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> Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces Nor can the design world, for that matter. They thi

by LtWorf 1y ago

> Overall, the development world does not intuitively understand the difficulty of creating good interfaces Nor can the design world, for that matter. They think that making slightly darker gray text on gray background using a tiny font and leaving loads of empty space is peak design. Meanwhile my father cannot use most websites because of this.

hn_acc1 1y ago
As I age, this x1000. Even simple slack app on my windows laptop - clicking in the overview scroll bar is NOT "move down a page". It seems to be "the longer you click, the further it moves" or something equally disgusting. Usually, I dock my laptop and use an external mouse with wheel, and it's easy to do what I want. With a touchpad? Forget it.. I'm clicking 20x to get it to move to the top - IF I can hit the 5-pixel-wide scrollbar. There's no easy way to increase scrollbar size anymore either.. It's like dark patterns are the ONLY pattern these days.. WTF did we go wrong?
- BobbyTables2 1y ago
  Indeed. Win95 was peak UI design. I don’t understand modern trends.
- fragmede 1y ago
  With a touchpad? Use two fingers to scroll (also works horizontally). Who's managing to hit a tiny scrollbar that disappears with a touchpad‽
  - mjevans 1y ago
    They just aren't as good at detecting real physical contact as a nice physical mouse is at responding to movement and pressure.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      I mean, maybe but the question wasn't what is the superior general pointing device (trackball ftw if you ask me) though, but how to scroll using a trackpad without tearing your hair out.
- LtWorf 1y ago
  I created localslackirc to keep using IRC and not have to deal with slack :D
BobbyTables2 1y ago
What pisses me off is that the “brutalist” style in the 1990s was arguably perfect. Having standardized persistent menus, meaningful compact toolbars was nice. Then the world threw away the menus, adopted an idiotic “ribbon” that uses more screen real estate. Unsatisfied, we dumbed down desktop apps to look like mobile apps, even though input technology remains different. Websites also decided to avoid blue underlined text for links and be as nonstandard as possible. Frankly, developers did UI better before UI designers went off the deep end.
- sjamaan 1y ago
  I was ranting exactly the same just yesterday. Nowadays UI designers seem to have forgotten all about affordances. Back in the day you had drop shadows below buttons to indicate that they could be pressed, big chunky scrollbars with two lines on the handle to indicate "grippiness" etc. A few days ago I had trouble charging an electric rental car. When plugging it in, it kept saying "charging scheduled" on the dash, but I couldn't find out how to disable that and make it charge right away. The manual seemed to indicate it could only be done with an app (ugh, disgusting). Went back to the rental company, they made it charge and showed me a video of the screen where to do that. I asked "but how on earth do you get to that screen?". Turned out you could fucking swipe the tablet display to get to a different screen! There was absolutely no indication that this was possible, and the screen even implied that it was modal because there were icons at the bottom which changed the display of the screen. So you had: zero affordances, modal design on a specific tab, and the different modes showed different tabs at the top, further leading me to believe that this was all there was.
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    I've had long discussions at work with our designer, who thinks that people on desktop computers should perform swipe actions with the mouse rather than the UI reacting to mouse scroll events. 99% of the users are not using the mobile version.
    - DrewADesign 1y ago
DrewADesign 1y ago
The dozens of people I know that design interfaces professionally can probably recite more of the WCAG by heart than some of the people that created them. You’re assuming that things you think “look designed” were made by designers rather than people playing with the CSS in a template they found trying to make things “look designed.” You’re almost certainly mistaken.
- eviks 1y ago
  > can probably recite more of the WCAG by heart than some of the people that created them That's part of the problem, they'll defend their poorly visible choice by lawyering "but this meets the minimal recommended guideline of 2.7.9"
  - DrewADesign 1y ago
    Find a validator and try to make a text color selection that meets wcag guidelines which doesn’t have contrast high enough to read it perfectly easily. The criteria are not ambiguous and they’re not scraping the visibility barrier.
- pseudalopex 1y ago
  No. I worked with designers who designed low contrast and low density interfaces. I read articles written by designers. I used products of companies like Apple.
  - DrewADesign 1y ago
    Examples? Are they interface designers? Are they qualified? The existence of shitty designers is no more an impeachment of any design field or designers as the existence of shitty developers is an impeachment of development or developers.
    - LtWorf 1y ago
      I think at this point the existence of good designers is what needs proof.

