I find it a bit ironic that the author of this post references a New York Times article on how difficult it is to cancel your Amazon Prime subscription without any mention of how difficult the New York Times makes it so cancel a subscription to their own service. If you have a New York Times subscription you can only cancel it by calling them on the phone during working hours or using their support chat which is only available during working hours (for everyone except Californians, kinda odd how they won't make that available to the whole country, huh?). Why not just have a simple cancel subscription button on your account page?
I had such a hard time cancelling The Economist last time, I joined their web chat to ask them if cancelling was as easy as signing up and if it was I would subscribe. Unfortunately my place in the queue kept _incrementing_, so I ended up buying myself a gift subscription so I knew I wouldn't have to go through that again.
Didn't California pass a law saying you got to cancel as easily as you signed up?
Yes, which is why a hack at some of these websites is to set your address as being in California, at which point one-click cancellation buttons magically seem to appear.
Wow, having different pages based on state seems to be such an amount of effort that it's basically an admission of fraud to have the other version: you must make enough money of not-cancelling to justify having two.
It's very annoying. They want to be able to negotiate if you are leaving because of price, and you can get it for quite cheap. But I wish they just had a more attractive list price and a cancel button.
Well at least you can cancel by phone. I was moving out and wanted to cancel my internet subscription last year. Months in advance, I went to their website and located (with difficulty!) their cancellation page. There was either a form online you could fill where they would call you back, or you could call them. I did the former, waited for a couple of weeks, never had an answer. So I called them, got someone who told me it would be cancelled in 3 months as requested and forgot about it. I even received a survey about how my cancellation process went.
4 months later, I received a bill for the first month after it was supposed to be cancelled. So I called support, which told me that cancellations could only be processed by registered letter, and that they had sent me a mail regarding this (which I never received). She then told me that the service would be cancelled in 2 months since it's the minimum delay, but it would be shortened to 1 month since I was moving to a place which already had a subscription with them, provided I gave the name/address/customer number of the place I was moving to. I asked if she was sure about the details and she said yes.
Now, 2 months later, of course I still received a bill. Called them again, turns out you actually need the signature of the person holding the other contract for the 1 month thing to be valid... Apparently, they sent me another mail, which again I did not receive. (I did, however, receive a late payment notice with massive fees to my new address...) I sent a letter complaining about the whole situation, and just got told to "read the contract attentively next time".
Piling onto your post because of recent bad experiences:
Did you know that literally anyone can email Comcast and complain about alleged DMCA violations on your residential internet? Comcast has no mechanism for submitting a counter-notice, and if you get too many such complaints they will ban you for up to 6 months. It's shocking that an ISP can be so bad that they're the impetus for moving all by themselves.
In your case though, if you're interested you might be able to get a lawyer involved? Lying is generally legal, but they might have some civil liability for fraud or something. It probably wouldn't be profitable for you, but if you won it might make you feel better.
I thought about it, but honestly it took a lot of time and energy out of me already, I just don't want to deal with them again.
I just won't ever do business with them again, and I tell my story from time to time to people that ask my opinion about ISPs.
I'm not even sure I have a case, I looked a bit online and as you said, lying is not illegal even if in cases like this that doesn't sit very well with me.
In your case, isn't having a counter notice mechanism a requirement? I guess you could have sued them as well for that? But I understand, I don't want to have to sue every company I do business with, that's not a healthy environment even though it probably would be better for everyone in the long run.
My Internet suddenly stopped working in the middle of a work day a few weeks back (I work from home) and I tried to call Spectrum to diagnose the problem and all they could tell me was the account holder canceled the account, which was clearly not true as I tried to tell them since I am the account holder and I did no such thing. Unfortunately, my wife (who they would actually talk to) works in a SCIF, so I had no way to get a hold of her and had to just leave her a message and wait.
It turns out someone had called and claimed to be moving into my house, so they canceled my account in order to enable setting up a new account for the person who claimed to be moving into my house.
I am still amazed that this is possible. You can get any customer's Internet turned off and they can't stop you just by signing up to get a new account at their address.
The worst I've seen is cancelling a subscription to the French newspaper Le Monde. You have to print and fill a form and send it to them by snail mail. Totally unbelievable.
> a New York Times article on how difficult it is to cancel your Amazon Prime subscription without any mention of how difficult the New York Times makes it so cancel a subscription to their own service
Well, not only that, but things have gotten so bad that Amazon Prime is really not the best example. I actually just went through this process: I accepted a 30 day Amazon Prime free trial just before Christmas because I was going to be doing a lot of ordering. Of course I forgot to cancel it until a few days after the trial was up. So I went to go cancel it and try to get any money they had charged me back.
And... it wasn't really that bad? From the main page, you click one link to manage your account / Prime subscription. Another one link takes you to cancel the subscription. There are like three or so pages that explain the benefits you'll be losing and allow you to back out, or choose options like "cancel my subscription at the end of the month", or "cancel it now and refund the money". I wouldn't describe any of this as dark-patterns because even if it's manipulative it was at least very clear how to do what I wanted to do.
That the other thing, too. I was able to get $14 of the $15 monthly fee back when canceling - they didn't try to pull any bullshit with that.
A couple of qualifiers: (a) yes, it could (and should) be better, and (b) I'm a California resident, so it's possible they presented a different flow to me than to most other people.
I don't normally subscribe or unsubscribe to services and so the NYTimes unsubscribe process really surprised me at the time. In the end, having to go through a chat system wasn't as bad as I thought, but it did annoy me at the time that I couldn't just hit a button to cancel.
Since then, I've been wary of signing up for anything new, knowing that there is likely a painful process on the other end to cancel my account.
In addition to use exploitation, there's a lot of shallow visual-appeal hooks but no interest in making things useful or better for accomplishing tasks/goals.
In defense of the d.school, what they teach are techniques and tools - not ethics.
UX broadly is in the same boat. UX is a tool. We can use it for good or for evil.
At the end of the day UX is only as valuable as how well individuals (or companies) can align their personal definition of 'good' with 'good' that the underlying company cares for.
I think it would be correct to say that receiving an education should teach you about ethics. Whether that should be strategic from the top down (you take specific classes about ethics) or embedded in each class is a question I don’t know the answer to.
In an individual class the amount of ethics varies. When I took d.school classes there certainly wasn’t a “market mover” mentality. We were genuinely interested in understanding people better so we could improve lives. But ethics certainly wasn’t explicitly on the agenda. We just didn’t have any assholes taking the course at that time.
This is part of the argument within the university for loosening credit requirements. When I was there, I took the HCI track. That track had the smallest credit requirement and also let you take a broader base of classes that counted towards the major, such as philosophy. That was a more rounded experience than some of my peers who took harder cs tracks like networking and systems.
At least when I was teaching intro HCI courses at Carnegie Mellon we did have lectures and discussions on dark patterns and the ethics of UX. Taking advantage of human psychology to manipulate people has been a problem in the field for a long time (e.g. gambling machines, advertising, dark patterns, screen addiction) so IMO it's a bit irresponsible not to at least warn students that they're likely going to be asked to do some morally questionable things.
> In Juul's case, fraudulent proclamations of "empathy" served as a smokescreen for the true aim of the company, which was to use d.school-inflected product design to addict, capture, and monetize an entire generation of young nicotine users.
People try to make everything about "empathy" these days. The term has been on the rise since September 2008 [0] and I've seen it routinely used and abused. Who can refute empathy or a lack thereof? I recently took a corporate training about personalities. The whole seminar was supposed to show you strengths of the various personality type, what their opposites are, and how to interface with them better. Make better teams through understanding; nothing new. One measurement went from what's basically Extremely Empathetic => Data Driven (neither being bad, explicitly stated.) Routinely people that I worked with recategorized people in "data driven" to "non-empathetic" in casual conversation. Reading this article made me realize the real deceiving UX isn't unique to code or processes, it's just human inclination for things they don't like; whether that be the "cancel" button or personality traits.
Leave the kids alone. Adults who market harmful products to kids are predatory assholes. I'd hope there is a special place in hell for whoever dreamed up count chocola and all the other bullshit used to sell candied cereal to kids. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it was ethical. And in the case of Juul, going into highschools with their marketting material, I doubt it was even legal.
UX is the "user experience". An experience can be good or an experience can be bad. An experience can reduce friction, or it can intentionally create it. UX as a term on its own is neither positive nor negative.
The title should just be "I dislike UX anti-patterns", because good UX, i.e. low-friction/high-reward (for your customer) UX is still the nice thing it's always been.
For basically everyone of an age to being reading HN, we've essentially never known anything other than technology (and life in general) improving over time, often exponentially.
If you've never seen this talk by Jonathan Blow, he's makes a rather compelling argument that we don't necessarily have any reason to believe this will continue:
I'm not sure I'd use the term "improving" but would instead say "changing." The perception of those changes has certainly been weighted towards "improvement" but some of that perception is a hangover from the popular mid-century views that most people held regarding science and technology (others held such views prior to that time but I wouldn't say they were the majority).
Which one should I read first? I read Taleb's critique, who comes off as a raving lunatic in this context, and Gladwell who must have some axe to grind since he doesn't actually address the concrete metrics that Pinker brings up.
Lower childhood mortality, less poverty, longer life expectancy, less violent crime, less disease, more equality, less war. Things are getting better, along almost every metric we can think of. It's not just "different". It's also not just Pinker's work confirming that, OurWorldInData is good on this topic too.
The only sensible argument I've heard to the contrary is that our systemic tail risks have gotten bigger. Which is accurate but doesn't change the fact that things are much better for almost everyone presuming that such risks can be mitigated.
I'm sure you can think of other dimensions in which things are worse than they used to be. (Not being snarky, I just think things are usually more complicated.)
Jason Hinkel's article raises some good points but is hardly a valid rebuttal. It's extremely weak. I'm still firmly on the side of Pinker's narrative, which clearly fits the data far better.
(1) Hinkel falsely concludes that "The poverty rate has worsened dramatically since 1981", using a graph of the number of people in poverty (which increases by ~31% between 1981 to 2013) as justification. The rate did not increase. The ratedecreased according to his own graph! The population increased by 59% over that same time period, so the correct conclusion from his own data is that the poverty rate actually reduced over that same time period.
(2) Not only is poverty better, but almost every other meaningful metric (disease/mortality/war deaths/crime deaths) is also better, which he hand-waves away in a single paragraph after falsely asserting that the poverty rate has gone up!
It is borderline dishonest, or perhaps at best he is innumerate. If this is the best rebuttal then I am even more confident in the conclusion that things are getting better - MUCH better - aside from a number of existential tail risks that we need to mitigate.
Excluding China, the graph in [1] shows ~3pp decrease in poverty over 30 years, and a good portion of that time was above the starting point so it might just be random fluctuation.
Also,
> only 5% of new income from global growth goes to the poorest 60% of humanity – people living on less than $7.40/day.
Excluding China is motivated reasoning - and even doing so still shows the opposite conclusion to the one he's clearly desperate to validate. What if I excluded Venezuela or North Korea in order to boost the conclusion that I've decided on a priori?
He explains why it makes sense to handle China differently -- basically because China hasn't applied the policies that Pinker advocates, so it shouldn't be used as evidence for them. China's policies have been very different. He should treat other countries the same way, as you suggest, though China's impact is likely larger than the others.
This is motivated reasoning on his part. If the question at hand is "is the world getting better?", then excluding China makes no sense in the pursuit of answering that question.
It's also ridiculous for him to say that China doesn't use policies that Pinker advocates for. That's absolutist and binary thinking. Pinker would advocate for the open market liberalising policies of Deng Xiaoping relative to Maoist economic authoritarianism, which helped to lift millions out of poverty in China, even though there's still a lot that he doesn't agree with China's system.
