5 ms·

I understand the desire to want to fix user pain points. There are plenty to choose from. I think the problem is that most of the UI changes don't seem to fix a

by jhhh 10mo ago

I understand the desire to want to fix user pain points. There are plenty to choose from. I think the problem is that most of the UI changes don't seem to fix any particular issue I have. They are just different, and when some changes do create even more problems there's never any configuration to disable them. You're trying to create a perfect, coherent system for everyone absent the ability to configure it to our liking. He even mentioned how unpopular making things configurable is in the UI community. A perfect pain point example was mentioned in the video: Text selection on mobile is trash. But each app seems to have different solutions, even from the same developer. Google Messages doesn't allow any text selection of content below an entire message. Some other apps have opted in to a 'smart' text select which when you select text will guess and randomly group select adjacent words. And lastly, some apps will only ever select a single word when you double tap which seemed to be the standard on mobile for a long time. All of this is inconsistent and often I'll want to do something like look up a word and realize oh I can't select the word at all (G message), or the system 'smartly' selected 4 words instead, or that it did what I want and actually just picked one word. Each application designer decided they wanted to make their own change and made the whole system fragmented and worse overall.

porkbrain 10mo ago
Text selection used to be frustrating on mobile for me too until Google fixed it with OCR. I get to just hold a button briefly and then can immediately select an area of the screen to scan text from, with a consistent UX. Like a screenshot but for text.
- supportengineer 10mo ago
  That’s how I do it on the iPhone as well. I take a screen shot first. You can count on it, it is reliable, it always works.
  - throwaway894345 10mo ago
    Unless you need to select more text than fits on the screen
- taskforcegemini 10mo ago
  They are using OCR for selecting plain text?
  - AlienRobot 10mo ago
    At least it's not AI... yet.
    - xnx 10mo ago
      Multi-modal LLMs like Gemini are better than traditional OCR in most ways.
    - hulitu 10mo ago
      It is a poor person, sitting in a 3rd world country, thanscribing the text in your clipboard. See Alexa for details. /s I'm only half joking.
      - doubled112 10mo ago
        There’s an API (Actually People Implemented) for that.
  - eastbound 10mo ago
    On iPhone too, taking a screenshot is the single reliable way to select text.
    - throwaway894345 10mo ago
      It becomes possible. Getting the handles to move correctly is still often a frustrating experience.
  - aoeusnth1 10mo ago
    It's possible to use the Gemini "ask me about this screen" to OCR the selected area of the screenshot. I guess that might be more efficient in some contexts then trying to use the native text select.
- clearleaf 10mo ago
  This is such an indictment of modern technology. No offense is meant to you for doing what works for you, but it is buck wild that this is the "fix" they've come up with. As somebody learning about this for the first time it sounds equivalent to a world where screenshotting became really hard so people started taking photos of their screen so they could screenshot the photo. How could such a fundamental aspect of using a computer become so ridiculous? It's like satire.
  - porkbrain 10mo ago
    Unfortunately, some apps don't support text selection and on some websites the text selection is unpredictable. I'd actually compare screen OCR to screenshots. Instead of every app and every website implementing their own screenshot functionality, the system provides one for you. Same goes for text selection. Instead of every context having to agree on tagging the text and directions, your phone has a quick way of letting you scan the screen for text. To be fair, I still use the "hold the text to select it" approach when I want to continue with the "select all" action and have some confidence that is going to do what I want.
    - zbentley 10mo ago
      > some apps don't support text selection and on some websites the text selection is unpredictable. That correctly identifies the problem. Now why is that, and how can we fix it? It seems fixable; native GUI apps have COM bindings that can fairly reliably produce the text present in certain controls in the vast majority of cases. Web apps (and "desktop" apps that are actually web apps) have accessibility attributes and at least nominally the notion of separating document data from presentation. Now why do so few applications support text extraction via those channels? If the answer is "it's hard/easier not to", how can we make the right way easier than the wrong way?
- bathtub365 10mo ago
  Does it automatically scroll down while selecting if the text is larger than the screen?
  - porkbrain 10mo ago
    Fair point, it does not on my device
diziet_sma 10mo ago
Universal search on Google Pixels has solved a lot of the text selection problems on Android for me, with the exception being selecting text which requires scrolling.
PunchyHamster 10mo ago
> He even mentioned how unpopular making things configurable is in the UI community. Inability to imagine someone might have different idea about what's useful is general plague of UI/UX industry. And there seem to be zero care given to usage by user that have to use the app longer than 30 seconds a day. Productivity vs learning time curve is basically flat, and low, with exception being pretty much "the tools made by X for X" like programming IDEs
- ryandrake 10mo ago
  Back in the 90s, you had a setting for everything! It was glorious. This trend of deliberately not making things configurable is the worst, and we can’t seem to escape it because artists are in charge of the UI rather than human interaction professionals. App designers need to understand that their opinions on how the app should look and work are just that: opinions. Opinions they should keep to themselves.
  - 3v1n0 10mo ago
    Try to maintain the whole matrix or possibilities then you tell me...
    - eviks 10mo ago
      Indeed, people aren't paid to do the good things, only the easy ones
    - rcxdude 10mo ago
      Which is why you should think about how these options interact and compose at the start, as opposed to only adding options in an ad-hoc manner (whether you do it willy-nilly or only when your arm is really twisted)
      - hulitu 10mo ago
        "You mean we shouldn't use 10 layers of abstraction and 274 libraries to achieve our goal ? I mean, we use a lot of resuources, but look how polished the UI is: everything is flat. " Thank god the RAM prices have risen. Maybe some people will start to programm with their heads instead of their (AI) IDE.
jauntywundrkind 10mo ago
> that it did what I want and actually just picked one word. Each application designer decided they wanted to make their own change and made the whole system fragmented and worse overall. This is the trouble. It's been decades of the OS becoming less and less relevant. Apps have more power, more will to build their own thing. And there's less and less personal computing left. There's the design challenges, the UX being totally different. But the OS used to be a common substrate that the user could use to do things. And the OS has just vanished vanished vanished, receeded into the sea. Leaving these apps to totally dominate the experience, apps that are so often little more than thin clients to some far off cloud system, to basically some corporations mainframe. The OS's relevance keeps shrinking, and it's awful for users. Why bother making new UX for the desktop, if the capabilities budget is still entirely on the side of the app? What actually needs to change is's UX of the desktop or other OS paradigm (mobile), it's a fundamental shift in taking power out of the mainframe and having a personal computer that's worth a damn, that again has more than a quantum of capability embued in it that it can deliver to the user. (My actual hope is that someday the web can do some of this, because apps have near always been a horrible thing for users that gives them no agency, no control, that's pre baked to be only what is delivered to the user.)
ahartmetz 10mo ago
>Text selection on mobile is trash Doesn't have to be - Blackberry BB10 had damn near solved it. I think they had some patents on it, but these should have expired, and I noticed some corresponding changes in Android. But it's still far from being as good as BB10. What BB10 had was a kind of combined cursor and magnifying glass that controlled really well, plus the ability to tap the thing left or right to move one letter at a time.
- johanyc 10mo ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi-XrtAmRuk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi-XrtAmRuk it doesn't look very easy to use in the demo tbh
  - ahartmetz 10mo ago
    It looks like the thing that I remembered appears at 2:06 and later. I also tried to find a video example when I wrote my post and didn't find anything. Seems like very few people get excited about text selection.