by LtWorf 1y ago

hn_acc1 1y ago

As I age, this x1000. Even simple slack app on my windows laptop - clicking in the overview scroll bar is NOT "move down a page". It seems to be "the longer you click, the further it moves" or something equally disgusting. Usually, I dock my laptop and use an external mouse with wheel, and it's easy to do what I want. With a touchpad? Forget it.. I'm clicking 20x to get it to move to the top - IF I can hit the 5-pixel-wide scrollbar. There's no easy way to increase scrollbar size anymore either.. It's like dark patterns are the ONLY pattern these days.. WTF did we go wrong?

BobbyTables2 1y ago
Indeed. Win95 was peak UI design. I don’t understand modern trends.
fragmede 1y ago
With a touchpad? Use two fingers to scroll (also works horizontally). Who's managing to hit a tiny scrollbar that disappears with a touchpad‽
- mjevans 1y ago
  They just aren't as good at detecting real physical contact as a nice physical mouse is at responding to movement and pressure.
  - fragmede 1y ago
    I mean, maybe but the question wasn't what is the superior general pointing device (trackball ftw if you ask me) though, but how to scroll using a trackpad without tearing your hair out.
LtWorf 1y ago
I created localslackirc to keep using IRC and not have to deal with slack :D

BobbyTables2 1y ago

What pisses me off is that the “brutalist” style in the 1990s was arguably perfect. Having standardized persistent menus, meaningful compact toolbars was nice. Then the world threw away the menus, adopted an idiotic “ribbon” that uses more screen real estate. Unsatisfied, we dumbed down desktop apps to look like mobile apps, even though input technology remains different. Websites also decided to avoid blue underlined text for links and be as nonstandard as possible. Frankly, developers did UI better before UI designers went off the deep end.

sjamaan 1y ago
I was ranting exactly the same just yesterday. Nowadays UI designers seem to have forgotten all about affordances. Back in the day you had drop shadows below buttons to indicate that they could be pressed, big chunky scrollbars with two lines on the handle to indicate "grippiness" etc. A few days ago I had trouble charging an electric rental car. When plugging it in, it kept saying "charging scheduled" on the dash, but I couldn't find out how to disable that and make it charge right away. The manual seemed to indicate it could only be done with an app (ugh, disgusting). Went back to the rental company, they made it charge and showed me a video of the screen where to do that. I asked "but how on earth do you get to that screen?". Turned out you could fucking swipe the tablet display to get to a different screen! There was absolutely no indication that this was possible, and the screen even implied that it was modal because there were icons at the bottom which changed the display of the screen. So you had: zero affordances, modal design on a specific tab, and the different modes showed different tabs at the top, further leading me to believe that this was all there was.
- LtWorf 1y ago
  I've had long discussions at work with our designer, who thinks that people on desktop computers should perform swipe actions with the mouse rather than the UI reacting to mouse scroll events. 99% of the users are not using the mobile version.
  - DrewADesign 1y ago

DrewADesign 1y ago

The dozens of people I know that design interfaces professionally can probably recite more of the WCAG by heart than some of the people that created them. You’re assuming that things you think “look designed” were made by designers rather than people playing with the CSS in a template they found trying to make things “look designed.” You’re almost certainly mistaken.

eviks 1y ago
> can probably recite more of the WCAG by heart than some of the people that created them That's part of the problem, they'll defend their poorly visible choice by lawyering "but this meets the minimal recommended guideline of 2.7.9"
- DrewADesign 1y ago
  Find a validator and try to make a text color selection that meets wcag guidelines which doesn’t have contrast high enough to read it perfectly easily. The criteria are not ambiguous and they’re not scraping the visibility barrier.
pseudalopex 1y ago
No. I worked with designers who designed low contrast and low density interfaces. I read articles written by designers. I used products of companies like Apple.
- DrewADesign 1y ago
  Examples? Are they interface designers? Are they qualified? The existence of shitty designers is no more an impeachment of any design field or designers as the existence of shitty developers is an impeachment of development or developers.
  - LtWorf 1y ago
    I think at this point the existence of good designers is what needs proof.