If Pinker doesn't like Putin's strongman behavior in the region should he exclude Russia from his statistics on improving world peace? If Pinker doesn't like the US healthcare system should he exclude the US from his statistics on childhood mortality?
This is a dishonest rhetorical strategy that Hinkel is employing. It's clear to me now that Hinkel is a bad faith salesman who has set out to demonstrate his hypothesis at all costs.
If the question is "is the world getting better?" then yes, treat everything the same. But that question isn't as useful as others that could be asked, such as "which policies make the world get better?"
Hinkel's argument is that Pinker uses "is the world getting better?" as a proxy for "are my preferred policies making the world better?". If policy evaluation is their goal, the ad-hoc exclusion of China is overly simplistic, but so is drawing policy conclusions from overall trends without examining what's driving the trends. Both Pinker and Hinkel should be measuring the degree to which various policies were applied and evaluate poverty-reduction against that quantity.
By "things" it seems you ignore the key bit of the parent I was replying to... namely "technology," especially within the confines of the main article which focused on UX.
Specifically I used the word "changing" rather than "improving" because within the tech world (and to a degree the larger world of product) there is a long history of new and novel equating to better, hence the tired ad slogan "new and improved!" That emphasis on newness as desirable is a result of the many measurable improvements that did result from the rapid pace of innovation that occurred in the 19th and 20th century, improvements that were obviously perceptible in that they resulted in large leaps forward vs incrementally over long time periods.
Also, to claim that there has been improvements for large-scale populations via some new thing is nowhere close to being sufficient to explain how that new thing is an improvement for the individual customer.
How about this. Tonight, when I want to watch a program on BBC Iplayer, I need to switch on the kindle fire stick, wait for it to load, find the iplayer app and wait for 30 seconds until it loads, search for a channel, with each character I type taking 0.5 seconds to show up on the screen (no kidding), select the channel and wait 10 seconds for it to buffer.
When I was a kid, I just used to press one button on the front of the tv and it was on in less than a second.
Not sure what my point is really but there’s something not quite right with this situation. Technology has improved choice but made the experience awful.
The cool thing is that while it's not easy, there's probably never been an easier time to make good stuff. There's a lot of opportunity out there to make better experiences.
It seems like all of those other steps allow you more flexibility to do a bunch of stuff you probably couldn't do as a kid, such as watch BBC from any country in the world, or watch something from the BBC that came on earlier, or to pause the BBC so you can get some chips from the pantry.
Every once in a while, Netflix will take like 15s to load. But before I cuss out my XBox One, I do try to remember that as a kid I was happy downloading one picture off a 300BPS modem in like 10 minutes from a BBS (which sometimes took 30 minutes to finally get into) back when I was kid.
My android box running pirated streaming and torrent services (or even IPTV occasionally when I want to watch “TV”) seems to work 100x better than your proprietary tech. Plus it runs Prime and Netflix just fine...
My $50 Chromecast is still the best thing around for watching movies or streams off my computer. Kodi works but it takes set up times which I don’t like investing.
Sounds like you either just have low end tech or bad gov run software services.
And I’m not running anything fancy just your typical Android SoC with a decent remote with a keyboard on the back, which I bought for <$100 max off Amazon.
The first telly I remember was b/w and had three channels and belonged to a neighbour. Provided the dog hadn't recently wazzed on the rubber plant that supported the aerial, in which case ITV was optional and then we only had BBC One and Two.
However, old school CRT screens could handle pans and zooms that my modern LG thing can only dream of. Then again the thing I'm watching now is comparatively huge and "waffer theeeen". A ~50" CRT would stick out from the wall about four feet and weigh enough that I'd be using some of the more robust Civil Engineering things I learned at college to fix it to the wall.
When I was a child it took a while to tune a TV by hand, channel by channel. Remember portables with the little aerials on the end of a wire? Then finding out that to watch the rugby today involved perching the TV on a chair near a window and the aerial held by long suffering (someone) holding it at a strange angle near the ceiling. You missed half the match faffing around.
My laptop runs Arch - that's far more friendly than anything I used in the '70s-'00s. I recall getting an Epsom FX80 dot matrix printer connected to our C-64 was quite traumatic and involved getting a Centronics (parallel) interface card made up and stuff. I still have the C-64 and it now has a USB interface.
Now I press the home button and pick a service on my TV. OK on my TV that isn't one of my RPi driven monsters that uses the MythTV backend. I have an Octo-LNB on my sat dish ...
(Sorry about this (twitch) but it's iPlayer and you were a child, not a kid)
Nah I was a kid and we had a colour tv. Your setup sounds very impressive but you’re not the average viewer, and it’s the average viewer that has an old fire stick like mine that takes 30s to load the iplayer app.
I assume you’re in the UK if you’re using iPlayer.
Why not just use Freeview? It’s not quite as fast as analogue TV because it has to acquire and decode the digital signal, but apart from that it’s just as convenient, the quality is better and there are many more channels.
> My laptop runs Arch - that's far more friendly than anything I used in the '70s-'00s.
Not to be too much of a Linux-using stereotype, but it really does seem like the things that have been getting better are those things that are made (usually for free) for users for the benefit of themselves and other users, and not by profit-seeking corporations as closed-source software.
The few exceptions to that rule are those areas that are heavily dependent on technological improvements, e.g. music production, gaming, media editing. But that's just because there are still huge profit-wins to be had just by improving the quality of what the user receives. There's no reason to think wins like that won't dry up.
I can walk over to my TV, it takes a second or two to start up. Maybe another second or two to open an app. And then I can watch any one of tens of thousands of shows.
Yes, when I was kid the TV turned on almost instantly but then I was stuck watching whatever minimal content was broadcasted. Can't even pause it!
I have the same argument with Jonathan Blow's talk -- he talks about how complex things are now compared to the past but the past was so much less capable. Yes, you can write an OS in 3 weeks as long as it doesn't do very much.
If we don't have choice, we manufacture happiness. Something we predict will be somehow worse than "real" happiness, but studies show it's not worse. If we have choice, we predict we will be more happy, but studies show we aren't.
I have to wait many seconds for the "entertainment system" computer in my car to boot in order to simply hear the radio. And when I tune to a different station, it's a touchscreen with UP and DN buttons that I have to tap on to tune ±0.2 MHz, and it takes takes maybe 750ms to lock on to the station. Think about how absurd this is! Compared to my first car made in the early 80s where the radio started as soon as you turned the key, and you had an analog dial that panned through the spectrum instantly with the sound continuously playing.
In decade 1 as the author describes it, there was still patience of investors that there ROI would come, and AI/data wasn’t feasible enough, so good UX was the name of the game. Think of carts that needed to be 1 click affairs.
When I did my training in advertising, the first line uttered by my teacher was “We are learning you to lie here” , and indeed the rest of the course was about how to deceive the customer by pushing the right buttons.
That’s the state of affairs of most of the commercial web. And I think you are right it won’t change.
There are plenty of tech companies not using dark patterns (I used to work for one). Granted Amazon employees might not be able to get paid as much elsewhere, but that's the choice you make.
I have worked for 5 companies in my 15 years career. One of that company was ecommerce consulting firm which dealt with a lot of mom-n-pop ecommerce stores. Let me tell you not a single one of them was willing to give up any dark patterns if that meant losing revenues. Unless you are working on non-revenue generating product like internal dashboard, it is all about get sales anyway possible.
I am sure there are ethical companies, I see many of them mentioned here, started by readers of this forum, but what percentage are those. Imo, they are less than 1%.
The "you can always go work somewhere else" argument will never stop being a cop out. Your employer controls access to your salary, healthcare benefits, and potentially more. Leaving your job is never a completely safe move and there's an abundance of reasons why it's simply not an option to most people, and it doesn't matter what tier of middle class occupation you have for that to be true.
Moreso this argument isn't one to be taken seriously because it assumes every collective failure is a failure of millions of individual choices rather than any of the cultural inertia or environmental influences that steer our choices.
We're talking about UX designers, and in particular UX designers at large tech companies (FAMAG). UX designers at e.g. Amazon, do have huge optionality to go elsewhere and still get paid good salaries. They are not e.g. clothing workers in Bangladesh.
> Moreso this argument isn't one to be taken seriously because it assumes every collective failure is a failure of millions of individual choices rather than any of the cultural inertia or environmental influences that steer our choices.
That's a strawman - I'm not saying this applies for 'every collective failure'. Systemic factors are important, however we shouldn't absolve individuals at large tech firms of their own responsibility.
It's also worth mentioning that the misconception of thinking UX as being solely related to aesthetics is getting dangerously more and more common, even among professionals referring to themselves as UX designers.
Aesthetics is important, but, in some sorts of systems, it has much lower priority than other non-functional requirements, like overall speed, maintainability, testability and so on.
I don't know if my experience is the same of most of you, but I've seen more and more systems getting aesthetic pleasant but painfully slow and/or buggy these days. It's easy when you can simply quit using the software, but when your bank, your broker, your airline, your accountant, the company that operates the subway ticket machines, when those sorts of businesses start to embrace such vision, things start to get complicated.
And, unfortunately, all those examples I mention here are real and this is not an exhaustive list.
Besides, I'm not sure those companies (at least the ones in my examples) do that as an attempt to exploit users. I believe they do that due to plain lack of competence.
The biggest issue to me is the dumbing down of an experience and design, treating your users as incompetent vs. treating them as intelligent and being able to figure out things; there's still bad design that can occur when complex, but good UX of presenting information appropriately and contextually can create a rich but easy, intuitive flow.
The slowness of certain platforms is also an equally big issue, Reddit for example who seems to purposefully ignore and allow their website via browser experience to suffer - in an attempt to drive people to their app for ad tracking purposes - which I think is shooting themselves in the foot with the trend towards eliminating shallow-manipulative advertising from existence.
If you have the opportunity of visiting a company still using COBOL, Clipper or some other text mode software, ask their users for an opinion on those old systems compared to the current ones.
Most of them prefer the acient ones. When asked why, they simply say "I don't know. It works, it feels right".
Even the younger users (who already had experience with web applications, big tech's stuff etc when they joined the company) prefer the text based ones.
I'm not at all implying that every software should be text based. But I think there are some very important lessons to be learned here. Things we developers used to know, intuitively.
I think UX designers should listen more to those users and less to theories and to Google and its MDC trying to make the internet look like their own products
For a network of sites I am developing I am planning a command prompt where users can type /command for basically every function: /msg username, /logout, /search phrase, etc.
Interesting! I had a similar idea but as a library to drop into existing sites, perhaps even be a browser extension. Vimium does a great job of enabling keyboard control over a website but I think a generic web CLI could take the experience even further.
I did something similar for a web app at work and the people on the floor really liked it. It was mich faster than trying to mouse to things, especially when half of their task is scanning barcodes anyway.
Can confirm. Started out writing code in IDEs, now I'm using Vim
and CLI utilities. It's a polished, stable ecosystem that
doesn't hide anything from the user and isn't incentivised to do
anything other than its purpose, and that becomes very
noticeable once you're familiar with it.
It doesn't come with file sync, plugin management or flashy
animations. But I also don't get loading screens, don't need to
look at SaaS pricing tiers and don't get overwhelmed by UI dark
patterns. That's a trade-off I'll take any day.
One of the great things about command-line interfaces of old are that you could often enter your keyboard input faster than the system could respond to it, and it was OK because the system buffered them up for you and executed them as it caught up.
