video call. Things like this used to be a nightmare to setup and use, and now it's taken for granted.

JohnFen 3y ago
> the baseline of usability for many areas has hugely increased over the last 20 years. I genuinely think the opposite has happened. Most of the things you cite as being problems with UI of the 2000s is really better applied to software of the late 80s/early 90s, although in all eras there have been both fantastic and terrible UIs. But from a usability perspective, I think things peaked in the early 2000s. > It's really amazing what non-techy people can do easily on their phones and computers now It truly is! But that's about functionality improving, not about usability improving.
- chiefalchemist 3y ago
  A few years ago, my then employer, due to a certain client's requirement, had everyone take a certification course on application security. One of the things that stuck in my head was the course advocating for cryptic error messages. The reason given was that the message shouldn't highlight a particular kink in the armor (if you will) that an able hacker could then try to exploit. Too vague and cryptic was best. I admit, it makes a lot of sense. Annoying as a user, but necessary for application safety and security.

local_crmdgeon 3y ago

Uber is also completely fucking unusable now. Just ads and upsells

garrickvanburen 3y ago

the discoverability aspect of usability ("what can this system do") has fallen the worst. I'm looking at you Google Assistant/Alexa/Siri/ChatGPT.

blahedo 3y ago

Way back in 2008 or so, shortly after the "ribbon" arrived in the MS Word interface, I was teaching a CS class that had a unit on UI, so we spent a bunch of time deconstructing it and comparing it to the menu-based interfaces we were all (then) still used to. I was careful to point out that unfamiliarity with the new interface wasn't necessarily the same as it being bad, especially if with a little additional training and practice we could become more efficient and/or it aided in discoverability for newer users. Although I didn't use the same words as the OP I was unironically suggesting that MS must have done a bunch of research to show that these interfaces would be an improvement in usability. Joke's on me! Fifteen years later and I still can't fucking find anything I want to do in the ribbon. I use various MS products at least a couple times a week (though day-to-day is more Libreoffice when it can't just be vim) and despite regular use I still find that I routinely have to google "how do I X in Microsoft Word/Excel/etc" for values of X that are very standard tasks that I am deeply confident I would be able to find on my own in a menu. And once I do find out how to do something, even if it's something I'm going to be doing a bunch, there's no indication of a shortcut or keyboard equivalent that I could train myself on, to become an actual power user of the interface. It's all completely maddening.

inamberclad 3y ago
I think this kind of user abuse is intentional. If people put the time and energy, and emotional effort into understanding a piece of software, they're less likely to jump ship.
- brutusborn 3y ago
  Wouldn’t that suggest it is accidental? Making it harder to understand a piece of software seems to cause people to look for easier to understand alternatives.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    If the software has a small marketshare and is struggling to get new users, then this would be true. When the software is already hugely dominant, the same dynamic does not apply. Trying to lock-in customers when they're not customers yet is a bad idea, but when they're already your customers, it makes business sense.

pugworthy 3y ago

I guess I always look at UI as like movies. Sure, we know a good movie when we see it, and "everyone" knows what a good movie is. Yet that's totally wrong as one person's "Dumb and Dumber" is another person's "Titanic" - and you should look at that comment from both perspectives. People still make bad movies that should be good. And make good movies that should be bad. If it was easy, everyone would make good movies.

shiroiuma 3y ago
People might disagree on what's a great movie, but I don't think anyone disagrees on the very worst movies. No one actually thinks Gigli was a good movie.
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  I would be willing to bet any amount that at least one person unironically loves Gigli. Art is subjective, that's the whole point.
ykonstant 3y ago
>I guess I always look at UI as like movies. That is a big part of the problem; designers are tasked with creating something to be used by a vast array of people: those with diminishing eyesight, unsteady hands, professionals who need adaptable elements for advanced workflows, newbies who need to be onboarded quickly and smoothly, dilettantes who want to make use of basic software functionalities, hackers who want to extend or modify the software... an endless list of situations, people and workflows; and all that designers see is aesthetics. UI is much more than aesthetics, and a UI designer is much more than an artist expressing themselves or their brand; or at least, it should be.

