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Hidden interface controls that affect usability

• perching_aix 1y ago
  Always fun to read about user interfaces best practices from sources that when opened are completely broken. Could be just me having JS off on mobile, but the site is an utter mess when I visit it.
• crtasm 1y ago
  Fig.1 doesn't look like a drop-down menu - is the term really used for that style?
  • zahlman 1y ago
    The only thing that seems wrong about it to me is that it's above the point where the user clicked rather than underneath; and that's only because that point is near the bottom of the screen.
  • nsriv 1y ago
    I have had to explain it as such while teaching kids to use Zoom over the pandemic, and yeah one of the first things I got was "it's a drop up menu!"
  • chrismorgan 1y ago
    The term “popover” has been gaining popularity in the last decade or so, as a superset of dropdowns. HTML adopting the term a couple of years ago has helped with this.
• BLKNSLVR 1y ago
  Only tangentially related, and a seemingly lost old-man battle: stop hiding my scrollbar. Interesting article. Some points I didn't quite agree entirely with. There's a cost and practically limitation to some things (like a physical knob in a car for zooming in and out on a map - although that was probably just an example of intuitive use). I just recently switched a toggle on a newly installed app that did the opposite of what it was labelled - I thought the label represented the current state, but it represented the state it would switch to if toggled. It became obvious once changed, but that seems the least helpful execution.
  • thangalin 1y ago
    > stop hiding my scrollbar https://superuser.com/a/1720363 https://superuser.com/a/1720363 Use Firefox?
    • panzi 1y ago
      Stop making my scrollbar so impossible thin, Firefox!
      • cube00 1y ago
        Gnome enjoys the impossibly thin scrollbars too even when you do manage to find them.
        • msgodel 1y ago
          GTK+ used to be a decent widget toolkit.
      • Kwpolska 1y ago
        You might be able to set a different scrollbar style in about:config.
      • gred 1y ago
        https://askubuntu.com/questions/1407179/widening-firefox-scrollbar https://askubuntu.com/questions/1407179/widening-firefox-scr...
        • panzi 1y ago
          Thanks a lot! This finally did what I want: widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style = 4 widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override = 20 Though I'm not sure if I maybe want: widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style = 3 widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.size.override = 30 Plus of course that, which I had found earlier and did nothing on it's own: widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled = false layout.css.scrollbar-width-thin.disabled = true
  • 1y ago
• jongjong 1y ago
  Something which drives me mad is how modern operating systems (both desktop and mobile) keep hiding file system paths. There used to be a setting on OSX which let you show the address bar in Finder (though it wasn't default) but nowadays it seems to be impossible (unless you get some third-party extension) and I have to resort to using the terminal. It's bonkers. It makes it impossible to locate files later when I need to move or transfer them.
  • BLKNSLVR 1y ago
    I have this issue when links are shared directly to a file on SharePoint. It's often more useful to share the directory it's in rather that the file itself. MS Office dies have a way to get that information, but you have to look for it.
  • duskwuff 1y ago
    Unfortunately it's not exposed in the UI, but: defaults write com.apple.Finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool true
  • internet2000 1y ago
    It's still there. Finder → Show menu → Show Path Bar
  • theturtle32 1y ago
    My working theory, which I hold quite confidently, is that anything that doesn't test well with new users in usability testing focus groups or A/B testing eventually gets the axe. But the people conducting that testing are - intentionally or unintentionally - optimizing for the wrong metric: "how quickly and easily can someone who has never seen this app before figure out how to do this action." That's the wrong thing to optimize for at a macro scale. It might make your conversions go up for a while, but at a long term cost of usability, capability, and discoverability that enrages the users that you want to convert into advanced, loyal, word of mouth evangelists for your app because they love it. When people who are not thinking in that bigger-scale, zoomed-out, societal-level perspective conduct A/B testing or usability testing in a lab or focus group setting, they focus on the wrong metrics (the ones that make an immediate, short-term KPI go up) and then promote the resulting objectively worse UX designs as being evidence-based and data-driven. It has been destroying software usability for the last 20 years and doing a deep disservice to subsequent generations who are growing up without having been exposed to TRULY thoughtful UX except very rarely. I will die on this hill.
• nsriv 1y ago
  Very slightly unrelated, but this trend is one of the reasons I went Android after the iPhone removed the home button. I think it became meaningfully harder to explain interactions to older users in my family and just when they got the hang of "force touch" it also went away. First thing I do on new Pixel phones is enable 3 button navigation, but lately that's also falling out of favor in UI terms, with apps assuming bottom navigation bar and not accounting for the larger spacing of 3 button nav and putting content or text behind it.
  • RachelF 1y ago
    Similarly the disappearing menu items in common software. Take a simple example: Open a read-only file in MS Word. There is no option to save? Where's it gone? Why can I edit but not save the file? A much better user experience would be to enable and not hide the Save option. When the user tries to save, tell them "I cannot save this file because of blah" and then tell them what they can do to fix it.
    • cosmic_cheese 1y ago
      The Mac HIG specifies exactly this: don’t hide temporarily unavailable options, disable them. Disabling communicates to the user the relationships between data, state, etc and adds discoverability.
      • int_19h 1y ago
        This has been the norm on every desktop. But lately I don't think app designers know what "HIG" even is. Everything is web (or tries real hard to look like it even when it's native apps...), which is to say, everything is broken.
    • urbandw311er 1y ago
      I half agree. The save option should be disabled, since there is something very frustrating about enabling a control that cannot be used. However, there could be a label (or a warning button that displays such a label) explaining why the option is disabled.
• baggy_trough 1y ago
  Alan Dye in shambles.
• zmmmmm 1y ago
  I think the article overlooks that it is not really an accident that apps and operating systems are hiding all their user interface affordances. It's an antipattern to create lock in, and it tends to occur once a piece of software has reached what they consider saturation point in terms of growth where keeping existing users in is more important than attracting new ones. It so turns out that the vast majority of software we use is created by companies in exactly that position - Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta etc. It might seem counter intuitive that hiding your interface stops your users leaving. But it does it because it changes your basis of assumptions about what a device is and your relationship with it. It's not something you "use", but something you "know". They want you to feel inherently linked to it at an intuitive level such that leaving their ecosystem is like losing a part of yourself. Once you've been through the experience of discovering "wow, you have to swipe up from a corner in a totally unpredictable way to do an essential task on a phone", and you build into your world of assumptions that this is how phones are, the thought of moving to a new type of phone and learning all that again is terrifying. It's no surprise at all that all the major software vendors are doing this.
  • BLKNSLVR 1y ago
    It's a double edged sword though in that it can discourage users from trying their interface. Apple's interface shits me because it's all from that one button, and I can never remember how to get to settings because I use that interface so infrequently, so Android feels more natural. Ie. Android has done it's lock-in job, but Apple has done itself a disservice. (Not entirely fair, I also dislike Apple for all the other same old argument reasons).
    • copperx 1y ago
      Which button do you mean?