So if you know on this screen you need to hit F1, and that on the next screen you will have to hit X, then on the following screen, you need to type in the SKU number, you could simply issue as fast as you wanted: F1-X-4112295[ENTER], and take your mind off it while the system would just go through the whole experience successfully at its own pace.
With "better" GUI/mouse based systems, you have to click here, wait... wait... wait..., now click there, wait... wait... wait..., then click there and type in your SKU. Your attention needs to be on the screen at all times in order to wait for the UI and aim the mouse.
Next time you go to your bank web site to pay a bill, think to yourself: Wouldn't it be nice if, rather than navigating their cumbersome UX, you could just hit a known string of keystrokes that you memorized, hit enter, then walk away to get coffee while all the Javascript and page reloading chugged along and paid your bill?
So much this! I've noticed how common it is that interfaces can't keep up with me when, by all rights, they should be able to! I'm a limited, slow human, while their instructions execute billions of times per second. And yet I'm constantly running into scenarios were the next screen comes up and I try to give it an input, but it's not ready. Or when I hit the next-preset button for my car radio, and yet it has to pause to load that station before I can use the button again.
Yea. I have 48 cores on my workstation at work, dozens of gigabeans of RAM and an ultra-mega-terra-gigabit ethernet connection, and still I sit there watching spinners as websites composed primarily of text and images struggle to load.
Right, any desktop app where you have to wait for a non-stupid operation (like a Gaussian blur on a 50mpix image) makes me want to throw my computer through the window. It's 100% unacceptable, every interaction should have its result in the very next frame, and we have all the tools for that.
That would be nice but it is impossible because to actually commit some money I have to go through 2FA involving the bank app on my phone and enter one or two other secrets on the bank website. This is Italy and probably most of EU since the last year.
I understand this is for the safety of my money, probably also for the safety of the bank itself (if something goes wrong it's more and more my fault) but sending money to someone is becoming a PITA.
Even checking your balance from your non-mobile device is quite a pain now. It's much more likely for me to miss a fraudulent transaction now since I no longer login on a daily basis.
"So if you know on this screen you need to hit F1, and that on the next screen you will have to hit X, then on the following screen, you need to type in the SKU number, you could simply issue as fast as you wanted: F1-X-4112295[ENTER], and take your mind off it while the system would just go through the whole experience successfully at its own pace."
There actually are a few plugin managers for Vim. I think i used Vundle once upon a time, but honestly don't recall.
My biggest pet peeve with vim and emacs is that (a) discovery sucks as with most all text mode tools, and (b) emacs in particular is slow and difficult to configure to get some mainstream languages working. Doom was the closest I ever got to being happy with my setup, but the tooltips and autocomplete were still objectively inferior even to vscode (for typescript and react, at least).
Lisps are a different story, but not by much. I'm actually fairly happy with using vscode to write common lisp, though I don't do much of it these days.
Sorry to come at this late but there's discoverability-by-doing and I think it's clear from general user feedback that emacs doesn't have it.
I agree it's very well documented, and I assume your impulse upon reading the previous paragraph is to tell me there's a REPL. it's simply not casually approachable. sorry. ask someone who isn't drowning in koolaid!
Also, for Vim, `:<tab>` gives you all available commands in the current buffer and `:h command` gives you the vim help page for that command (which is usually at least a few sentences long, and pretty thorough).
> Also, for Vim, `:<tab>` gives you all available commands in the current buffer
Don't misunderstand me, I love vim and use it almost exclusively and everyday, but tab-ing in the way you describe yields 2-3 screenfulls of commands that I have to manually (well, with my eyes anyhow) scan to find what I want and it includes gems such as: "spellrare" and "{{{{{{{{"
The latter of which I do not know how to open a help page for.
To me "discoverable" would mean that I would be able to use this interface to learn more commands, but this is only as discoverable as having to read man-pages. Sure - that is a great way to learn, but it's not discoverable.
Now, what would probably get a little closer is if `:<tab>` opened a list if commands in an fzf-style list also listing their descriptions and maybe grouping them by some other way than just alphabet sort order.
(If anyone can tell me what is up with those '{' I would greatly appreciate it)
Having used 3270 terminal for time registration many years ago. And it was 1000 times better and faster than all the web apps that followed. So I can confirm this.
I'm working freelance and built my own cli for this exact purpose. I've been wanting to redo it as a web app, but i honestly like my cli tool better. It lives in git, and Gitlab CI handles generation of pdf/excel reports and uploading to Dropbox. Inputting new data is just so damn fast compared to opening any web app!
I don't think the issue is text based or non text based. In my opinion, the problem is TOOL versus ASSISTANT. A tool is easy to understand and does one thing, an Assistant is more hand waving, tries to guess what you "really" want, steers you away from error and lures you into something.
When I started at my current employer we were running our retail management software on DOS terminals connected to a SCO Unix box. My experience with the system was that it wasn't intuitive or easy to learn, but was pretty bulletproof for the veteran users who had been working with it for ~30 years. I learned as much of it as I needed to know, and got to the point where I could do some tasks without even thinking about which keys I was pressing.
I helped set up the replacement system and received a lot of complaints from those same users - some resistance to change, but also some legitimate failings of the new software. Tradeoffs in the network structure made it run more slowly at satellite locations, Windows 10 on all of the terminals caused network issues until we got updates and bandwidth moderation dialed in, and some employees needed additional practice using a mouse.
I see trade-offs between the old and the new here. The new software is easier to train new users (less arcane) and able to securely handle things like chip credit cards (which had previously needed a separate card terminal system) and charge accounts. At the same time, the old system was faster (for the limited features it provided) and was able to run more smoothly on older equipment (very little OS overhead, text only network transmissions).
Text-only as opposed to encrypted text and images.
As far as I've been able to make out, document images are generated on the server and sent to the terminals as PostScript files. I've noticed at satellite locations the receipt printers hesitate for a few seconds before printing the barcode at the bottom, which tells me that either 1) it's taking some time to transmit the barcode image over the internet or 2) the server is taking its sweet time cataloguing the transaction in the document archive. Either way, I've gotten complaints about it from the users.
Some of the worst offenders in this area were the preinstalled
apps on Windows 8. Their official OneDrive app had I think 1-2
options to toggle and didn't even show how much of the cloud
storage was used/free. It was basically a picture viewer but
without properly working right click.
And in terms of performance I fear slow, ad-filled websites
slowly trained users to accept bad performance in applications
outside the browser as well. At least I don't know how to
otherwise explain the widespread indifference toward those
things, often even among developers.
Makes me think of a system/application getting attention, reach, that it doesn't deserve - hasn't earned - a negative of the advertising industry as well, one reason I love Tesla is that they don't advertise, any attention they get has been earned.
> And in terms of performance I fear slow, ad-filled websites slowly trained users to accept bad performance in applications outside the browser as well. At least I don't know how to otherwise explain the widespread indifference toward those things, often even among developers.
Yeah, I don't know either, and I think yours is a very good hypothesis.
I'm currently working on a windows project after spending four years exclusively on Linux, using mostly vim and Eclipse. Visual Studio feels now way worse than it used to. You get more conscious about the time you're wasting.
And, most interestingly, the same happens to users. It's not a matter of being text based, it's a matter of getting useful stuff done, and fast.
Users can and actually enjoy using the keyboard. Users don't want to be delighted with our stuff (speaking of the enterprise here), they just want a system that helps them to get their job done and, after that, get out of their way.
Designers and more and more developers seem to forget that animations, complex colorful screens, all this stuff has to be built, tested, processed by user's hardware which is already having a bad time supporting windows. So, instead of shipping something fast, something we are able to build and fix and test quickly, we deliver something detrimental, in many ways, to user experience.
I think this is why the spreadsheet is the killer productivity app. It's just a keyboard enabled information management tool, power users can take a spreadsheet really, really far. Entire businesses rest upon spreadsheets.
That is coming from someone who considers the need to use a spreadsheet as a marker that my job scope had gone awry. Love spreadsheets, hate managing information.
I really wish spreadsheets had a way to loop over rows and columns. Currently I have to create a huge mess of ARRAYFORMULAs whenever I need to apply some computation to all rows. I use my spreadsheets as databases and I want them to calculate new information as soon as I input new data. This use case should not be so hard...
Yeah, using an actual programming language would probably solve all this complexity. I'm using Google Sheets though and I absolutely need everything to be fully functional in the mobile app so I'm not sure how far I can take it with the javascripting. The app doesn't even support editing pivot tables.
Imagine if Excel had 1 inch padding around any cell, a gray large font on a light gray background, no cell borders and autohiding row and column labels because "cleaner and modern UI" :-)
> Visual Studio feels now way worse than it used to. You get more conscious about the time you're wasting.
Visual Studio is the perfect example to me. I begged dad to upgrade the computer to 64/128MB of RAM to get VC++6 to run. It was feature complete then and maybe a bit earlier. Sure supported languages and syntax of come and gone but the core product feature set (editor + intellisense) has not changed in over 20 years, yet the current version takes an order of magnitude more memory and is slower despite having a desktop more powerful than anything I could have imagined back then.
> It's not a matter of being text based, it's a matter of getting useful stuff done, and fast.
Sometimes this is about being composable and scriptable, text based generally helps here.
> Sometimes this is about being composable and scriptable, text based generally helps here.
Absolutely. This is one of the main reasons I'm using Vim - not
only because of the program itself but how I can just combine it
with the multiplexer I want, in my preferred terminal emulator,
interfacing with other text-based tools. Many things I do
regularly would require me to write custom plugins in VS Code.
In Vim I can just bind keys to an arbitrary sequence of inputs -
something modern applications sorely lack.
It's limited, but that limitation severely reduced the
complexity of the interface - it's all just a string and bash
is, despite all its weirdness, an extremely productive string
processing language.
In order to get my reddit addiction in check I uninstalled the app and started using it in the browser. After 1 week I quit reddit forever. Never looking back.
Reddit is an example of a good dark pattern for me: The popup reminds me that I need to leave the side. Unfortunately, like the Nigerian Prince Paradox, an upfront obnoxiousness is often designed to filter people out early, if they risk not being gullible enough during the rest of the path.
We are all busy and distracted. Dumbing down an experience to it's essential aspects is a great way to make something easier to use.
If a 'fool could use it while trying to juggle' then that's good.
Making it dumb means speaking to intuition, not thought.
I should add, there are some good comments here about 'command line' etc. - I suggest that that makes sense but in an entirely different realm of usability.
Designing for something that's going to be used by competent people all day for their jobs, is different than designing for the proles standing in line at the bank, looking for 3 minutes of respite from whatever, or even trying to squeeze in that little update.
I somewhat agree. A UI that works well for inexperienced users is better than one that isn't. But the real measure of a good UI is if it works well for inexperienced users and actively allows for them to gain experience while using the software.
A good example is how, in classic application menus, each entry would have its keyboard shortcut printed next to it. A fresh user can navigate the menu to find an action, and the same option is open to anyone how forgot about how to invoke the action, but whenever they land on the action, they can see the keyboard shortcut and eventually they'll remember it and learn to invoke the action faster without having to make an active effort.
This is good UX.
Then designers or product owners or someone decided that the shortcuts made their menus look cluttered (or maybe they really took that "treating your users as incompetent" mantra to heart and thought the shortcuts looked too technical or intimidating), thus condeming inexperienced users to stay inexperienced forever.
Those are good points - often we're in different headspaces as well on the matter.
Physical product design, mobile app, command line, common entry (like the software the waiter uses), pro software (i.e. Photoshop) are all very different aspects of usability representing colliding viewpoints.