by jhhh 10mo ago

porkbrain 10mo ago

Text selection used to be frustrating on mobile for me too until Google fixed it with OCR. I get to just hold a button briefly and then can immediately select an area of the screen to scan text from, with a consistent UX. Like a screenshot but for text.

supportengineer 10mo ago
That’s how I do it on the iPhone as well. I take a screen shot first. You can count on it, it is reliable, it always works.
- throwaway894345 10mo ago
  Unless you need to select more text than fits on the screen
taskforcegemini 10mo ago
They are using OCR for selecting plain text?
- AlienRobot 10mo ago
  At least it's not AI... yet.
  - xnx 10mo ago
    Multi-modal LLMs like Gemini are better than traditional OCR in most ways.
  - hulitu 10mo ago
    It is a poor person, sitting in a 3rd world country, thanscribing the text in your clipboard. See Alexa for details. /s I'm only half joking.
    - doubled112 10mo ago
      There’s an API (Actually People Implemented) for that.
- eastbound 10mo ago
  On iPhone too, taking a screenshot is the single reliable way to select text.
  - throwaway894345 10mo ago
    It becomes possible. Getting the handles to move correctly is still often a frustrating experience.
- aoeusnth1 10mo ago
  It's possible to use the Gemini "ask me about this screen" to OCR the selected area of the screenshot. I guess that might be more efficient in some contexts then trying to use the native text select.
clearleaf 10mo ago
This is such an indictment of modern technology. No offense is meant to you for doing what works for you, but it is buck wild that this is the "fix" they've come up with. As somebody learning about this for the first time it sounds equivalent to a world where screenshotting became really hard so people started taking photos of their screen so they could screenshot the photo. How could such a fundamental aspect of using a computer become so ridiculous? It's like satire.
- porkbrain 10mo ago
  Unfortunately, some apps don't support text selection and on some websites the text selection is unpredictable. I'd actually compare screen OCR to screenshots. Instead of every app and every website implementing their own screenshot functionality, the system provides one for you. Same goes for text selection. Instead of every context having to agree on tagging the text and directions, your phone has a quick way of letting you scan the screen for text. To be fair, I still use the "hold the text to select it" approach when I want to continue with the "select all" action and have some confidence that is going to do what I want.
  - zbentley 10mo ago
    > some apps don't support text selection and on some websites the text selection is unpredictable. That correctly identifies the problem. Now why is that, and how can we fix it? It seems fixable; native GUI apps have COM bindings that can fairly reliably produce the text present in certain controls in the vast majority of cases. Web apps (and "desktop" apps that are actually web apps) have accessibility attributes and at least nominally the notion of separating document data from presentation. Now why do so few applications support text extraction via those channels? If the answer is "it's hard/easier not to", how can we make the right way easier than the wrong way?
bathtub365 10mo ago
Does it automatically scroll down while selecting if the text is larger than the screen?
- porkbrain 10mo ago
  Fair point, it does not on my device