qwery 3y ago

Criticism of GUI design trends like this is always attacked for being out of touch -- "you just want everything to cater to your weird taste", "most of the users aren't experts", "iOS enabled my papa to send emails, he never even worked out how to turn on the Macintosh II SE", and so on -- this comes from a well-intentioned place but doesn't really hold up under scrutiny. The problems described here are problems for less-experienced/non-technical/casual users, too. In fact, it seems reasonable to assume that friction arising from the design of the UI will have a greater impact on non-expert users. Highly proficient and experienced users are able to work around problems more easily, recognise the (changed) patterns more easily, etc. They are also more able to articulate what the problems are and are more likely to dedicate time to doing so. When your non-technical family member faces some inscrutable change to their workflow, they seek your help to get their task done, not to analyse the design or intent behind the UI -- and you know that, so you use your expertise to adapt their workflow to the new design and they thank you for it. When your professional family member faces some inscrutable change to their workflow, they tell you how shit software is these days and find a solution on their own. So on one hand you hear "help me get my thing done" and on the other you hear "software used to be better". It's not surprising that people treat the cases differently -- even though both are problems stemming from UI design decisions. editendum: I guess it's worth pointing out explicitly that usability is not universal. Some software is complicated because it's for doing complicated work.

userbinator 3y ago

Slack is not some backwater cottage industry. It's a big company with thousands of employees and millions of users - many of whom are paying good money for their software. ...and therein lies the root cause underlying the majority of these useless changes: Too many people for the amount of required work. In much the same way that "design by committee" often leads to horribly complex abominations, I've noticed that the bigger the development team (and perhaps the company behind the product), the worse the software turns out to be; and usability is no exception. At the other extreme, products of a single developer very rarely make hostile UI changes, because they mostly can't afford to. Then sometimes they get bought out by a bigger company, and the useless changes start showing up shortly afterwards.

pmontra 3y ago
I saw this happen many times: 1. We have to add this feature, we need an icon, menu item, anything, for it. 2. It doesn't fit well in any of our menus, we should stop a moment and think about the UI, maybe like this and that. 3. Great but it takes too long, we need this tomorrow, on this Friday, or at any very demanding deadline. 4. Ok, so we add an icon there or into the options and people will figure out. We'll fix it later. 5. Later never happens because we're again at step 1 very soon.
quickthrower2 3y ago
Firebase seems a case in point. You have to do all this weird Google cloud shit to get something basic working. I posit that using Firebase is more complicated at the outset than installing an ORM and using postgres. And being nosql it gets worse from that point on. So it’s raison detre of making it easy to build apps is lost.
rob74 3y ago
Slack gets a lot of flak, but in my experience they're far from having the worst web app UI. For instance, have you tried the abomination that is the AWS management console? Not sure about the pricing for Slack and for AWS, but I bet companies tend to pay a lot more for AWS, so you'd think they would be able to come up with an acceptable interface - but no, it's a Rube Goldberg-esque monstrosity where even the simplest tasks require you to traverse at least five slow-loading pages...

notbeuller 3y ago

So many, many rants could come from this and my blood is boiling in fervent agreement. But two thoughts: as hard as it is to use the contrast-less, contextless obscure icons and "is it checked or toggled or active", try working with someone and having to explain "click that thing, I don't know what it is, no, the other one, to the left, arghghhg." But really, maybe these aren't our interfaces anymore - the lack of scrollbars on macOS is because of the touch, pinch and swipe touch interfaces, and the people that are now very happily consuming content (and creating, although less so) without having to worry about that extra bit of information. But the rest of us suffer, and the "increase contrast" and "reduce motion" checkboxes don't do nearly enough to reconfigure the UI. I never really appreciated the Mac modding community[1] (kaleidoscope?) and the powerful frameworks they had to build UIs, 90% of which I'd happily switch to today if I could. [1] https://botsin.space/@osxthemes/111416576638238992 https://botsin.space/@osxthemes/111416576638238992

Miiko 3y ago
> lack of scrollbars on macOS Do you know that you can tell your Mac to "always show scroll bars" on System Settings -> Appearance page? Anyway, while I tend to agree that Snow Leopard UI was the best and it went downhill since then, the latest macOS is still very usable and I do not suffer on Mac at all (unlike Windows 11, where I had to install a 3rd party app to at least partially revert what they did with UI)
- bigstrat2003 3y ago
  Sadly the UI isn't even the worst part of Windows these days. It's the ads. It's beyond belief that I should get ads in software that I paid for, yet here we are. I got so sick of it that I switched to daily driving Linux. It's not perfect (I'm a gamer and games can have issues even though they mostly work great), but at least I don't have ads on my desktop.
  - shiroiuma 3y ago
    Microsoft did the right thing in putting ads on the Windows desktop. They can make more money that way, and increase shareholder value. For every user like you that gets angry and switches to Linux, there's countless others that don't, and MS makes more profit showing them annoying ads, so it's a net gain for them.

gavinhoward 3y ago

For a long time, I've contemplated building a Qt competitor, a cross-platform library for building GUI's. I'm still considering it, but if I did do it, it would need to address accessibility and usability first. And this post is a good example of why. I think I'd take usability guidelines from 20-30 years ago instead of modern ones.