May I ask what you think is wrong with Reddit's UI? In my opinion, it's one of the best out there and I've never had problems with it. HN is better, but mainly because it offers far less functionality.
Facebook is for me the prototypical example of a bad UI with lots of dark patterns, confusing navigation, different settings scattered all over the place, and frequent technical glitches.
Have you used Reddit on a phone without using the app? It constantly berates you to use the app, even when you've clearly stated your preference for using the site before.
There's also the problem that the new UI is clearly more buggy than the old one, and requires manually refreshing to fix glitches far too often, but that's more of a technical problem and not a UX issue.
When I click on a post it only shows 4 comments by default, and I have to click again to see more.
To be honest, they actually seem to have improved new reddit a lot since I last looked (a few months ago). Now once you do that second click it shows a decent number of comments, whereas previously even then it would still not show many.
> May I ask what you think is wrong with Reddit's UI?
Worth noting that the mobile experience is VERY different from the desktop website, and the desktop website is very different if you're using the Reddit Enhancement Suite plugin (and if you haven't used the site in a while, that difference is even starker now that RES uses "old.reddit.com" while everyone else is stuck on the new redesign)
I love the RES / old.Reddit experience, but the new desktop redesign and the mobile experience are both pretty annoying.
Part of the issue is inter-team communication and part of the problem comes from that very phrase "dumbing down". I often hear people argue for "dumbing things down" when there is an overwhelming amount of information, but that phrase:
1. Treats people's intelligence as 1-dimensional, which it is not.
2. Gives no clear direction to an engineer who is passionate about UX, recognises that humans are multidimensional, and is trying to ask about what their users really need.
You might say I'm arguing semantics, but communication matters!
Without it, you can write code at high speed, but you won't learn what direction to go in order to present information appropriately and contextually to create a rich but easy, intuitive flow.
For me, the most frustrating example of this is the control panel on Windows. The new mobile-friendly menus exclude many important "advanced" (emphasis on the quotes) settings, especially related to audio and networking.
The old menu is still available, but over the years they've made it progressively harder to find. But when apps get confused about my bluetooth headset the only way to fix it is to pull up the old menu.
Off-topic, one of the things that surprised me the most when I finally made the jump to Linux (I don't remember anymore which dark pattern finally turned me off of Windows, but it was one too goddamned many) -- the bluetooth support was light-years ahead of anything I'd previously encountered. I was expecting hardware incompatibilities to be way more problematic than they actually were.
It infuriates me to no end that bluetooth headsets have two modes -- one for listening only, and one for listening+voice, where the latter has absurdly low audio quality.
This has been a major source of problems for me, especially on Windows, where I often have to manually switch between the two.
I have two Linux laptops. On one, Bluetooth devices endlessly disconnect/reconnect and I gave up entirely. On the other, Bluetooth works flawlessly, better than Windows! So it's really hit and miss in my experience.
Don’t you remember in Windows XP how you had to click on 6 « advanced » dialogs to set the machine IP? And DHCP wasn’t the default on many, many routers at the time. Windows has always been bad at UX, probably because each dialog was the job of a different team.
I actually like it better because I just type whatever I'm looking for in the search bar and it brings up the appropriate item, I don't have to go searching. In fact, for something like bluetooth settings I wouldn't even pull up the control panel, just click start and type "bluetooth" then enter (when you see it's brought up the correct item).
I remember in the old versions of windows changing environment variables was something that was a bit of a pain paint because it was hidden behind multiple "advanced" dialogs. Now it's real easy, click start type "envi" and hit enter. That actually brings up "System properties" advanced tab and you have to click "environment variables."
I totally agree. It begins with using monochrome icons and ends with something that is pleasant to look at but where nothing that is useful is standing out. As if they try to make screenshots to look good to hang them on their walls. Form over function....
I've run into this while interviewing people for UX positions. They'll walk me through a portfolio and point out a lot of the aesthetics, whereas I'm asking about their decision-making process: how did you identify the problem? What other solutions did you consider and why didn't you go with them? How did you determine the organization of X? Why did you choose this flow? Why are you framing the task this way? Why did you make this more important than that? Why are you grouping this and that together? Why not these other things? Why expose this information at a glance and hide that information behind an interaction? etc.
At a social networking company once I brought up the fact that the post message to feed workflow required 3x more steps than any of our competitors, and that perhaps we should focus on making it easy to post. Design of course ignored it, as they wanted something "measureable" to iterate on.
Came here to say that. UX should, by and large, be staffed with deep experience in User Psychology, with some tech and design experience to know how to apply that knowledge. Instead it's mostly discount designers who occasionally conduct a user interview.
My stock broker have recently redesigned their systems to provide us "an improved experience".
Except that, besides removing some functionality existent in the previous platform, the new one doesn't allow you any longer to lay out your tools the way you think it's more convenient.
They asked for a feedback and I said it feels like the artist conceptual design has priority over the damn user needs. It's evident that the people involved on that project have never performed something beyond trivial operations at the stock market.
Financial industry usually values stability and it's a bit disconcerting to see a stock broker embarking on such trend now.
>Financial industry usually values stability and it's a bit disconcerting to see a stock broker embarking on such trend now.
It's because of Robinhood. Mobile friendly (Material?) UX is very "welcoming" to users, compared to the multitudes of tables and charts that are typically part of a trading platform. Since RH was able to onboard a lot of users, especially amateurs, the others have been paying attention and doing every thing to become similar to RH, to capture that huge amateur market.
> nothing prevented them from offering an alternate, more amateur-friendly platform, without turning the traditional one off
This is exactly the gripe I have with my broker too right now, so we might be using the same broker.
They try to squeeze the entire platform onto a mobile app, when I'm sure 95% of their user base trades from a PC. In the end, it results in botched functionality, a shitty UX of hiding things away, the works.
> Came here to say that. UX should, by and large, be staffed with deep experience in User Psychology
Maybe if you're trying to convince people to part with money. Most applications just need UX designers that understand the users workflows and what they're trying to accomplish. When a person comes to this screen of the app why are they there? What data to they need? What are their next steps? Are the doing it for 1 item or 15?
Programmers want to create generic, do everything CRUD interfaces with 15 layers. "UX" people just want to make it pretty. No one is left to understand what they users are actually doing with the software.
Disconnect between UX department and engineering department can cause this too.
Business object can grow out of nothing.
UX designers might feel creative and introduce some unintended features, dynamic colors, even complex structure data. If the design is not validated regularly, these non essential items get worked on by the engineers not knowing that these are not in anybody's interest other than the UX designer.
This is not solely UX designer's fault. This is also the team workflow's fault to not accommodate time for validating design.
At the other spectrum, from engineering side it can be from the underlying mechanism, such as request of huge data should be made stateful because one http call can't handle it, multiple points of hardware failures in a seemingly single operation, etc.
These can sometimes change the game and UX design need to be changed so that user information.
If these are not well communicated, the initial UX design may not suffice to honestly picture the actual underlying process of the product, causing the users to miss one or two options they should have, e.g. missing retry button where user is supposed to be able to retry an action.
Again there should be a period where UX design is validated again and again in the middle of development. A department or a role in the development team that takes care of the big picture of UX design (information architect and interaction design), the big picture of system architecture, and the big picture of project management (to determine which developer works when) might be ideal for it.
And that's why I'm such a big fan of simple, as-much-text-based-as-possible interfaces. By self-imposing a decrease in her degrees of freedom, one gets fewer things compounding the probably already high project burdens.
> This is not solely UX designer's fault. This is also the team workflow's fault to not accommodate time for validating design.
We suffer from this greatly. Our app is complicated by nature. The designs that come from our product team turn a blind eye on the complexity and try to "make it simple". As a result, the product doesn't really work (in some aspects).
Every time we try to "validate" those designs, we're shut down "because simplicity".
Honestly I think product designers should go through a database course or something to understand that if there's a one-to-many relationship between to entities in real life, you cannot force it into a one-to-one relationship and ignore all potential corner cases. Suddenly 40% of cases are "corner cases" and the app doesn't work.
Indeed. And they should listen to the actual users and product managers as well (assuming product managers know the use cases very well). Instead, so many UX designers behave like "they knew better".
That perfectly describes what happened to the software provided by my stock broker. They changed the interface so that tools stay on fixed positions, with fixed sizes.
Now the interface looks nice but it also makes some sorts of operations simply impossible.
They completely fail to realize that the "mess" of the old platform was actually obeying to customers ongoing needs for monitoring a specific set of assets, and we didn't f.. care about how the interface looked like, we just cared about numbers and that was all.
It's so depressing how fast even conservative sectors like finance are forgetting some decades-old stuff which could just be taken for granted until some years ago.
Then, the said UX designer is not a true UX designer.
User experience involves stuffs other than visual appearances. They must also take care of interaction, information architecture, usability. Decreased usability is a symptom of failure of misdesign.
People learn about these topics at different period of their life.
The most important thing, to me at least, is to work with people open to learning and exploring something new. People who, when realizing they lack of a certain competence, goes curious about the topic rather than denying it.
A good UX designer might not know these topics before they are hired, but they will be happy to explore when they heard of the terms.
And a very flawed interpretation of "simplicity" btw.
What is the point of creating an interface containing the bare minimum of buttons if that will lead users to spend more time to perform what they need? Just like that Apple's "one-button" remote?
What is the point of employing fancy graphical diagraming technics to layout widgets if the resulting layout impairs users?
I'm ok about sb designing an interface without talking to users if and only if the designer is being assisted by/responds to sb who has already been on the future users shoes, or have previous similar experience.
The prevalence of this theoretical, taste and opinion-based ideas about how interfaces should be designed must stop.
In this context, validating the design means ensuring it is portraying the business object as correct as possible to relative to the business requirement.
Like, "validating implementation against specification", but replace implementation with design and specification with business requirement
I agree with your conclusion that it’s more likely lack of competence.
I appreciate the article ending with the impossible NY website for COVID-19 vaccine registration. The situation is the same in Maryland, except that one must register for three so as to be on a waiting list with the county health department and the private pharmacy and the local hospital (as there is no telling which might get supply first). Not to mention the larger problem: the target group is people age 75 and up! No one seems to have thought that maybe an optional system of registration by phone, or through a call center representative authorized by the caller to register them on their behalf, is plausible. Somehow, three bad websites is considered fine. And one can’t blame this on ‘government’- the private pharmacies are as bad.
So is it incompetence, laziness, or sheer lack of concern whether the most vulnerable elderly get vaccinated? Incompetence might be the most comforting interpretation.
This is happening everywhere. It took me around 2 hours to sign up my parents for the vaccine (in an EU country) on a website that was impossible to figure out. Add details here, then you have a list of details, but those are not the actual people that you can sign up, then you need to go somewhere else to actually be able to schedule someone. It's as if they made the scheduling website so complicated that only the people that really want the vaccine will spend 1+ hour to try and register. For a 65+ person, it is almost impossible to navigate through that. And for the icing on the cake, it's all a react SPA that they build in a hurry, probably, that when you got a server error back for one of the requests, the whole multi-step process crashed and you had to start over. After all the frustration I ended up completing the process with Postman.
I think it can be a challenge on both the supply and demand sides.
On the supply side the profession has ballooned and subjectively it feels like a disproportionate amount of the growth has been folks who tend towards the "aesthetic" side and/or who lack stat/psych/research/engineering experience. Not that aesthetics isn't valuable, mind you, just that the balance feels off.
On the demand side more product teams are considering UX but many of them seem to have the impression that UX is there to "make it look better". In my experience most teams are receptive to doing user research to identify and solve the underlying problems, but occasionally I'll get someone who insists that the solution is to use the latest UI fad.