diziet_sma 10mo ago

Universal search on Google Pixels has solved a lot of the text selection problems on Android for me, with the exception being selecting text which requires scrolling.

PunchyHamster 10mo ago

> He even mentioned how unpopular making things configurable is in the UI community. Inability to imagine someone might have different idea about what's useful is general plague of UI/UX industry. And there seem to be zero care given to usage by user that have to use the app longer than 30 seconds a day. Productivity vs learning time curve is basically flat, and low, with exception being pretty much "the tools made by X for X" like programming IDEs

ryandrake 10mo ago
Back in the 90s, you had a setting for everything! It was glorious. This trend of deliberately not making things configurable is the worst, and we can’t seem to escape it because artists are in charge of the UI rather than human interaction professionals. App designers need to understand that their opinions on how the app should look and work are just that: opinions. Opinions they should keep to themselves.
- 3v1n0 10mo ago
  Try to maintain the whole matrix or possibilities then you tell me...
  - eviks 10mo ago
    Indeed, people aren't paid to do the good things, only the easy ones
  - rcxdude 10mo ago
    Which is why you should think about how these options interact and compose at the start, as opposed to only adding options in an ad-hoc manner (whether you do it willy-nilly or only when your arm is really twisted)
    - hulitu 10mo ago
      "You mean we shouldn't use 10 layers of abstraction and 274 libraries to achieve our goal ? I mean, we use a lot of resuources, but look how polished the UI is: everything is flat. " Thank god the RAM prices have risen. Maybe some people will start to programm with their heads instead of their (AI) IDE.

jauntywundrkind 10mo ago

> that it did what I want and actually just picked one word. Each application designer decided they wanted to make their own change and made the whole system fragmented and worse overall. This is the trouble. It's been decades of the OS becoming less and less relevant. Apps have more power, more will to build their own thing. And there's less and less personal computing left. There's the design challenges, the UX being totally different. But the OS used to be a common substrate that the user could use to do things. And the OS has just vanished vanished vanished, receeded into the sea. Leaving these apps to totally dominate the experience, apps that are so often little more than thin clients to some far off cloud system, to basically some corporations mainframe. The OS's relevance keeps shrinking, and it's awful for users. Why bother making new UX for the desktop, if the capabilities budget is still entirely on the side of the app? What actually needs to change is's UX of the desktop or other OS paradigm (mobile), it's a fundamental shift in taking power out of the mainframe and having a personal computer that's worth a damn, that again has more than a quantum of capability embued in it that it can deliver to the user. (My actual hope is that someday the web can do some of this, because apps have near always been a horrible thing for users that gives them no agency, no control, that's pre baked to be only what is delivered to the user.)

ahartmetz 10mo ago

>Text selection on mobile is trash Doesn't have to be - Blackberry BB10 had damn near solved it. I think they had some patents on it, but these should have expired, and I noticed some corresponding changes in Android. But it's still far from being as good as BB10. What BB10 had was a kind of combined cursor and magnifying glass that controlled really well, plus the ability to tap the thing left or right to move one letter at a time.

johanyc 10mo ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi-XrtAmRuk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi-XrtAmRuk it doesn't look very easy to use in the demo tbh
- ahartmetz 10mo ago
  It looks like the thing that I remembered appears at 2:06 and later. I also tried to find a video example when I wrote my post and didn't find anything. Seems like very few people get excited about text selection.