      • BLKNSLVR 1y ago
        Yeah, that's how old my Apple knowledge is. Another comment elsewhere on this page informed me that the universal button no longer exists.
• fiddlerwoaroof 1y ago
  I sort of disagree with this: once I’ve internalized the gestures, I really appreciate the lack of UI for them. It’s like vim and emacs: the sparse ui creates a steeper learning curve but becomes a feature once you’ve learned the tool
  • layer8 1y ago
    It’s one thing to learn a few gestures that work consistently across the platform. But every app tends to do its own thing, and even if you are a power user of the respective apps and learn their idiosyncrasies, it’s still annoying that they all work in slightly or sometimes drastically different ways, and that they aren’t consistent in terms of discoverability.
  • bbarn 1y ago
    That was the point of the article. Users with knowledge of how it works can do it fine, but new users can't. Your average dev who's never used vim or vi will start frustrated by default.
    • fiddlerwoaroof 1y ago
      My point is that no one is a new user forever and so I think we need to come up with a better solution than UI taking up screen space for things people end up doing via shortcuts. Menus and command palettes are great for this because they are mostly invisible. The other important thing is learning to fit into the conventions of the platform: for example, Cocoa apps on Mac all inherit a bunch of consistent behaviors.
      • netsharc 1y ago
        The default should be a clutter for new users, and the customization option should be make the UI customizable by hiding things you won't ever touch because you use shortcut keys. The other way around is yeah, hostile. But of course it looks sleek and minimalistic! On the early iPhones, they had to figure out how to move icons around. Their answer was, hold one of the icons down until they all start wiggling, that means you've entered the "rearrange icons" mode... Geezus christ, how intuitive. Having a button on screen, which when pressed offers a description of the mode you've entered would be user-friendly, but I get the lack of appeal, for me it would feel so clunky and like it's UI design from the 80's.
• jonas21 1y ago
  > If you want to lock the door, then the hidden control problem becomes evident... to lock the door, I must know that the hidden control to lock is the pound key. To make matters worse, it's not a simple press of the pound key. It's a press of the pound key for a full five seconds in order to activate the lock sequence. The combination of the long temporal window and the hidden control makes locking the door nearly impossible, unless you are well acquainted with the system and its operation. Isn't that kind of the point? You don't want people accidentally locking the door, but if it's your door, it's easy enough to remember how to do it.
  • danparsonson 1y ago
    Then put the lock operation on the fingerprint reader too. Doesn't that make more sense?
• kulahan 1y ago
  This is easily one of the most frustrating parts of the user experience on Discord. So many buttons are hidden until you mouse over them, which absolutely drives me UP A WALL. I really hope this trend discontinues.
• temporallobe 1y ago
  My car’s audio system seems to go out of its way to bury sound settings (bass, treble, balance, etc.) in as many nested menus as possible. And when you do finally find the settings, they are greyed out. I had to actually watch a youtube video to figure out that they are configured at the individual source level. Super confusing and unintuitive, and especially egregious considering that this is in a vehicle you are DRIVING - confusion, distraction, and frustration are the last things you want drivers to experience.
  • pipe2devnull 1y ago
    I would argue though you shouldn’t be messing with treble and bass settings while you are driving.
    • vel0city 1y ago
      I fully agree with you on this. If the car is moving you shouldn't really do anything more than previous/next/volume. And of those they should be on the steering wheel. You want to mess with your equalizer, do it when stopped. IDGAF if it's dozens of physical buttons and knobs and sliders or hidden in menus; you're supposed to be driving not mastering an audio file.
    • mook 1y ago
      I imagine that makes having the settings be specific to each source even worse. How else are you going to adjust them for navigation instructions? My car has something like that, but thankfully I have only needed to adjust volume, which can be done from the steering wheel…
    • hamburglar 1y ago
      I used to drive a Camry where on the factory radio, bass and treble had individual knobs and you could adjust them without taking your eyes off the road. Oh, those were the days.
      • userbinator 1y ago
        Some had a whole equalizer: https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/btcaraudio-volvo.jpg https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/btcaraudio-v...
• userbinator 1y ago
  This is what happens when "designers" who are nothing more than artists take control of UI decisions. They want things to look "clean" at the expense of discoverability and forget that affordances make people learn. Contrast this with something like an airplane cockpit, which while full of controls and assuming expert knowledge, still has them all labeled.
  • jama211 1y ago
    Next you’ll be complaining that the taps in your house don’t have a label telling you that they need to be twisted and in what direction. Phones aren’t 747’s, and guess what every normal person that goes into an airplane cockpit who isn’t a pilot is so overwhelmed by all the controls they wouldn’t know what anything did. Interface designers know what they’re doing. They know what’s intuitive and what isn’t, and they’ve refined down to an art how to contain a complicated feature set in a relatively simple form factor. The irony of people here with no design training that they could do a better job than any “so called designer” shows incredible levels of egotism and disrespect to a mature field of study. Also demonstrably, people use their phones really quite well with very little training, that’s a modern miracle. Stop shaking your fist at a cloud.
    • userbinator 1y ago
      Interface designers know what they’re doing. They know what’s intuitive and what isn’t No they don't. The article refutes your points entirely, as does everyone else here who has been confounded by puzzling interfaces.
      • jama211 1y ago
        It doesn’t refute anything, it complains bitterly and states things are problems that demonstrably aren’t. You’re figuratively pointing at the sky and stomping your foot and saying “it’s not blue it’s green”. “I’m smarter than every designer” is such a common programmer trope at this point that it’s hilarious. Speaking as a developer myself.
    • Mesopropithecus 1y ago
• WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
  The other day I was locked out of my car the key fob button wouldn't work Why didn't I just use my key to get in? First, you need to know there is a hidden key inside the fob. Second, because there doesn't appear to be a keyhole on the car door, you also have to know that you need to disassemble a portion of the car door handle to expose the keyhole. Hiding critical car controls is hostile engineering. In this, it doesn't stand out much in the modern car experience.
  • julianlam 1y ago
    This also happened to me in a rental. We drove it off the lot to our hotel a half-hour away before we discovered the remote was busted, with all of our possessions locked inside. I did know that there must be a physical key (unless Tesla?), and the only way I found the keyhole was because a previous renter had scratched the doorknob to shit trying to access the very same keyhole.
    • jahewson 1y ago
      I'm yet to drive a car with a doorknob but it sounds awesome.
  • jama211 1y ago
    All of which you should know, and can be easily found with a quick google. The moment we got a car with no physical key my first question was “what’s the backup option and how does it work”. Basic knowledge about the things you own isn’t hard. My god there is a lot of old man shakes fist at cloud in here.
    • raincole 1y ago
      Knowing how to get around a stupid design doesn't make it any less stupid.
      • 9dev 1y ago
        The opposite take would be that there’s no need to shove something in the users face that they need less than once per year, but offer a more elaborate way to get there just in case.