Combined and I can see why UX is being perceived as more shallow.
> other non-functional requirements, like overall speed, maintainability, testability and so on
If your title is UX designer, and the UX problem is 'overall speed', how do you solve that given your skills and responsibilities?
As software engineering has grown from someone hacking in their basement to large corporate teams practicing SAFe agile, the responsibilities of the individual software engineer have been reduced. The lone basement hacker is responsible for everything, but the corporate engineer is a cog in the machine with requirements handed down from project managers and ux designers.
Overall speed is a systems quality encompassing the whole system. It's something a lone engineer responsible for the whole system can tackle and be diligent about, but the corporate engineer must rehash the design over and over with ux designers and project managers until an efficient design, not just an aesthetically pleasing design, is what is used.
Another systems quality besides speed is security, and you'll notice more and more systems are less secure than they used to be.
Slack is a prime example of this. Simple things like switching a chat room, which was instantaneous in mIRC on my old 166mhz PC, can take seconds in Slack. But at least there are round corners everywhere, plenty of padding around elements, and animated gifs /s
Real talk though...if you polled slack users and said "You could have instantaneous room switching, but you have to give up animated gifs", what percentage of users would actually take that trade?
Absolutely, you're probably right if you meant to imply that the percentage of such users is low. But on the other hand, if Slack became as fast as desktop apps from the 1990s tomorrow, how many users do you think would raise their arms in joy and exclaim that their computers suddenly became much faster? Latency is less directly visible to users - which is probably why it receives less attention - but silently adds to the users frustrations when working with the system.
I disagree, it was always as common as it is and never broke past the barrier of getting people to understand it's value, beyond designers themselves. This was true before UX was called UX (before 2014 maybe and as far back as designers of any kind have been around) and it's true now.
The UX sin that bothers me the most lately is when I can enter data faster than the device can handle and it doesn't buffer. The example I gave last time is running calc.exe, then hitting enter and typing a formula. On Win10 you'll lose keypresses and half the formula, but not on the older versions. It used to be a very convenient way to do some quick maths without even interrupting my workflow, now I have to wait for it.
It's even in some games I've played recently, where I'm in a menu and hitting down twice then a button will sometimes ignore the second press because it's still playing a 'move the cursor' animation.
I was pleasantly surprised last time I snuck a look at the screen in my local post office where I saw an ASCII terminal UI full of text with hotkeys. There is a mistaken belief that complicated is bad, but in a job where you spend your whole day all week long it can be very beneficial because everyone can be a power user.
> ...even among professionals referring to themselves as UX designers.
I believe this is a part of the problem. Because there is a word "designers" in "UX designers", a lot of designers expanded their credentials to include UX. In my experience, they invariably suck at it (at least the ~5 I had the pleasure to work with).
The proliferation of high-fidelity wireframes (and tools like Adobe XD, Figma) is another testament to that; impressive looking designs that hide basic UX mistakes. Low fidelity wireframes would make them obvious, but who wants to look at the "wires" when you can have colors?
I think the designers simply prioritize aesthetics over content / usability and it is difficult for them to get past that. The best UX designers I have worked with in the past were either engineers or coming from completely unrelated fields.
> sure, they said, we can do the research, listen to customers, and make recommendations for improvement. But what if leadership not only ignores our recommendations but tells us to do something different?
Do the research? Listen to customers? These are so 1990s.
I'm surprised the author didn't cover that one explicitly: how much of the problem with UX comes with it being "data-driven" these days? In lieu of acquiring direct feedback from the users, everyone these days just overloads their products with telemetry, runs countless A/B tests, gaze tracking experiments... just about everything imaginable except talking to the users.
It's nice to be data-driven - good, quantifiable data is easy to gradient-descent on. But somehow, the metrics tend to be selected in context of what profits the business the most, and not what maximizes the value of a product to the user...
> But somehow, the metrics tend to be selected in context of what profits the business the most, and not what maximizes the value of a product to the user...
The divergence happens when the user isn't the one paying for the product; e.g. when the user's company is paying for it or when advertisers pay for it instead.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows on the paid side of the house. All the disconnected out of touch decision making still happens but the metrics are ARR and churn. The game is making it as easy as possible for people to pay us and inconvenient as possible for people to stop.
B2B SaaS companies offer a great UX to the people who pay for their software - long golfing trips, fancy dinners, powerpoints full of feature checklists. The users aren't the customers.
"users don't know what they want" is one factor. Nevermind that Macs lacked more than one mouse button, or iPhones more than one physical button for many years.
The single-button approach is valid, IMO - for the right audience. I hated it myself... and then I had to help my parents and grandparents learn the ropes with mobile devices. Turned out that iOS made them more comfortable for one simple reason: no matter where they ended up, if they felt like they were lost or overwhelmed, there was always that physical button, looking the same, and in the same exact place, that they knew would backtrack them back to "the beginning" - i.e. to a known state from which they could try again to do whatever they wanted.
So, in some ways, it is genius, and I really hated it when Apple killed it off. The problem wasn't the concept itself - it was trying to sell it as UX for everyone. I think that's one of the big problems with UX today - the things that are done under the guise of "simplification" aren't actually simple.
The problems posed by multiple mouse buttons are very similar to the "hidden swipe gestures" people are complaining about elsewhere in the comments for this article. There's nothing inherently wrong with either - any more than there is with e.g., English being a language with thousands of "hidden" words that people have to learn and remember instead of limiting you to only the words visible in an autotext menu - but you have to think about how people learn them, how consistently they're available, how to accommodate people not knowing them or learning them at different rates, etc.
HN commenters tend to be power users of desktop-style UI more than touch or mobile-style UI which can make it hard to see similarities between them (right click conventions really aren't much more consistent or obvious than swipe conventions)
I will disagree on that last bit, again, based on personal experience. Right-clicking to produce a context menu in Windows was easy to explain to my mom, and she very quickly started to use it everywhere to discover the available actions - and it worked. In mobile UIs, on the other hand, to this day, she is struggling to figure out where you're supposed to press-and-hold, where you're supposed to swipe etc. Quite often, she'll do press-and-hold to do something that worked in one app, and it doesn't work in another. Desktop apps are much more consistent in that regard.
Agreed. Much as there's a difference between "free as in speech and free as in beer" there's a distinction between "usable like hammer and usable like cocaine". For as long as engagement is allowed to pay better than utility, thats what's on the menu.
Things were better when the Operating System decided how a gui should look and work.
I just cannot comprehend how anybody could come up with something like the redesign of
https://www.tagesschau.de/ which was launched this week.
I cliked your link and opened my devtools out of curisority, and every headline is under the class name "teaser", so it would seem the main intent of the site is to tease you!
Besides that, it looks like no one did any design at all, like what you'd get on the default template of wordpress or other CMS
It's definitely a new site, in the dystopian sense.
Usage hint: Reducing the browser window to what is approximate smartphone width in portrait orientation somewhat helps with the experience. Clearly, using anything other than a mobile device is deviant.
On the other hand, in terms of UX, I felt somewhat neglected as there wasn't a "Use our App!" popup. Also, the lack of welcoming "Subscribe!" popups (options "I can't wait!" and "Later, but for sure!") is a bit reminiscent of past decades of public services and their arrogant attitude towards customers needs. I was even left to my own on any attempts to scroll without any reassuring popups gratifying my engagement by another opportunity to click a button. I could just scroll and scroll without noticing, accompanied by a growing feel of loneliness and solitude in this digital void. If this isn't pure negligence… ;-)
Sarcasm? While I don't read German, this is actually a pretty good design for a news site. It's clean, consistent and uncluttered. It loads quickly and doesn't have any obnoxious animations or advertising. The font choice is clean and well spaced, but let down by poor definition of link vs title/theme colour.
I agree that the new style looks a lot better, however I'm not comparing their new site to the old one but to actually usable news sites. Maybe I used the wrong word, what's awful is the layout. I want information not one row of pictures which take up half my screen.
They must've looked at their traffic stats, seen that most users are mobile and decided to focus on that version instead of having substantially different layouts for mobile vs desktop.
Thanks for introducing "user exploitation" to my vocabulary, it certainly describes the overwhelming focus on giving ad networks as much screen real estate as possible so we can be surveilled by marketers and governments alike.
As an additional correlation to the timeline, Taboola took off from 2007 to 2013 especially, when all the online journalism sites were trying to figure out how to stay afloat and suddenly they were all handed a guaranteed monthly income, all they have to do is mix scams and health-scare and "Tommy Chong CBD" fraud in with your news, your readers will love having relevant recommendations for what to read next!
(It's my conspiracy theory that the only reason these ad networks pay out so well is to keep the surveillance dragnet wide, track what information every person sees -- for the price of a little click fraud)
But back to the topic, these design changes (even editorial changes to what headlines are on your front page) are certainly not done with the user in mind.
Another design trend that has completely taken over of course is algorithmic timelines. Both Twitter and Instagram started pushing non-chronological sorting on previously chronological feeds in 2016. This is a transparent effort to take advantage of the slot-machine-addiction of reward and disappointment brought about by a refresh of content -- requiring you to refresh the page and load more ad impressions. I can't tell you how many times I tried to use facebook's search feature, but eneded up scrolling down the timeline trying to find a post I saw earlier, how many dozens of ad impressions were bought and sold while I scrolled, all because facebook couldn't be bothered to write a useful timeline search?
The places where people spend most of their time online (social media, youtube) are designed to act like quicksand, information is re-arranged every time you hit the back button, just because they need to mix some payola in and keep you on the site.
/rant
I think there is still a log of creativity to be had with computers, for my part I'm building a WYSIWYG CMS that frames all of its data into polygon 'tiles' that fit together into a mosaic in 2 or 3 or more dimensions, just something to get away from the rectangles and single column timelines that make everything look the same. I can't even remember what website I saw something on because I can't tell one from the other. So, see also another great piece on web design from 2016 [1] relating to design trends in physical spaces, the trend of cafes and airbnbs to ignore any of its local context in favor of a bland Le Corbusier-meets-Edison-Bulbs style, a full on mcdonaldization of service so that you never have to try anything new (except even mcdonalds adapts the menu to local taste)
It has likely become not just unprofitable to focus on UX, but downright detrimental to the company’s bottom line. I say this without the evidence to back it up, but the anecdotal evidence is everywhere. I see it all the time as I preach UX improvements.
If my theory here is right, then the problem can’t be solved by preaching UX to businesses. I think it can only be solved by reminder end users that they deserve better.
I'd actually argue otherwise - UX has gotten tremendously better in the last decade. Online products have been moulded perfectly towards improving the use case for their customers.
The main issue though is that you aren't the customer anymore.
Look at Facebook - they've done an absolutely incredible job becoming a dream experience for advertisers. Youtube has catered to these advertisers as well and blocked controversial content that wouldn't look good next to their brand. It's a golden age to be at the head of a marketing team with a large ad budget. These companies have made golden escalators for getting sponsored content in front of the productized consumers.
If you want UX to succeed and become something that benefits you as a user, then you should focus on platforms where you truly are the customer. Look at Square or Patreon - in both platforms you are truly the customer, and their UX is incredible.
Indeed; consumer-oriented software previously focused on user productivity as its primary concern, and at present this class of software is focused on user engagement as its primary concern.
>Look at Square or Patreon - in both platforms you are truly the customer, and their UX is incredible.
I'm sorry, are we talking about the same Patreon? Because patreon.com has a bunch of seemingly pointless clicks for posting content.
Here's the step-by-step for posting a video from the creator page:
1. Click on Posts in the sidebar. An animation creates a dropdown - this frequently stutters even on a reasonable desktop and creates a small delay.