ykonstant 3y ago
I have been praying for a GUI library that at least supports a skeuomorphic style for UI elements; this, however, requires some creative designers without preconceptions ready to take on a challenge. The challenge is to create a forward-looking skeuomorphic design with subdivisions adapted to different devices and workflows (separated e.g. by screen size and by expected expertise of the user). This is hard to do when most designers are stuck in the non sequitur that skeuomorphism means a dated 90s feel (a baffling lack of imagination for a seemingly creative profession) or that a single design instance should support all devices (I will not use a word processor on my phone unless absolutely necessary, and I sure as hell don't want to touch-click gigantic rectangles on my widescreen Microsoft). And of course, as you say, it is important to read the rich HCI research conducted over many decades since the 60s, and not dismiss it as "old".
- gavinhoward 3y ago
  Well, I'll say that I won't just support skeumorphic design; it will be the only option. :) The rest of your post lays out my plan perfectly. Yes, it will be a challenge, but I think you are absolutely right that UI's need to be designed for their audience, like blog posts and other writing. Now the question is: if you need to use such a library in a commercial context, would you happily pay for it? I can't justify the time unless I could make money.

squigglydonut 3y ago

Design has nothing to do with usability. Companies do not value designers. At least that has been my experience. When I was young and gullible I was hireable. Now I am too stubborn to compromise on my values to be a part of the bureaucracies and pandering.

andrei_says_ 3y ago
There’s a whole book dedicated to turning gullible obedient designers happily producing malicious dark patterns into designers who own their responsibility to society and the end users. It’s called Ruined by Design, by Mike Monteiro. He also has a talk on the same topic. Both are highly recommended. In short, a designer has a responsibility to use the craft for good and refuse to weaponize it. For this to be a real possibility, we need a union standing behind the designer.

quickthrower2 3y ago

Cloud and SaaS. It is all about constantly mutating interfaces, underlying concepts and resources.

effdee 3y ago

> What is the "Archive" icon even supposed to depict? It looks like a labelled archive box to me. <https://www.google.com/search?q=archive+box&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=archive+box&tbm=isch>

creshal 3y ago
It would've been a lot more clear with old-style coloured isometric icons. Making everything vague, monochrome silhouettes definitely wasn't an improvement.

gifvenut 3y ago

The author has some valid points, but let’s not forget that people used to critizice those old UIs at the time as well, ever since the first GUIs appeared to replace command line interfaces.

2d8a875f-39a2-4 3y ago

The issue is really that "Usability" in the sense of "helping people achieve their goals" isn't really a priority for most of these vendors. When they talk about "usability" they really mean: engagement, retention, distinctive branding, and optimising for whatever KPIs are important for their business. Then there are the economic pressures of supporting multiple platforms, so you get shit like Electron and PWA where for a fraction of the price you can present the same semi-usable interface on different platforms - where it looks like your signature style but doesn't look like any other apps on the platform.

strix_varius 3y ago
> optimising for whatever KPIs are important for their business. Or, for their promo packet. "Our usability research showed that our UI redesign was not worth the cost to the users" is a sentence I've never heard in fifteen years of software development. But I have seen dozens of decks that include a slide of hand picked quotes from a small sample of test users extolling the virtues of the presenter's Q3 project.

fifticon 3y ago

This is evident in physical products. We have perfected 'crap for the masses', unfortunately. Standard problems: - I just bought a (bulk) phone charging station. Even though I attempted to pay more to get a non-shitty product, it has no on/off button. Instead, I can unplug it manually from the socket each morning :-/. - music volume: When I stream music from my android phone to one of our not-cheap bluetooth speakers, the volume can be adjusted in something like 16 possible increments. In practice, there are 3-4 possibilities: (A) so low you can't hear anything, and the frequency distribution is off. (B) almost but not quite audible. (C) audible, but a bit too loud. (D) so loud you fear structural damage to your kitchen. In practice, I toggle back and forth between B and C, and wish just that interval had analog subdivisions. - two relatively expensive bluetooth speakers (sigh) in our house have no 'tangible' power buttons, only icon-marked areas where you can hover your finger for the same effect. I lack words to describe how annoying it is to have to visually ascertain your finger is near where the almost-invisible icon is. I have marked them with nail-polish, but it is not enough. They are both cylinder-shaped, so there are 360 choices. As I see it, there should be good money to make, in just offering physical knobs on your gadget, and possibly analog controls. As a caveat, precisely the physical knobs have often been the failure points in expensive Hi-Fi gear I've owned over the years, in particular the channel/input selector, and the volume controls. Sigh.