• WarOnPrivacy 1y ago
  I drive a Toyota that is nearly old enough to run for US Senator. Every control in the car is visible, clearly labeled and is distinct to the touch - at all times. The action isn't impeded by routine activity or maintenance (ex:battery change). Because it can be trivially duplicated, this is minimally capable engineering. Yet automakers everywhere lack even this level of competence. By reasonable measure, they are poor at their job.
  • staplers 1y ago
    Because it can be trivially duplicated While I agree with your sentiment, designing and manufacturing custom molds for each knob and function (including premium versions) instead of just slapping a screen on the dash does have a cost.
    • marginalia_nu 1y ago
      Has this cost risen? Why is this so expensive it can't even be put into a premium car today when it used to be ubiquitous in even the cheapest hardware a few decades ago?
      • cortesoft 1y ago
        No, but every cost cut is additional profit
      • const_cast 1y ago
        Because most companies are ruthless penny-pinchers and over-optimizers. They're willing to burn dollars to save pennies. The reason is that they're trading things they can measure for things they can't. Basically, if you remove the knobs you can save, say, 10 dollars on every vehicle. In return, you have made your car less attractive and will lose a small number of sales. You will never, ever be able to quantify that loss in sales. So, on paper, you've saved money for "free". Typically, opportunity cost is impossible or close to impossible to measure. What these companies think they are doing is minimizing cost. Often, they are just maximizing opportunity cost of various decisions. Everyone is trying to subtly cut quality over time. Going from A quality to B quality is pretty safe, it's likely close to zero consumers will notice. But then you say "well we went from A to B and nobody noticed, so nobody will notice B to C!". So you do it again. Then over and over. And, eventually, you go from a brand known for quality to cheap bargain-bin garbage. And it happened so slowly that leadership is left scratching their heads. Sometimes the company then implodes spontaneously, other times it slowly rots and loses to competitors. It's so common it feels almost inevitable. Really, most companies don't have to do much to stay successful. For a lot of markets, they just have to keep doing what they're doing. Ah, but the taste of cost-cutting is much too seductive. They do not understand what they are risking.
• julianlam 1y ago
  I'm on the edge of my seat waiting to see how skeuomorphic icons will solve this and every other problem.
• jofzar 1y ago
  I'm sorry, this website doesn't have a mobile interface, are you seriously complaining about accessibility when you don't support majority of the web?
  • Aeolun 1y ago
    Websites made for desktop work just fine on mobile. What is your issue? Having to scroll to see all the text?
    • Gigachad 1y ago
      Plain text ones do. Not the OP website which forces a fixed width multi column layout preventing the text from wrapping correctly.
      • deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
  • jeroenhd 1y ago
    I don't think the author of the article is in control of the stylesheet of ACM's interactions domain.
• StellarScience 1y ago
  We have a user interface design rule that keyboard shortcuts and context menus must only be "shortcuts" for commands that are discoverable via clear buttons or menus. That probably makes our apps old-fashioned. I recall learning that the four corners of the screen are the most valuable screen real estate, because it's easy to move the mouse to those locations quickly without fine control. So it's user-hostile that for Windows 11 Microsoft moved the default "Start" menu location to the center. And I don't think they can ascribe it to being mobile-first. Maybe it's "touch-first", where mouse motion doesn't apply.
  • Animats 1y ago
    Corners and edges are rarely used that way. They should be. See "Fitts Law".[1] My metaverse client normally presents a clean 3D view of the world. If you bring the cursor to the top or bottom of the screen, the menu bar and controls appear. They stay visible as long as the cursor is over some control, then, after a few seconds, they disappear. This seems to be natural to users. I deliberately don't explain it, but everybody finds the controls, because they'll move the mouse and hit an edge. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
  • moffkalast 1y ago
    I think the centered icons on W11 were done for one reason and one reason only: ripping off MacOS (probably because it's what the design team uses themselves and it felt familiar to them). There is no sensible UX reason to do it, and even in MacOS it's a detriment to its interface.
    • jeroenhd 1y ago
      I don't think it's a macOS ripoff, they would've also ripped off more of the dock if that was the goal. For instance, you would've been able to do things like "pin the task bar to the side". I think they wanted the start menu to be front and center. And honestly, that just sounds like a good idea, because it is where you go to do stuff that's not on your desktop already. But clicking a button in the bottom left and having the menu open in the middle would look weird, so centering the icons would make sense. I think there are better ways to do it and I'm sure they've been tried, but they would probably confuse existing Windows users even more.
• dagmx 1y ago
  While I appreciate the ACM having an article on this, their own site is a poor example of good UX. And some of their conferences are just downright awful UI https://s2025.siggraph.org/ https://s2025.siggraph.org/
• horsawlarway 1y ago
  I think there are couple of conflated aspects here - and some of them are fine, and likely a consequence of computing devices being more ingrained in common day, and some of them are very hostile, and clearly intended to subvert the interests of the user. As an example: I think hiding controls in favor of "knowledge in the head", as the author phrases it, is absolutely fine when the user is presumed to be aware of features, should be able to understand they exist and know how to use them, and can reasonably learn them. Especially fine if those controls aren't used all that often, and are behind a keyboard shortcut or other common and efficient route to reach them. On the other hand - I think there's also been a drive to visibly reduce how much control and understanding basic users might have about how a machine works. Examples of this are things like - Hiding the scheme/path in browser url bars - Hiding the file path in file explorers and other relevant contexts - Hiding desired options behind hoops (ex - installing windows without signing into an account, or disabling personalized ads in chrome) Those later options feel hostile. I need to know the file path to understand where the file is located. I can't simply memorize it - even if I see the same base filename, is it in "c:/users/me/onedrive/[file]" or "c:/users/me/backed_up_spot/[file]"? No way to know without seeing the damn path, and I can have multiple copies floating around. That's intentional (it drives users to Microsofts paid tooling), and hostile. Basically - knowledge that can be learned and memorized can benefit from workflows that give you the "blank canvas" that the author seems to hate. Command lines are a VERY powerful tool to use a computer, and the text interface is a big part of that. R is (despite my personal distaste for it as a language) a very powerful tool. Much more powerful and flexible than SPSS. But there are also places where companies are subverting user goals to drive revenue, and that can rightfully fuck right off. One of my biggest complaints with modern computing is that "The internet" has placed a lot of software into a gray zone where it's not clear if it's respecting my decisions/needs/wants or the publisher's decisions/needs/wants. It used to be that the publisher only mattered until the moment of sale. Then it was me and the software vs the world - ride or die. Now far too much software is like judas. Happy to sell me out if there's a little extra silver in it.
• aaron695 1y ago
  [dead]
• RVuRnvbM2e 1y ago
  Notion is horrendous for this. Hiding every control behind an invisible hover target. No, I don't want my company documentation to have a minimalist aesthetic. I just want to use it.