2. Click on New. This loads a new page where you can select a post type.
3. Click on Video. This loads another new page where I can select Vimeo or Add URL.
4. Click on Add URL. This immediately creates a textbox under the button that I can paste a URL into. I can set a title, tags, additional content and post it.
---
Compare this to uploading a video to Youtube:
1. Click on Create. This immediately opens a dropdown.
2. Click on Upload video. This opens an upload video box that you can click on to open a file upload dialog or you can drag a file onto it. If you're on the Youtube frontpage then there's a page load in this step, but if you're on the Creator Page, then there's no page load.
3. While the file is uploading you can fill in the title etc and even press Publish immediately (while it's still uploading).
I understand that the two cases aren't equivalent, but the experience of posting content feels better on Youtube. I think in terms of UX something like imgur or streamable are great examples.
Edit: I was overly harsh at first. It's just a part of UX that has consistently annoyed me with Patreon. Overall it's decent, but these small things make it feel worse than it is.
If we are following what OP was inferring, arguably the customer in Patreons sense are the ones forking over money, in which case the UI is pretty damn easy.
The creators are an important part of the platform, but arguably will put up with more because they are getting paid.
As Closi mentions in the sibling comment, the customers are the ones paying the money.
What you've described is exactly what I'm talking about - the UX is optimized for whoever is paying. Your example is a perfect showing of this. A creator's experience is secondary for Patreon - a patron's experience comes first (hell, it's even in their name). Patreon improved the UX of funding creatives.
Pateron? What? Pateron has the worst UX of any platform I regularly use.
Sign up to be a pateron of some artist to download their works. Your only way to do this is to scroll through the list of all their posts one at a time in an endless scroll. And to add insult to injury the page will crash and you have to start over from the top of the scroll, there is no way to start 50 or 100 posts in.
For artists offering media via pateron a good UX might be something like Mega.
1. It is slow.
2. It is buggy.
3. They often introduce new features (instead of fixing old ones), call me on phone, and convince me to use them, only for them to not work right.
4. The UI seemly tries it hard to obscure useful stuff and make easy to waste money, sometimes it is blatant, for example when I was getting a ton of click fraud coming from mobile apps, I found a hidden option to disable ads on mobile apps, 2 weeks later they removed the option entirely, restoring the fraud, when I went to research how to fix that, the answer was that I had to either let the fraud happen, or stop advertising on mobile (even in sites) entirely. I took the second option (and the SEO and ad-ranking hit, since google hates when you ignore mobile)
> In the single biggest public health crisis in the world, New York can't build a usable vaccine website. The telephone - 1950s technology - is our best option, after 25 years of web development.
I think the latest thing in the 1950's was Touch-Tone. The telephone itself is actually 1870s technology.
The framing is wrong - thinking of these as problems of design. As though the practitioners just need to do a better job, or do better at petitioning their bosses to let them make things nicer. If making things nicer for people gets in the way of dollars, guess what will win 95 times out of a hundred. There's something you can safely put your faith in.
This is about incentives and business. You cannot design your way out of that.
Well, he's right. I feel sorry for the students that studied psych, hoping to help people in need, and, instead, are working for companies to produce dark patterns.
That must suck; but at least they probably make more money than they would, helping people. Unfortunately, in the US, at least, we value the reaper, more than the servant. Teachers and social workers are paid badly, treated with immense disrespect, and sidelined.
People who make money by treating their users like chattel are lionized and held up as national models.
Ah...well. That's the USofA.
For me, I decided that I love UX -the original kind, and I write software that implements it. I don't particularly care if I ever make a dime off it. I love to write high-quality, non-manipulative, useful software. It's a rare luxury, and I'm grateful to be in that position.
It does make me sad to know that the kind of work that I do is scorned, but that won't stop me from doing it.
Well said. A redefinition in design not driven by big tech would be a great initiative. Maybe even an open source data bank of non dark patterned practices.
Another shout out for “About Face : the essentials of interaction design” which everyone should read, especially programmers.
Governments are notorious for contracting websites to the lowest bidder that claims they can check all the requirements boxes. Websites run through the same procurement process as buying toilet paper for the offices.
And the result is websites that do technically check all the boxes in the document thought up by someone charged with "getting a website built for this", but rarely anything that would be considered a good experience.
The federal government has gotten a lot better at this since the founding of 18f, but state and local still has the problem of checklistware
The dark patterns described here are part of a broader pattern for big tech. The firms mentioned, Amazon, Google, etc, have made the strategic decision to debase their products to further monetize them. This is similar to the way in which high-end fashion brands are often tempted to cash in on their brand name by marketing to mass market. Just as with high-end retail, this is journey goes one way. Now these companies have embraced the lowest common denominator version of themselves it will be difficult to reverse these decisions.
The one big tech exception to all this is Facebook which basically zoomed straight towards the lowest common denominator version of itself yes continues to plough ever deeper trenches each year
330 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 275 ms ] threadBut they didn't give us flat UI.
Didn't California pass a law saying you got to cancel as easily as you signed up?
4 months later, I received a bill for the first month after it was supposed to be cancelled. So I called support, which told me that cancellations could only be processed by registered letter, and that they had sent me a mail regarding this (which I never received). She then told me that the service would be cancelled in 2 months since it's the minimum delay, but it would be shortened to 1 month since I was moving to a place which already had a subscription with them, provided I gave the name/address/customer number of the place I was moving to. I asked if she was sure about the details and she said yes.
Now, 2 months later, of course I still received a bill. Called them again, turns out you actually need the signature of the person holding the other contract for the 1 month thing to be valid... Apparently, they sent me another mail, which again I did not receive. (I did, however, receive a late payment notice with massive fees to my new address...) I sent a letter complaining about the whole situation, and just got told to "read the contract attentively next time".
Fuck you UPC Cablecom.
Did you know that literally anyone can email Comcast and complain about alleged DMCA violations on your residential internet? Comcast has no mechanism for submitting a counter-notice, and if you get too many such complaints they will ban you for up to 6 months. It's shocking that an ISP can be so bad that they're the impetus for moving all by themselves.
In your case though, if you're interested you might be able to get a lawyer involved? Lying is generally legal, but they might have some civil liability for fraud or something. It probably wouldn't be profitable for you, but if you won it might make you feel better.
I just won't ever do business with them again, and I tell my story from time to time to people that ask my opinion about ISPs.
I'm not even sure I have a case, I looked a bit online and as you said, lying is not illegal even if in cases like this that doesn't sit very well with me.
In your case, isn't having a counter notice mechanism a requirement? I guess you could have sued them as well for that? But I understand, I don't want to have to sue every company I do business with, that's not a healthy environment even though it probably would be better for everyone in the long run.
It turns out someone had called and claimed to be moving into my house, so they canceled my account in order to enable setting up a new account for the person who claimed to be moving into my house.
I am still amazed that this is possible. You can get any customer's Internet turned off and they can't stop you just by signing up to get a new account at their address.
Well, not only that, but things have gotten so bad that Amazon Prime is really not the best example. I actually just went through this process: I accepted a 30 day Amazon Prime free trial just before Christmas because I was going to be doing a lot of ordering. Of course I forgot to cancel it until a few days after the trial was up. So I went to go cancel it and try to get any money they had charged me back.
And... it wasn't really that bad? From the main page, you click one link to manage your account / Prime subscription. Another one link takes you to cancel the subscription. There are like three or so pages that explain the benefits you'll be losing and allow you to back out, or choose options like "cancel my subscription at the end of the month", or "cancel it now and refund the money". I wouldn't describe any of this as dark-patterns because even if it's manipulative it was at least very clear how to do what I wanted to do.
That the other thing, too. I was able to get $14 of the $15 monthly fee back when canceling - they didn't try to pull any bullshit with that.
A couple of qualifiers: (a) yes, it could (and should) be better, and (b) I'm a California resident, so it's possible they presented a different flow to me than to most other people.
Since then, I've been wary of signing up for anything new, knowing that there is likely a painful process on the other end to cancel my account.
I had to contact them. I said "look, I have amazon prime for the shipping speed, and ALL shipping is taking 1-2 weeks."
The support folks couldn't figure out how to cancel prime for a partial year, so they gave me a full refund.
1. The bigger the company, means also the older the company means also a lot of design and tech debt and results in bad UX
2. The smaller the company the more you work on your UX to attract customers, the bigger the more you care about your profitability
3. The bigger the companies the more your customers are also bigger companies and then UX is not important in their choice [1]
4. In my opinion we are at a rare time in which UI will you raise a lot of money (Stripe, Notion,...)
[1] https://blog.luap.info/product-management-in-saas-b2b-enterp...
UX broadly is in the same boat. UX is a tool. We can use it for good or for evil.
At the end of the day UX is only as valuable as how well individuals (or companies) can align their personal definition of 'good' with 'good' that the underlying company cares for.
Is that a defence? That sounds like trying to explain your friend's rudeness away by saying "In Bob's defence, he's an asshole".
I guess this is partly a philisophical question about whether the job of schools is to raise effective citizens, or effective market manipulators.
I think it would be correct to say that receiving an education should teach you about ethics. Whether that should be strategic from the top down (you take specific classes about ethics) or embedded in each class is a question I don’t know the answer to.
In an individual class the amount of ethics varies. When I took d.school classes there certainly wasn’t a “market mover” mentality. We were genuinely interested in understanding people better so we could improve lives. But ethics certainly wasn’t explicitly on the agenda. We just didn’t have any assholes taking the course at that time.
This is part of the argument within the university for loosening credit requirements. When I was there, I took the HCI track. That track had the smallest credit requirement and also let you take a broader base of classes that counted towards the major, such as philosophy. That was a more rounded experience than some of my peers who took harder cs tracks like networking and systems.
Although tangental, I can't imagine the cognitive psychology stuff one must learn managed to completely omit ethics.
People try to make everything about "empathy" these days. The term has been on the rise since September 2008 [0] and I've seen it routinely used and abused. Who can refute empathy or a lack thereof? I recently took a corporate training about personalities. The whole seminar was supposed to show you strengths of the various personality type, what their opposites are, and how to interface with them better. Make better teams through understanding; nothing new. One measurement went from what's basically Extremely Empathetic => Data Driven (neither being bad, explicitly stated.) Routinely people that I worked with recategorized people in "data driven" to "non-empathetic" in casual conversation. Reading this article made me realize the real deceiving UX isn't unique to code or processes, it's just human inclination for things they don't like; whether that be the "cancel" button or personality traits.
[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=e...
Leave the kids alone. Adults who market harmful products to kids are predatory assholes. I'd hope there is a special place in hell for whoever dreamed up count chocola and all the other bullshit used to sell candied cereal to kids. Just because it's legal doesn't mean it was ethical. And in the case of Juul, going into highschools with their marketting material, I doubt it was even legal.
The whole self-help industry in a nutshell.
UX is the "user experience". An experience can be good or an experience can be bad. An experience can reduce friction, or it can intentionally create it. UX as a term on its own is neither positive nor negative.
The title should just be "I dislike UX anti-patterns", because good UX, i.e. low-friction/high-reward (for your customer) UX is still the nice thing it's always been.
If you've never seen this talk by Jonathan Blow, he's makes a rather compelling argument that we don't necessarily have any reason to believe this will continue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
Lower childhood mortality, less poverty, longer life expectancy, less violent crime, less disease, more equality, less war. Things are getting better, along almost every metric we can think of. It's not just "different". It's also not just Pinker's work confirming that, OurWorldInData is good on this topic too.