strix_varius 3y ago
Glomming onto your comment to add my gripes with the Google home speakers I now deeply regret installing in every room in my house: 1. Touching the speakers adjusts their volume. They are convex hulls with no handles, and there are no visible markers indicating where they are sensitive to this input, so moving them while in operation is dangerous: they are as likely to hit 100% volume as 0%. 2. Alternatively, volume can be adjusted verbally: "Hey Google, set volume to 10 percent." However, I ended up covering my newborn's ears and running out of a room recently when the speaker didn't understand the "percent." That's how I discovered that you can also say "set volume to N," with N being 0-10, and the speaker will multiply by ten to get a percent. This decision is baffling for a voice interface, which could have consistency and user safety by treating all inputs as percentages. As it stands, 1% = too quiet to hear, 1 = quiet, 10% = quiet, and 10 = so loud the speaker cannot hear you say "hey Google, stop."

emilmiosa90 3y ago

[flagged]

fifticon 3y ago

He touches upon the tragedy of modern simplified lobotomy crayon full-screen UIs: They are horrible to use for any usecase they weren't specifically built for: In slack and teams, I often end up screenshotting something, because the information I want to consult, cannot be displayed at the same time I am in another editing view. This includes scrolling (not in slack/teams, that single thing actually works): Often you cannot scroll back up in history to see earlier discussion as you are typing. Which segues to my pet peeve: In the dumbed-down modern online discussion forums, the UI and search for finding earlier discussion is horrible. There is no calendar/timeline navigation, but just an endless contextless scrolling, where you can scroll back for 20 minutes to reach "7 months ago". This is annoying on technical forums, where a feature discussion from 2 years ago may be very relevant to figure out the hows and whys.

fifticon 3y ago

Oh, and the (lack of) window borders: This is a concrete and practical problem - I often get into fights with multiple open browsers. I will have 2 or 3 browser windows open, each containing an ongoing selection of related open tabs concerning a given separate task/subject. As I try to resize, position and minimize-maximize those 3 windows, I will have trouble figuring out the right area to get hold of "window N". (because of the modern minimalist way of drawing it, especially in dark mode). This problem is made worse by the modern violation of the title bar itself. Originally, the title bar would be exactly that, with identical design across multiple applications. Nowaways, the titlebar is a free-for-all anything-goes, with everything-but-the-actual-titlehandle stuffed into it. And worse, if it gets cramped for space, the title-handle (by which you move and handle the window..) is the first to lose and go! So you find yourself begging your application window "is there any place I can interact with you to move you?" Surely we live in the age of the instant geniuses.

eviks 3y ago
The right area for a resize of the right window border is ~33% of the window's area at the right (with an Alt or some other key) instead of a tiny window border. Similarly minimizaion is much better done with a shortcut/mouse gesture rather than with a tiny button in the corner (though it's not easy to find out about these better UI actions)
- JohnFen 3y ago
  That's fine, but I'd still prefer to have real window borders. Not only because they make manipulating the window easier, but because the visual separation itself makes the entire system easier to visually parse and use.
  - eviks 3y ago
    Visual border and resize border are two different UI things, and regarding the latter, precision-hunting for a tiny line instead of a thick area doesn't make manipulation easier, that's just a persistent mistake of the previous generations of UI geniuses

jacknews 3y ago

I was nodding along, until the author presented mIRC as an example of what should be. Maybe if you grew up with this app, it's efficient or whatever. But at a glance, I have no clue at all what any of those icons do. It's just a chat app. Perhaps you should be able to control it, or at least learn it's afordances, with chat?

danjc 3y ago

Microsoft have outdone themselves on New Outlook where the transition animations actually delay state change. For example, where I'm used to clearing a folder by pressing CTRL+A followed by Del, it's now necessary to wait after the first step because selecting all messages takes a while to animate.

agent327 3y ago

If you are a developer, you really should observe your users struggle with your software. It will make it very clear that all that clever stuff you thought of just confuses the hell out of everybody. And since I am a developer, I have never felt as much shame as when I realised what horrific workflow I had accidentally foisted upon my unsuspecting customers.

1letterunixname 3y ago

Mac classic UI/UX: Tog on Interface (1992) Bruce Tognazzini 0201608421

fsckboy 3y ago

>Another example is why the Mac, Atari and Amiga all put the menu bar at the top of the screen: it's an oft-used target and should be easy to move the pointer to. This is an adaptation of Fitt's law. this oft-repeated argument is so dumb. Perhaps it's that different people's brains work differently, but so what. I have more than one window open; I'm looking at one of them, that's my context. Why would I want to roll the mouse out of my context to go to the top of the screen (shared context) only to discover that the the other window has the focus, and thus the menu? If I clicked on the menu in the context of my window, it would be given the focus and I would not be interrupted/distracted; my attention is the premium here. It's just such a flawed argument. I'm fine with you having it the way you prefer it; I'm not fine with you forcing me to have it the way you prefer it; and even more aggrieved to be given a nonsensical reason.