• padolsey 1y ago
  Agree utterly. It's a real shame, and severely affects accessibility for disabled and elderly people. Not only UI discoverability but also the types of swiping or holding movements required on mobile devices. The initial mobile interfaces felt way more accessible, so I don't think its an implicit implication of limited screen real-estate. This has been a trend-driven flattening of UI, with aesthetics over functionality. The palm and compaq pilots felt sublime to use, and the ipod and early mp3 players were fine, as was the originally charming iphone skeudomorphic iconography. It's all been downhill since then.
  • josephg 1y ago
    I don’t know that I agree. Take reading HN comments on my phone. There’s dozens of UI controls that are hidden behind a few buttons at the top or bottom of the screen. Getting that stuff out of the way makes the page itself take up almost all of my phone screen - and that makes the webpage much more beautiful and enjoyable. My phone screen is only so large. The palm pilot era equivalent browser would fill half the screen with buttons and controls and scroll bars, leaving much less room for the website content. In my opinion, hidden controls aren’t bad per se. But they are something you have to learn to use. That makes them generally worse for beginners and (hopefully) better for experts. It’s a trade off and sometimes getting users to learn your UI is the right decision. I’m glad my code editor puts so much power at my fingertips. I’m glad git is so powerful. I don’t want a simplified version of git if it means giving up some of its power. That said, I think we have gone way too far toward custom per-app controls. If you’re going to force users to learn your UI conventions, those learnings should apply to other applications on the same platform. Old platforms like the palm were amazing for this - custom controls were incredibly rare. When you learned to use a palm pilot, you could use all the apps on it.
  • socalgal2 1y ago
    The interaction that messes me up all the time is the side button and payment related stuff One press turns on/off the display Two taps enables Apple Pay Quite often my timing is not perfect or one press isn’t hard enough so I shut off the display Then, paying with Apple Pay is a double press but paying for transit is no press. but often I’m absent minded and as I’m walking through the transit gate my brain thinks “must pay” “pay = double press” so I subconsciously double press and the gate screams since is not in transit mode now it’s in Apple Pay mode
• rkagerer 1y ago
  My favorite is how Android shuffles buttons around just as I'm about to tap, so I wind up tapping the wrong one. I'm convinced advertisers will find a way to leverage that behavior in some new dark UI pattern.
• keithnz 1y ago
  a lot of the things being pointed out seem like non issues. It seems to me that this doesn't really explore that knowledge in head UIs are actually a lot more straightforward and easy to use with the knowledge in head. Most attempts to circumvent that bloat UIs. Also whatever you give people, if it's a repetitive use UI they tend to learn it and turn into knowledge in head, even if its a knowledge in world type of UI, you then change it and people get confused.
  • 38 1y ago
    Did you just have a stroke?
    • Barbing 1y ago
      Just missing hyphens and a couple clarifying rephrases, no?
• userbinator 1y ago
  This article reminds me of one of my favourite comments on the subject I've seen here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965293
• SulphurCrested 1y ago
  The article suggests a “simple, well-labeled rotary control ... would accomplish the same function” as a power button and “prevent the user from accidentally activating the control in a way that is no longer hidden”. But a rotary control itself has a serious problem, in that it can mislead the user as to the state, on or off. If the power has failed and the machine does not restart when it comes back, the rotary control will remain in the ON state when the machine is off. From memory, Donald Norman called this kind of thing “false affordance” and gave the example of a door that needed to be pulled having a push-plate on it. So my iMac, among many other devices like the light I wear on my head camping, has a button which you long-press to turn on. It is a very common pattern which most people will have come across, and it’s reasonable to expect people to learn it. The buttons are even labelled with an ISO standard symbol which you are expected to know.
  • cwillu 1y ago
    I have never looked at a fan that isn't running and been confused by the switch being set to “on”. The affordance is that it immediately tells me that the switch is on, so the problem is somewhere else. Compared to the typical phone's “hold for 3 seconds to turn on, hold for 10 seconds to enter some debug mode”, this is a breath of fresh air when anything unusual is going on with the device.
    • SulphurCrested 1y ago
      I live in a country where the socket on the wall the fan is plugged into also has a switch, which could be on or off. So to make the fan go around, both switches must be on; the user needs to know about and have a mental model of serial circuits. If it’s just a button the user just has to know two things: turn the switch on at the wall socket when plugging in, which becomes habit since childhoood; and press and hold the button on the fan to make it go, which I suspect most children in 2025 can manage. These two things don’t interact and can be known and learned separately. As you said, the knob’s position tells you about the switch. But it’s the fan the user is interested in, not the switch. (BTW, if the fan has a motion sensor you can’t tell it’s off by the fact the blades aren’t turning. There’s probably a telltale LED.)
• weinzierl 1y ago
  I get why you would hide interface elements to use the screen real estate for something else. I have no idea why some interfaces hide elements hide and leave the space they'd taken up unused. IntelliJ does this, for example, with the icons above the project tree. There is this little target disc that moves the selection in the project tree to the file currently open in the active editor tab. You have to know the secret spot on the screen where it is hidden and if you move your mouse pointer to the void there, it magically appears. Why? What is the rationale behind going out of your way to implement something like this?
  • ryncewynd 1y ago
    I agree, I know those buttons are there and how to activate them, but I still occasionally stare blankly at the screen wondering where the buttons are before remembering I need to hover them
  • autobodie 1y ago
    Intellij on Windows also buries the top menus into a hamburger icon and leaves the entire area they occupied empty! Thankfully there is an option to reverse it deep in the settings, but having it be the default is absolutely baffling.
    • DidYaWipe 1y ago
      Microsoft pulls the same BS. Look at Edge. Absolute mess. No menu. No title bar. What application am I even using? This stupidity seems to have spread across Windows. No title bars or menus... now you can't tell what application a Window belongs to. And you can't even bring all of an application's windows to the foreground... Microsoft makes you hover of it in the task bar and choose between indiscernible thumbnails, one at a time. WTF? If you have two Explorer windows open to copy stuff, then switch to other apps to work during the copy... you can't give focus back to Explorer and see the two windows again. You have to hover, click on a thumbnail. Now go back and hover, and click on a thumbnail... hopefully not the same one, because of course you can't tell WTF the difference between two lists of files is in a thumbnail. And Word... the Word UI is now a clinic on abject usability failure. They have a menu bar... except WAIT! Microsoft and some users claim that those are TABS... except that it's just a row of words, looking exactly like a menu. So now there's NO menu and no actual tabs... just a row of words. And if you go under the File "menu" (yes, File), there are a bunch of VIEW settings. And in there you can add and remove these so-called "tabs," and when you do remove one, the functionality disappears from the entire application. You're not just customizing the toolbar; you're actually disabling entire swaths of features from the application. It's an absolute shitshow of grotesque incompetence, in a once-great product. No amount of derision for this steaming pile is too much.
• analog31 1y ago
  Just a minor quibble. Terminal based UI's weren't completely memorized. Many of us had a reference card taped to the wall, or a list of commonly used commands. It was an acceptable way to extend the limited information density of the 80x25 text display, and a really good manual was as discoverable as a GUI. Not too convenient to carry along with a pocket computer, though.