The only sensible argument I've heard to the contrary is that our systemic tail risks have gotten bigger. Which is accurate but doesn't change the fact that things are much better for almost everyone presuming that such risks can be mitigated.
Jason Hinkel's are especially good: https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1334072469091708929?l...
(1) Hinkel falsely concludes that "The poverty rate has worsened dramatically since 1981", using a graph of the number of people in poverty (which increases by ~31% between 1981 to 2013) as justification. The rate did not increase. The rate decreased according to his own graph! The population increased by 59% over that same time period, so the correct conclusion from his own data is that the poverty rate actually reduced over that same time period.
(2) Not only is poverty better, but almost every other meaningful metric (disease/mortality/war deaths/crime deaths) is also better, which he hand-waves away in a single paragraph after falsely asserting that the poverty rate has gone up!
It is borderline dishonest, or perhaps at best he is innumerate. If this is the best rebuttal then I am even more confident in the conclusion that things are getting better - MUCH better - aside from a number of existential tail risks that we need to mitigate.
Also,
> only 5% of new income from global growth goes to the poorest 60% of humanity – people living on less than $7.40/day.
https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-...
It's also ridiculous for him to say that China doesn't use policies that Pinker advocates for. That's absolutist and binary thinking. Pinker would advocate for the open market liberalising policies of Deng Xiaoping relative to Maoist economic authoritarianism, which helped to lift millions out of poverty in China, even though there's still a lot that he doesn't agree with China's system.
If Pinker doesn't like Putin's strongman behavior in the region should he exclude Russia from his statistics on improving world peace? If Pinker doesn't like the US healthcare system should he exclude the US from his statistics on childhood mortality?
This is a dishonest rhetorical strategy that Hinkel is employing. It's clear to me now that Hinkel is a bad faith salesman who has set out to demonstrate his hypothesis at all costs.
Hinkel's argument is that Pinker uses "is the world getting better?" as a proxy for "are my preferred policies making the world better?". If policy evaluation is their goal, the ad-hoc exclusion of China is overly simplistic, but so is drawing policy conclusions from overall trends without examining what's driving the trends. Both Pinker and Hinkel should be measuring the degree to which various policies were applied and evaluate poverty-reduction against that quantity.
Here are other links that concern another one of his books (Enlightenment …): https://historyforatheists.com/2016/11/the-dark-ages-popery-... (I haven't read any of these reviews though).
Specifically I used the word "changing" rather than "improving" because within the tech world (and to a degree the larger world of product) there is a long history of new and novel equating to better, hence the tired ad slogan "new and improved!" That emphasis on newness as desirable is a result of the many measurable improvements that did result from the rapid pace of innovation that occurred in the 19th and 20th century, improvements that were obviously perceptible in that they resulted in large leaps forward vs incrementally over long time periods.
Also, to claim that there has been improvements for large-scale populations via some new thing is nowhere close to being sufficient to explain how that new thing is an improvement for the individual customer.
When I was a kid, I just used to press one button on the front of the tv and it was on in less than a second.
Not sure what my point is really but there’s something not quite right with this situation. Technology has improved choice but made the experience awful.
It seems like all of those other steps allow you more flexibility to do a bunch of stuff you probably couldn't do as a kid, such as watch BBC from any country in the world, or watch something from the BBC that came on earlier, or to pause the BBC so you can get some chips from the pantry.
Every once in a while, Netflix will take like 15s to load. But before I cuss out my XBox One, I do try to remember that as a kid I was happy downloading one picture off a 300BPS modem in like 10 minutes from a BBS (which sometimes took 30 minutes to finally get into) back when I was kid.
My $50 Chromecast is still the best thing around for watching movies or streams off my computer. Kodi works but it takes set up times which I don’t like investing.
Sounds like you either just have low end tech or bad gov run software services.
And I’m not running anything fancy just your typical Android SoC with a decent remote with a keyboard on the back, which I bought for <$100 max off Amazon.
However, old school CRT screens could handle pans and zooms that my modern LG thing can only dream of. Then again the thing I'm watching now is comparatively huge and "waffer theeeen". A ~50" CRT would stick out from the wall about four feet and weigh enough that I'd be using some of the more robust Civil Engineering things I learned at college to fix it to the wall.
When I was a child it took a while to tune a TV by hand, channel by channel. Remember portables with the little aerials on the end of a wire? Then finding out that to watch the rugby today involved perching the TV on a chair near a window and the aerial held by long suffering (someone) holding it at a strange angle near the ceiling. You missed half the match faffing around.
My laptop runs Arch - that's far more friendly than anything I used in the '70s-'00s. I recall getting an Epsom FX80 dot matrix printer connected to our C-64 was quite traumatic and involved getting a Centronics (parallel) interface card made up and stuff. I still have the C-64 and it now has a USB interface.
Now I press the home button and pick a service on my TV. OK on my TV that isn't one of my RPi driven monsters that uses the MythTV backend. I have an Octo-LNB on my sat dish ...
(Sorry about this (twitch) but it's iPlayer and you were a child, not a kid)
Why not just use Freeview? It’s not quite as fast as analogue TV because it has to acquire and decode the digital signal, but apart from that it’s just as convenient, the quality is better and there are many more channels.
Not to be too much of a Linux-using stereotype, but it really does seem like the things that have been getting better are those things that are made (usually for free) for users for the benefit of themselves and other users, and not by profit-seeking corporations as closed-source software.
The few exceptions to that rule are those areas that are heavily dependent on technological improvements, e.g. music production, gaming, media editing. But that's just because there are still huge profit-wins to be had just by improving the quality of what the user receives. There's no reason to think wins like that won't dry up.
Yes, when I was kid the TV turned on almost instantly but then I was stuck watching whatever minimal content was broadcasted. Can't even pause it!
I have the same argument with Jonathan Blow's talk -- he talks about how complex things are now compared to the past but the past was so much less capable. Yes, you can write an OS in 3 weeks as long as it doesn't do very much.
Also, this topic made me think a bit of this letter: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius/Let...
If we don't have choice, we manufacture happiness. Something we predict will be somehow worse than "real" happiness, but studies show it's not worse. If we have choice, we predict we will be more happy, but studies show we aren't.
... in a little while, after all the vacuum tubes had heated up.
(Yeah, 'm old...)
Yeah, but if you turned it on late at night there was nothing being broadcast
When I did my training in advertising, the first line uttered by my teacher was “We are learning you to lie here” , and indeed the rest of the course was about how to deceive the customer by pushing the right buttons.
That’s the state of affairs of most of the commercial web. And I think you are right it won’t change.
> While the best-trained (and highest-paid) UX professionals are put to work optimizing the exploitation and deception of online users
UX workers at Amazon are not 'put to work' like some automotons, they have agency and the ability to find highly paid work elsewhere.
I am sure there are ethical companies, I see many of them mentioned here, started by readers of this forum, but what percentage are those. Imo, they are less than 1%.
Moreso this argument isn't one to be taken seriously because it assumes every collective failure is a failure of millions of individual choices rather than any of the cultural inertia or environmental influences that steer our choices.
> Moreso this argument isn't one to be taken seriously because it assumes every collective failure is a failure of millions of individual choices rather than any of the cultural inertia or environmental influences that steer our choices.
That's a strawman - I'm not saying this applies for 'every collective failure'. Systemic factors are important, however we shouldn't absolve individuals at large tech firms of their own responsibility.
Aesthetics is important, but, in some sorts of systems, it has much lower priority than other non-functional requirements, like overall speed, maintainability, testability and so on.
I don't know if my experience is the same of most of you, but I've seen more and more systems getting aesthetic pleasant but painfully slow and/or buggy these days. It's easy when you can simply quit using the software, but when your bank, your broker, your airline, your accountant, the company that operates the subway ticket machines, when those sorts of businesses start to embrace such vision, things start to get complicated.
And, unfortunately, all those examples I mention here are real and this is not an exhaustive list.
Besides, I'm not sure those companies (at least the ones in my examples) do that as an attempt to exploit users. I believe they do that due to plain lack of competence.
The slowness of certain platforms is also an equally big issue, Reddit for example who seems to purposefully ignore and allow their website via browser experience to suffer - in an attempt to drive people to their app for ad tracking purposes - which I think is shooting themselves in the foot with the trend towards eliminating shallow-manipulative advertising from existence.
I'd also mention a small experiment I often do.
If you have the opportunity of visiting a company still using COBOL, Clipper or some other text mode software, ask their users for an opinion on those old systems compared to the current ones.
Most of them prefer the acient ones. When asked why, they simply say "I don't know. It works, it feels right".
Even the younger users (who already had experience with web applications, big tech's stuff etc when they joined the company) prefer the text based ones.
I'm not at all implying that every software should be text based. But I think there are some very important lessons to be learned here. Things we developers used to know, intuitively.
I think UX designers should listen more to those users and less to theories and to Google and its MDC trying to make the internet look like their own products
It doesn't come with file sync, plugin management or flashy animations. But I also don't get loading screens, don't need to look at SaaS pricing tiers and don't get overwhelmed by UI dark patterns. That's a trade-off I'll take any day.
So if you know on this screen you need to hit F1, and that on the next screen you will have to hit X, then on the following screen, you need to type in the SKU number, you could simply issue as fast as you wanted: F1-X-4112295[ENTER], and take your mind off it while the system would just go through the whole experience successfully at its own pace.
With "better" GUI/mouse based systems, you have to click here, wait... wait... wait..., now click there, wait... wait... wait..., then click there and type in your SKU. Your attention needs to be on the screen at all times in order to wait for the UI and aim the mouse.
Next time you go to your bank web site to pay a bill, think to yourself: Wouldn't it be nice if, rather than navigating their cumbersome UX, you could just hit a known string of keystrokes that you memorized, hit enter, then walk away to get coffee while all the Javascript and page reloading chugged along and paid your bill?
It's like we're regressing year after year.
I understand this is for the safety of my money, probably also for the safety of the bank itself (if something goes wrong it's more and more my fault) but sending money to someone is becoming a PITA.
This gave me goosebumps.
My biggest pet peeve with vim and emacs is that (a) discovery sucks as with most all text mode tools, and (b) emacs in particular is slow and difficult to configure to get some mainstream languages working. Doom was the closest I ever got to being happy with my setup, but the tooltips and autocomplete were still objectively inferior even to vscode (for typescript and react, at least).
Lisps are a different story, but not by much. I'm actually fairly happy with using vscode to write common lisp, though I don't do much of it these days.
Do you mean something else?
(Now let's talk about Excel if you want to discuss discoverability issues.)
I agree it's very well documented, and I assume your impulse upon reading the previous paragraph is to tell me there's a REPL. it's simply not casually approachable. sorry. ask someone who isn't drowning in koolaid!
> It doesn't come with... plugin management
Also, for Vim, `:<tab>` gives you all available commands in the current buffer and `:h command` gives you the vim help page for that command (which is usually at least a few sentences long, and pretty thorough).
Don't misunderstand me, I love vim and use it almost exclusively and everyday, but tab-ing in the way you describe yields 2-3 screenfulls of commands that I have to manually (well, with my eyes anyhow) scan to find what I want and it includes gems such as: "spellrare" and "{{{{{{{{"
The latter of which I do not know how to open a help page for.
To me "discoverable" would mean that I would be able to use this interface to learn more commands, but this is only as discoverable as having to read man-pages. Sure - that is a great way to learn, but it's not discoverable.
Now, what would probably get a little closer is if `:<tab>` opened a list if commands in an fzf-style list also listing their descriptions and maybe grouping them by some other way than just alphabet sort order.