  • vel0city 1y ago
    I still remember having a pile of cards that fit around the function keys to show what they did in any particular application
• eviks 1y ago
  But the pervasive "form over function" design school disagrees with your desire for the UI to be useful, it has to look clean!
• jama211 1y ago
  My gosh I was unaware there were so many old men shaking their fists at clouds here. The level of nitpicking here is ridiculous, none of this is hard, no one else seems to have any issues with most of this stuff, it seems to me like people are bored and want to be angry at something. Touch grass people.
  • Barbing 1y ago
    Guessing you’re not often called to explain e.g. iOS control center to a boomer? If you have older loved ones, understanding their reality might go a ways towards growing empathy!
    • jama211 1y ago
      To the contrary, I’ve successfully done so many times. It’s fine.
  • MarkLowenstein 1y ago
    This is the mistake allowing this phenomenon to continue. It is not a "Boomer" or old-person thing. It is a thing for people who enjoy other things in life than electronics. We've already wasted years of our lives learning how to use a bunch of weak features and apps that weren't worth the time. Now those are all gone and we have to learn more? Forget it. Your app is not worth it.
    • jama211 1y ago
      I’m not sure you’re making sense. 99% of people enjoy other things in their life other than electronics, and successfully use an iphone without any issues.
  • LoganDark 1y ago
    > no one else seems to have any issues with most of this stuff In my experience, 9 times out of 10 what this actually means is that they just don't know it's an issue! The type of person who would be confused by, say, the iOS control center, is not necessarily the type of person who would easily identify and raise the issue of it being difficult to do something on their device. They would just be mildly annoyed that they can't figure it out, or that the device "can't do it", and move on to find some other way. You may not realize it if you don't interact with those types of people but they fundamentally do not think like you or I do and what may be an obvious problem-solving process to you (e.g. identify a problem, figure out what tools are at your disposal and whether each could be helpful, check for functionality that could do what you are wanting, ask for help from others if you can't figure it out on your own, etc.) may actually not always be so obvious. That's why the main way I find out people don't know how to do something is from them seeing me do it with my device and going "what!! I didn't know it could do that!!"
• saltysaltysalty 1y ago
  Published on a site that isn’t responsive lol
• zxcvbnm 1y ago
  https://askubuntu.com/questions/1552055/general-rant-about-the-state-of-desktop-software-nowadays https://askubuntu.com/questions/1552055/general-rant-about-t...
• gjvc 1y ago
  jetbrains could learn.
  • krior 1y ago
    I really don't know why a power-user tools needs to hide all menus behind an extra hamburger menu.
    • gjvc 1y ago
      because otherwise they wouldn't be able to fuck up their successful run of twenty-plus years
• dav43 1y ago
  Apple Photos has fallen into this trap as well. As a user, you have no way to see if a photo has been "scanned" with smart features and what it has detected (e,g found person x, found dog, blue sky, beach etc). Trips features, has this algorithm finished scanning your library? You have no idea, it's just hidden. Faces, detection, has this completely scanned your library? You don't know. Photos that don't seem to have faces detect, was it scanned or failed or did it not scan yet? The list is nearly endless - but in line with the rest of the direction of MacOS, getting worse.
  • Tagbert 1y ago
    This has not been a new development. The lack of feedback and status have been there since the iPhoto days.
• LoganDark 1y ago
  > Witness the navigation system in Apple Maps in CarPlay. The system developers obviously wanted to display as much map as possible, as shown in Figure 3 a). This makes sense, but to do that they relied on the use of hidden controls. If I want to enter a destination or zoom in on the map, I have to know to touch the bottom left-hand portion of the map What? You don't have to touch any specific portion of the map. You tap anywhere and it brings up those controls. I think this article largely has a point, and most of it seems true, but to me these bits of untruth are unamusing at best.
• thih9 1y ago
  > A DOS command window. Without specific knowledge in the head, the user cannot perform a single action. To be fair, even CLI environments provide some UI discovery. E.g. DOS had 'help' and it would list available commands and a short description.
  • zzo38computer 1y ago
    You could add a note so that it displays "Type HELP for a list of available commands and description"
• busymom0 1y ago
  I wish web developers would stop hiding the scrollbars and stop taking over the back button. Also hiding key navigation behind hamburger menu instead of using tab bar should be discouraged.
• 3cats-in-a-coat 1y ago
  Steve Jobs was mocking Microsoft for this kind of UI two decades ago when shipping the first iPhone. None of this is new. But this kind of dysfunctional product is what a dysfunctional organization ships, despite knowledge. Why? Because leadership wants features. Leadership also wants a clean, marketable product. Leadership also wants both of those done on a dime, quickly and doesn't care about the details. The only way to satisfy all constraints at the same time is to implement features and hide them so they don't clutter the UI. The problem isn't awareness. It goes deeper.
• LocalH 1y ago
  This is one thing that pisses me off about modern computing. This is shit that we mostly already figured out, but people with no context decided that visual design was the most important part of UI design, with no forethought to usage or discoverability. The golden age of computing is sadly long, long passed.
  • infinitifall 1y ago
    Not just UI, but performance as well. It is absolutely inexcusable if your app struggles with loading text and images on modern hardware. It's the computational equivalent of exploding a hydrogen bomb to open a chocolate wrapper.
• ryanbigg 1y ago
  Ironically the article is barely readable on an iPhone…
  • theturtle32 1y ago
    I read it perfectly fine on my iphone. Turning the device to landscape and zooming so the article text was full width made it an almost ideal reading experience. That said, the site does desperately need a responsive redesign so that you don't need to do what I just described.
• ozim 1y ago
  I love how everyone is UX/UI specialists in this thread :) exactly like in projects I worked for, everyone had something to say in that area.
• KaiMagnus 1y ago
  I think the new Apple design tries to do this too much and it will cause some issues. They're trying to make many things modal, split and merge on scroll, show and hide contextually. The intentions might be good, an intelligent interface that adapts sounds good in theory, but who knows really what the users want to do?
• jekwoooooe 1y ago
  Kind of ironic since this website isn’t mobile optimized
• jekwoooooe 1y ago
  A lot of these comments sound like people who can’t get with the times to be honest
• Hilift 1y ago
  Mobile is a deliberately second-class platform, in many cases to prevent closing an obtrusive window to serve an advertisement, or to provoke an inadvertent click on an ad. Many ads with malware simply don't present if the platform is not mobile, by design, from the creator.
• owers 1y ago
  This is a great post!
• atoav 1y ago
  The rotational On-Off switch for a computer is cool and provides excellent feedback, but like many stateful electromechanical input elements it has the problem that it might run out of sync with the system it controls. E.g. what if the PC is shutdown, it is practically off (you can't do useful stuff with) but technically on (only in a weird shutdown state). I am a fan of the conceptional clarity, but having to wait for my PC to shutdown only to have to flip a switch myself is not good UX. The absolute ideal would be the switch mechanically turning to off once it is off, and such switches exist, but they are expensive and require extra electronics to drive the electromagnetic part. A really good example of this UX principle are the motor faders in digital audio mixers: You can move them with your hand but if you cange to a different channel layout the mixer can move the faders for you. The downside of those is mainly cost. The cheap 80/20 solution for the PC is a momentary push-button and a Green/Red LED to display the current state. 5s holding is power-off because everything else has the danger of accidentally switching off — but this isn't obvious to the non-initialized.
• briandear 1y ago
  This is why I really despise “Material Design” and the whole Google aesthetic. Look at Google Meet for example. How many times and I trying to remember what the Share Screen icon looks like? Apple generally does this stuff far better: text labels for example. Also clicking some “+” icon to reveal more options — how does a “normal” person know what’s buried inside all of those click to reveal options? Diversity in tech has always been a concern — but one concern I have is that diversity has always meant race, gender, or sexual orientation stuff — but a 28 year old Hispanic LGBT person doesn’t react to a UI much differently than a 28 year old Black hetero person. But a 68 year old Hispanic woman with English as a second language absolutely has potentially different UI understandings than an 18 year old white woman from Palo Alto. Real diversity (especially age and tech experience levels) should be embraced by the tech companies — that would have a strong impact on usability. Computers are everywhere and we shouldn’t be designing UI around “tech people” understanding and instead strive for more universal accessibility — especially for products we expect “everyone” to potentially use. (Some dev ops tool obviously would have more latitude than an email app, but even then, let’s stop assuming users understand your visual language just because you do.) I want to see more UX designers who are “old” rather than some clever kid who lives on Behance. I also want to see more design that isn’t created by typical higher educated designers who think everyone should understand things they take for granted. The blue collar worker that works construction, the grandmother from Peru, the restaurant cook, or the literature professor — whatever. Usability should be clear and obvious. That’s really hard — but that’s the job. One of the original genius aspects of iPad is that a toddler can immediately start using it. We need all usability to be in that vein.
• iforgotpassword 1y ago
  Like everything, this goes in cycles. When the iPhone launched, its UI was touted as revolutionary; simple, discoverable, not the convoluted mess that a typical windows experience was. "lol lolyou have to click start to power off your computer" and the likes. You had the physical home button, or the three buttons on android. They were discoverable, you handed an old phone to your grandma and she could just try things and figure it out. Nowadays everything has to be clean and minimalist. No scrollbar, no buttons, just gestures. Hand a modern smartphone to someone who never used one in their life and see how they struggle to ever leave the first app they open. What are the odds they discover one of the gestures?
• careful_ai 1y ago
  [dead]
• jFriedensreich 1y ago
  There is a sweet spot in between those two extremes if you stop trying to build a compromise of a UI for both, touch screens and desktops. (sadly we still do not have the reality demoed by apple and google 10 years ago, where touch screens have hover detection, maybe XR gaze detection will bring this) You can pack extreme amounts of features without cluttering the interface or sacrificing discoverability by only showing most features on hovering certain areas. This is risk and effort free from user perspective, as users are much more explorative when no clicking is involved and it is clear an interaction will not trigger features by accident in the discovery process. Im especially passionate about this because having ADHD makes one sensitive to irrelevant stimuli in the periphery but being a power user for most software the dumbification of software happening since mobile apps drives me insane. I want software where a feature being used by the top 5 to 10 % power users once a month is not being ripped out if that once a month use provides high value for that group.
  • xg15 1y ago
    On the risk of sounding like a grandpa, but there used to be a pretty effective "division of labor" for this in UIs: (1) The "fast" path: Provide toolbars, keyboard shortcuts and context menus for quick access to the most important features. This path is for users who already have the "knowledge in the head" and just want to get there quickly, so speed takes priority over discoverability. (2) The "main" path: Provide an exhaustive list of all features in the "title bar"/"top of the screen" menus and the settings dialogues. This path is mainly for users who don't have the "knowledge in the head" and need a consistent, predictable way to discover the application's features. But it's also a general-purpose way to provide "knowledge in the world" for anyone who needs it, which may also include power users. Therefore, for this path, discoverability and consistency is more important than speed. Crucially, the "main" features are a superset of the "quick" features. This means, every "quick-access" feature actually has at least two different ways to activate it, either through 1 or through 2. This sounds redundant, but makes perfect sense if it allows peoples to first use the feature through 2 and then later switch to 1 when they are more confident. My impression is that increasingly, UIs drop 2 and only provide 1, changing the "fast" into the "main" path. Then suddenly "discoverability" becomes a factor of its own that needs to be implemented separately for each feature - and in the eyes of designers seems to become an unliked todo-list bullet point like "accessibility". Usually then, it's implemented as an afterthought: Either through random one-time "new feature" popups (if it popped up at an inappropriate time and you just closed it to continue with what you wanted to to, or if you want to reopen it later - well, sucks to be you) - or through unordered "everything" menus that just contain a dump of all features in an unordered list, but are themselves hidden behind some obscure shortcut or invisible button.
• cs702 1y ago
  Not sure I agree with all of the OP's opinions. I prefer a clean, calm, uncluttered user interface over a noisy, busy, cluttered one. In the OP's example with maps, I'd rather see a full-screen map, instead of a map that is always partially covered by a bunch of big buttons, obfuscating my view. Please let me see the map. Yes, fill the entire screen with it. Gradually, over decades, society has evolved a "shared language of touch-screen actions" for controlling touch-screen devices. Many actions are familiar to everyone here: tap to hide/show controls, press and hold to bring contextual menus, pinch with two fingers to zoom out, etc. It's OK for UI designers to assume familiarity with this common language to keep UIs clean, calm, and uncluttered. I like it.
  • surajrmal 1y ago
    The real problem is that there is no one sized fits all paradigm to rule them all. People will want different things. Watered down UIs that cater to average will never please those with more niche preferences. It's hard to get right but offering multiple competing options which cater to different segments is the only solution that seems to work in my opinion
• kristjank 1y ago
  I remember Nokia E-series phones with QWERTY keyboards had a little torch printed on the tiny spacebar. Everything else now feels unintuitive compared to that.
• BobMontgomeryJr 1y ago
  Your "shared language of touch screen interactions" is and will forever be unrealized as endless 'innovations' 'novelties' of creative developers and companies remain unfettered by any requirements for compliance voluntart or otherwise to UI 'standards'. Software developers are focused on myriad depths and constraints of toolkits and frameworks languages and libraries to get network, cloud, and actual functionality right, and immersed in those worlds, burden users with their own vast congitive prejudice that their application is the only one in the world, figuring 'users' have unlimited time to decipher undocumented UIs effectively gamified and unique across hundreds of spplications by not only gestures but by required and precise cadences to correctly effect those gestures, cadences which are overloaded and confounded by network and device delays and zero haptic or audio or visual feedback on what may have been 'commanded' or what is yet to be acomplished and displayed onscreen.
  • BobMontgomeryJr 1y ago
    to those trying to draw analogies to driving cars - Go rent a hundred of them. Next try and drive them in 30 different countries.
  • Daneel_ 1y ago
    I might be tired, and this isn’t meant as anything other than constructive criticism, but good grief I think you need to use full stops a little more. I had to re-read that 3-4 times to make out what you meant.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• BrtByte 1y ago
  The car key example especially resonated. That kind of design isn't just annoying, it's stressful in real-world situations
• xg15 1y ago
  I think an indicator that something is going wrong in UI design is what I'd call the "the food is in the fridge" anti pattern that seems to pop up lately. Essentially it's UI text in random places telling you what steps you should take to activate some other feature, instead of - you know - just providing a button to activate that feature. A variant of this is buttons or menu items that don't do anything else than move focus onto another button, or open a menu in a different location, so you can then click on that one. Increasingly seeing this in Microsoft products, especially in VS Code.
  • DonHopkins 1y ago
    I guarantee that you will LOVE the user interface design and menu system in World Quester 2: Game Helpin' Squad: World Quester 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gy9hJauXns https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gy9hJauXns Every time I'm using Cursor and select "Cursor => Settings => Cursor Settings" I giggle and think of World Quester 2. I love World Quester 2 so much, I implemented its most innovative feature, the "Space Inventory", in the WASM version of Micropolis (SimCity): https://micropolisweb.com/ https://micropolisweb.com/ WARNING: DO NOT PRESS THE SPACE BAR!!!! (And if you accidentally do, then definitely DO NOT PRESS IT AGAIN!!!! Or AGAIN!!! Or AGAIN!!!) SimCity Micropolis Tile Sets Space Inventory Cellular Automata To Jerry Martin's Chill Resolve: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=319i7slXcbI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=319i7slXcbI
    • xg15 1y ago
      This is amazing! :D Thanks a lot!
• DonHopkins 1y ago
  The article mentions the late Mark Weiser's work on Ubicomp at Xerox PARC. Before he went to run PARC, we worked together at the University of Maryland, where he supported and collaborated with my work on pie menus. Mark Weiser, Ben Shneiderman, Jack Callahan, and I published a paper at ACM CHI'88 about pie menus, which seamlessly support both relaxed "self revealing" browsing for novices, and accelerated gestural "mouse ahead" for experts: smoothly, seamlessly, and unconsciously training users to advance from novice to expert via "rehearsal". Pie menus are much better than gesture recognition for several synergistic reasons: Most importantly, they are self revealing. Also, they support visual feedback, browsing, error recovery, and reselect. And all possible gestures have a valid and easily predictable and understandable meaning, while most gestures are syntax errors. Plus the distance can also be used as an additional parameter, like a "pull out" font:direction / size:distance selection pie menu, with live feedback interactive both in the menu center and in the text document itself, which is great during "mouse ahead" before the menu has even been shown. The exact same gesture that novices learn to do by being prompted by the pop-up pie is the exact same action experts use more quickly to "mouse ahead" through even nested menus without looking at the screen or needing to pop up the pie menu. (By the principle of "Lead, follow, or get out of the way!") Linear menus with keyboard accelerators do not have this "rehearsal" property, because pressing multiple keys down at once is a totally different (and more difficult to remember and perform) action than pointing and clicking at tiny little menu labels on the screen, each one further from the cursor and more difficult to hit than the next. Our controlled experiment compared pie menus to linear menus, and proved that pie menus were 15% faster, and had a significantly lower error rate. Fitts' Law unsurprisingly predicted that result: it essentially says the bigger and closer a target is to the cursor, the faster and more reliably you can hit it. Pie menus optimize both the distance (all items directly adjacent in different directions), and the area (all items huge wedge shaped target areas that get wider as you move away from the center, so you get more precise "leverage" as you move more, trading off distance for angular precision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus, Proceedings of CHI'88: https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie-vs-linear-menus-466c6fdbba4b https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie... Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective (37 years now): https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1 https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1 The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus: They’re Fast, Easy, and Self-Revealing. Originally published in Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Dec. 1991, cover story, user interface issue: https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-design-and-implementation-of-pie-menus-80db1e1b5293 https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-design-and-implementation-... >[...] Pie Menu Advantages >Pie menus are faster and more reliable than linear menus, because pointing at a slice requires very little cursor motion, and the large area and wedge shape make them easy targets. >For the novice, pie menus are easy because they are a self-revealing gestural interface: They show what you can do and direct you how to do it. By clicking and popping up a pie menu, looking at the labels, moving the cursor in the desired direction, then clicking to make a selection, you learn the menu and practice the gesture to “mark ahead” (“mouse ahead” in the case of a mouse, “wave ahead” in the case of a dataglove). With a little practice, it becomes quite easy to mark ahead even through nested pie menus. >For the expert, they’re efficient because — without even looking — you can move in any direction, and mark ahead so fast that the menu doesn’t even pop up. Only when used more slowly like a traditional menu, does a pie menu pop up on the screen, to reveal the available selections. >Most importantly, novices soon become experts, because every time you select from a pie menu, you practice the motion to mark ahead, so you naturally learn to do it by feel! As Jaron Lanier of VPL Research has remarked, “The mind may forget, but the body remembers.” Pie menus take advantage of the body’s ability to remember muscle motion and direction, even when the mind has forgotten the corresponding symbolic labels. >By moving further from the pie menu center, a more accurate selection is assured. This feature facilitates mark ahead. Our experience has been that the expert pie menu user can easily mark ahead on an eight-item menu. Linear menus don’t have this property, so it is difficult to mark ahead more than two items. >This property is especially important in mobile computing applications and other situations where the input data stream is noisy because of factors such as hand jitter, pen skipping, mouse slipping, or vehicular motion (not to mention tectonic activity). >There are particular applications, such as entering compass directions, time, angular degrees, and spatially related commands, which work particularly well with pie menus. However, as we’ll see further on, pies win over linear menus even for ordinary tasks. Gesture Space: https://donhopkins.medium.com/gesture-space-842e3cdc7102 https://donhopkins.medium.com/gesture-space-842e3cdc7102 >[...] Excerpt About Gesture Space >I think it’s important to trigger pie menus on a mouse click (and control them by the instantaneous direction between clicks, but NOT the path taken, in order to allow re-selection and browsing), and to center them on the exact position of the mouse click. The user should have a crisp consistent mental model of how pie menus work (which is NOT the case for gesture recognition). Pie menus should completely cover all possible “gesture space” with well defined behavior (by basing the selection on the angle between clicks, and not the path taken). In contrast, gesture recognition does NOT cover all gesture space (because most gestures are syntax errors, and gestures should be far apart and distinct in gesture space to prevent errors), and they do not allow in-flight re-selection, and they are not “self revealing” like pie menus. >Pie menus are more predictable, reliable, forgiving, simpler and easier to learn than gesture recognition, because it’s impossible to make a syntax error, always possible to recover from a mistaken direction before releasing the button, they “self reveal” their directions by popping up a window with labels, and they “train” you to mouse ahead by “rehearsal”. >[...] Swiping gestures are essentially like invisible pie menus, but actual pie menus have the advantage of being “Self Revealing” [5] because they have a way to prompt and show you what the possible gestures are, and give you feedback as you make the selection. >They also provide the ability of “Reselection” [6], which means you as you’re making a gesture, you can change it in-flight, and browse around to any of the items, in case you need to correct a mistake or change your mind, or just want to preview the effect or see the description of each item as you browse around the menu. >Compared to typical gesture recognition systems, like Palm’s graffiti for example, you can think of the gesture space of all possible gestures between touching the screen, moving around through any possible path, then releasing: most gestures are invalid syntax errors, and they only recognizes well formed gestures. >There is no way to correct or abort a gesture once you start making it (other than scribbling, but that might be recognized as another undesired gesture!). Ideally each gesture should be as far away as possible from all other gestures in gesture space, to minimize the possibility of errors, but in practice they tend to be clumped (so “2” and “Z” are easily confused, while many other possible gestures are unused and wasted). >But with pie menus, only the direction between the touch and the release matter, not the path. All gestures are valid and distinct: there are no possible syntax errors, so none of gesture space is wasted. There’s a simple intuitive mapping of direction to selection that the user can understand (unlike the mysterious fuzzy black box of a handwriting recognizer), that gives you the ability to refine your selection by moving out further (to get more leverage), return to the center to cancel, move around to correct and change the selection. >Pie menus also support “Rehearsal” [7] — the way a novice uses them is actually practice for the way an expert uses them, so they have a smooth learning curve. Contrast this with keyboard accelerators for linear menus: you pull down a linear menu with the mouse to learn the keyboard accelerators, but using the keyboard accelerators is a totally different action, so it’s not rehearsal. >Pie menu users tend to learn them in three stages: 1) novice pops up an unfamiliar menu, looks at all the items, moves in the direction of the desired item, and selects it. 2) intermediate remembers the direction of the item they want, pop up the menu and moves in that direction without hesitating (mousing ahead but not selecting), looks at the screen to make sure the desired item is selected, then clicks to select the item. 3) expert knows which direction the item they want is, and has confidence that they can reliably select it, so they just flick in the appropriate direction without even looking at the screen.
• lbotos 1y ago
  Its funny. I built a UI where you can add elements and change their text. I then built a listener where if you press backspace twice in the element it will delete to avoid having a “x” in the UI. I came back to the interface a month later and i forgot about the backspace twice option!
• rekabis 1y ago
  > if I want to activate the flashlight on my iPhone, I have to know to swipe up from the bottom left-hand corner in order to bring up a control panel where the flashlight button exists. The author even drives the point home by getting this wrong. To get to the control panel it’s not a swipe up from the bottom left, it’s a swipe down from the top right. And you don’t even need to do that. The flashlight and camera icons exist right on the Lock Screen for immediate use without having to bring up the control panel It’s only the dangerously obsolete iPhones - iPhone 8 / 2016 and earlier - where you swipe from the bottom up. And from the bottom-anywhere straight up, no need to go from any corner. We’ve had 9 years of iPhones with the swipe-down action, and less than 2% of iPhones still in use are iPhone 8 and earlier.
• hinkley 1y ago
  Information hiding is why I insist that Bamboo is the worst CI/CD tool that had ever existed. (Note: I have used CI/CD long enough to have used cruisecontrol, which is demoted to second place). You don’t even know what features Bamboo has that would be nice to use - or ask someone else to use on your behalf - because if you don’t have permission it’s almost all hidden away. Developer tools in particular and productivity tools in general need to leave everything out there for discoverability to function. Taking it away is a disservice to everyone.
• andix 1y ago
  I really like the example with Apple Maps on Car Play. I had exactly the described struggle a few days ago. I very rarely use car play in rental cars, maybe 4 or 5 times for very short drives so far. It really took me more than a minute to figure out how to enter a destination. I couldn't believe it.
• bhauer 1y ago
  Apple is undeserving of its popular reputation as a leader in user interface. The article points out only a sampling of the egregious human interface issues with Apple software and devices. Whether it's iOS, CarPlay, or any other Apple software, they're all dramatically overrated. The trouble is, many of the alternatives are even worse. Android? Also awful. Most OEM infotainment systems? Even worse than CarPlay. I feel Apple is well-regarded simply because it's the lesser among several bad options. We need a viable third option in mobile operating systems. At least with cars, we have high-quality infotainment systems such as those from Tesla and Rivian. In the mobile phone space, we have tow poor options and a few alternatives with vanishingly small market share.
  • andix 1y ago
    Being the least bad is just a synonym for being the best.
• kldg 1y ago
  YES!! These design policy drives me insane. I review products independently for work, and it's such a hassle trying to figure out how to use modern products. The biggest problem in consumer electronics right now are capacitive touch buttons (that is, not a touchscreen); they're in all sorts of places they shouldn't be. They're put in lights, in fans, in earbuds -- you need some real darn small hands to not mess up your touches on a lot of these tiny wireless earbuds. I was evaluating some desk lights intended for guests in hotels -- there's no indication at all you're supposed to touch two of the four arches' sides on the light to toggle on/off, and it registers correctly maybe 40% of the time. Are you going to have front desk explain to every guest how to turn a simple desk lamp on/off, or put a manual on everyone's table and refuse to explain it? It would have been so much improved with a physical push button or toggle switch instead of doing this Three Seashells thing. Then on the software side I find Youtube particularly annoying, especially with their show-on-hover buttons for thumbnails. You want to click on a video, right, so you stop thinking about it and move your mouse to it and click it, but when you hover over it, buttons spawn, meaning there's a fair chance you're not going to click the video to launch it as you intended, but may be redirected to Youtube's ad disclosure policy page instead, as if anyone wanted to read that.
• tonymet 1y ago
  counterintuitive UIs are causing so much unconscious angst. People expect clear feedback from their tools. Out of a dozen gadgets ( earbuds, flashlights, calculators, smartphones, clocks, measurement tools) there are a dozen different ways to turn them on or off. Long press, double, triple tap. I feel like I'm casting spells just to try to use my tools. My wife's Pixel was hung and I was trying to reboot it. Long press, double tap, triple tap. up-down volume, then power was the answer. We are at the point where our gadgets expect bespoke Konami codes before they respond to input. It's maddening!
• news_hacker 1y ago
  Spot-on article. What's especially aggravating is the "skill-issue" meme that folks retort with when you make mention of this.
• zzo38computer 1y ago
  Visible controls are helpful, but good documentation (especially if context-sensitive help is available) is much better. If you read the documentation then you should know that the DOS command to list the files is "DIR", as well as other details. One reason to hide controls is to save space for the other things being displayed, although it should be ensured to not be made unusable from such a thing.
• ternaus 1y ago
  I am all for intuitive interfaces, but I am also a big proponent of learning hot keys in every program I work with. It would be better for design to be intuitive, but you struggle only the first time, while interfaces overloaded with information will take some of your attention every time you look at them