(If anyone can tell me what is up with those '{' I would greatly appreciate it)
I helped set up the replacement system and received a lot of complaints from those same users - some resistance to change, but also some legitimate failings of the new software. Tradeoffs in the network structure made it run more slowly at satellite locations, Windows 10 on all of the terminals caused network issues until we got updates and bandwidth moderation dialed in, and some employees needed additional practice using a mouse.
I see trade-offs between the old and the new here. The new software is easier to train new users (less arcane) and able to securely handle things like chip credit cards (which had previously needed a separate card terminal system) and charge accounts. At the same time, the old system was faster (for the limited features it provided) and was able to run more smoothly on older equipment (very little OS overhead, text only network transmissions).
As opposed to what, base64 images or something?
As far as I've been able to make out, document images are generated on the server and sent to the terminals as PostScript files. I've noticed at satellite locations the receipt printers hesitate for a few seconds before printing the barcode at the bottom, which tells me that either 1) it's taking some time to transmit the barcode image over the internet or 2) the server is taking its sweet time cataloguing the transaction in the document archive. Either way, I've gotten complaints about it from the users.
And in terms of performance I fear slow, ad-filled websites slowly trained users to accept bad performance in applications outside the browser as well. At least I don't know how to otherwise explain the widespread indifference toward those things, often even among developers.
Yeah, I don't know either, and I think yours is a very good hypothesis.
I'm currently working on a windows project after spending four years exclusively on Linux, using mostly vim and Eclipse. Visual Studio feels now way worse than it used to. You get more conscious about the time you're wasting.
And, most interestingly, the same happens to users. It's not a matter of being text based, it's a matter of getting useful stuff done, and fast.
Users can and actually enjoy using the keyboard. Users don't want to be delighted with our stuff (speaking of the enterprise here), they just want a system that helps them to get their job done and, after that, get out of their way.
Designers and more and more developers seem to forget that animations, complex colorful screens, all this stuff has to be built, tested, processed by user's hardware which is already having a bad time supporting windows. So, instead of shipping something fast, something we are able to build and fix and test quickly, we deliver something detrimental, in many ways, to user experience.
That is coming from someone who considers the need to use a spreadsheet as a marker that my job scope had gone awry. Love spreadsheets, hate managing information.
Wouldn't we use Lotus 1 2 3 in some emulator?
Visual Studio is the perfect example to me. I begged dad to upgrade the computer to 64/128MB of RAM to get VC++6 to run. It was feature complete then and maybe a bit earlier. Sure supported languages and syntax of come and gone but the core product feature set (editor + intellisense) has not changed in over 20 years, yet the current version takes an order of magnitude more memory and is slower despite having a desktop more powerful than anything I could have imagined back then.
> It's not a matter of being text based, it's a matter of getting useful stuff done, and fast.
Sometimes this is about being composable and scriptable, text based generally helps here.
Absolutely. This is one of the main reasons I'm using Vim - not only because of the program itself but how I can just combine it with the multiplexer I want, in my preferred terminal emulator, interfacing with other text-based tools. Many things I do regularly would require me to write custom plugins in VS Code. In Vim I can just bind keys to an arbitrary sequence of inputs - something modern applications sorely lack.
It's limited, but that limitation severely reduced the complexity of the interface - it's all just a string and bash is, despite all its weirdness, an extremely productive string processing language.
Actually, this is good practice.
We are all busy and distracted. Dumbing down an experience to it's essential aspects is a great way to make something easier to use.
If a 'fool could use it while trying to juggle' then that's good.
Making it dumb means speaking to intuition, not thought.
I should add, there are some good comments here about 'command line' etc. - I suggest that that makes sense but in an entirely different realm of usability.
Designing for something that's going to be used by competent people all day for their jobs, is different than designing for the proles standing in line at the bank, looking for 3 minutes of respite from whatever, or even trying to squeeze in that little update.
A good example is how, in classic application menus, each entry would have its keyboard shortcut printed next to it. A fresh user can navigate the menu to find an action, and the same option is open to anyone how forgot about how to invoke the action, but whenever they land on the action, they can see the keyboard shortcut and eventually they'll remember it and learn to invoke the action faster without having to make an active effort.
This is good UX.
Then designers or product owners or someone decided that the shortcuts made their menus look cluttered (or maybe they really took that "treating your users as incompetent" mantra to heart and thought the shortcuts looked too technical or intimidating), thus condeming inexperienced users to stay inexperienced forever.
This is bad UX.
Physical product design, mobile app, command line, common entry (like the software the waiter uses), pro software (i.e. Photoshop) are all very different aspects of usability representing colliding viewpoints.
Facebook is for me the prototypical example of a bad UI with lots of dark patterns, confusing navigation, different settings scattered all over the place, and frequent technical glitches.
The large "this experience is better in the app" on mobile visits
Only having one or two levels of responses visible without completely reloading the page, seemingly all the way down the reply chain
Sides of the page taking you back to the index on clicking (why?)
Having to expand a discussion thread that you clicked into (just to tell me how many replies there are, why?)
Not scrolling correctly when clicking threads, meaning I end up somewhere in the infinite 'other threads' list at the bottom of the page
The updating and flashing number of upvotes constantly drawing my attention while trying to read
As an outsider reddit is a disgusting mess, and every minute I spend reading it is mental harassment.
There's also the problem that the new UI is clearly more buggy than the old one, and requires manually refreshing to fix glitches far too often, but that's more of a technical problem and not a UX issue.
To be honest, they actually seem to have improved new reddit a lot since I last looked (a few months ago). Now once you do that second click it shows a decent number of comments, whereas previously even then it would still not show many.
Worth noting that the mobile experience is VERY different from the desktop website, and the desktop website is very different if you're using the Reddit Enhancement Suite plugin (and if you haven't used the site in a while, that difference is even starker now that RES uses "old.reddit.com" while everyone else is stuck on the new redesign)
I love the RES / old.Reddit experience, but the new desktop redesign and the mobile experience are both pretty annoying.
1. Treats people's intelligence as 1-dimensional, which it is not.
2. Gives no clear direction to an engineer who is passionate about UX, recognises that humans are multidimensional, and is trying to ask about what their users really need.
You might say I'm arguing semantics, but communication matters!
Without it, you can write code at high speed, but you won't learn what direction to go in order to present information appropriately and contextually to create a rich but easy, intuitive flow.
The old menu is still available, but over the years they've made it progressively harder to find. But when apps get confused about my bluetooth headset the only way to fix it is to pull up the old menu.
This has been a major source of problems for me, especially on Windows, where I often have to manually switch between the two.
I have two Linux laptops. On one, Bluetooth devices endlessly disconnect/reconnect and I gave up entirely. On the other, Bluetooth works flawlessly, better than Windows! So it's really hit and miss in my experience.
I remember in the old versions of windows changing environment variables was something that was a bit of a pain paint because it was hidden behind multiple "advanced" dialogs. Now it's real easy, click start type "envi" and hit enter. That actually brings up "System properties" advanced tab and you have to click "environment variables."
Except that, besides removing some functionality existent in the previous platform, the new one doesn't allow you any longer to lay out your tools the way you think it's more convenient.
They asked for a feedback and I said it feels like the artist conceptual design has priority over the damn user needs. It's evident that the people involved on that project have never performed something beyond trivial operations at the stock market.
Financial industry usually values stability and it's a bit disconcerting to see a stock broker embarking on such trend now.
It's because of Robinhood. Mobile friendly (Material?) UX is very "welcoming" to users, compared to the multitudes of tables and charts that are typically part of a trading platform. Since RH was able to onboard a lot of users, especially amateurs, the others have been paying attention and doing every thing to become similar to RH, to capture that huge amateur market.
Besides, nothing prevented them from offering an alternate, more amateur-friendly platform, without turning the traditional one off
This is exactly the gripe I have with my broker too right now, so we might be using the same broker.
They try to squeeze the entire platform onto a mobile app, when I'm sure 95% of their user base trades from a PC. In the end, it results in botched functionality, a shitty UX of hiding things away, the works.
I use Rico, in Brazil.
Maybe if you're trying to convince people to part with money. Most applications just need UX designers that understand the users workflows and what they're trying to accomplish. When a person comes to this screen of the app why are they there? What data to they need? What are their next steps? Are the doing it for 1 item or 15?
Programmers want to create generic, do everything CRUD interfaces with 15 layers. "UX" people just want to make it pretty. No one is left to understand what they users are actually doing with the software.
Business object can grow out of nothing.
UX designers might feel creative and introduce some unintended features, dynamic colors, even complex structure data. If the design is not validated regularly, these non essential items get worked on by the engineers not knowing that these are not in anybody's interest other than the UX designer.
This is not solely UX designer's fault. This is also the team workflow's fault to not accommodate time for validating design.
At the other spectrum, from engineering side it can be from the underlying mechanism, such as request of huge data should be made stateful because one http call can't handle it, multiple points of hardware failures in a seemingly single operation, etc.
These can sometimes change the game and UX design need to be changed so that user information.
If these are not well communicated, the initial UX design may not suffice to honestly picture the actual underlying process of the product, causing the users to miss one or two options they should have, e.g. missing retry button where user is supposed to be able to retry an action.
Again there should be a period where UX design is validated again and again in the middle of development. A department or a role in the development team that takes care of the big picture of UX design (information architect and interaction design), the big picture of system architecture, and the big picture of project management (to determine which developer works when) might be ideal for it.
And that's why I'm such a big fan of simple, as-much-text-based-as-possible interfaces. By self-imposing a decrease in her degrees of freedom, one gets fewer things compounding the probably already high project burdens.
and the so-called abstraction, either in the UX world or engineering world,
should be a mere default of how the underlying mechanism works, but everybody should still have access to the nitty gritty details.
We suffer from this greatly. Our app is complicated by nature. The designs that come from our product team turn a blind eye on the complexity and try to "make it simple". As a result, the product doesn't really work (in some aspects).
Every time we try to "validate" those designs, we're shut down "because simplicity".
Honestly I think product designers should go through a database course or something to understand that if there's a one-to-many relationship between to entities in real life, you cannot force it into a one-to-one relationship and ignore all potential corner cases. Suddenly 40% of cases are "corner cases" and the app doesn't work.
That perfectly describes what happened to the software provided by my stock broker. They changed the interface so that tools stay on fixed positions, with fixed sizes.
Now the interface looks nice but it also makes some sorts of operations simply impossible.
They completely fail to realize that the "mess" of the old platform was actually obeying to customers ongoing needs for monitoring a specific set of assets, and we didn't f.. care about how the interface looked like, we just cared about numbers and that was all.
It's so depressing how fast even conservative sectors like finance are forgetting some decades-old stuff which could just be taken for granted until some years ago.
User experience involves stuffs other than visual appearances. They must also take care of interaction, information architecture, usability. Decreased usability is a symptom of failure of misdesign.
The most important thing, to me at least, is to work with people open to learning and exploring something new. People who, when realizing they lack of a certain competence, goes curious about the topic rather than denying it.
A good UX designer might not know these topics before they are hired, but they will be happy to explore when they heard of the terms.
And a very flawed interpretation of "simplicity" btw.
What is the point of creating an interface containing the bare minimum of buttons if that will lead users to spend more time to perform what they need? Just like that Apple's "one-button" remote?
What is the point of employing fancy graphical diagraming technics to layout widgets if the resulting layout impairs users?
I'm ok about sb designing an interface without talking to users if and only if the designer is being assisted by/responds to sb who has already been on the future users shoes, or have previous similar experience.
The prevalence of this theoretical, taste and opinion-based ideas about how interfaces should be designed must stop.
It doesn't mean "compare using testers", because that requires engineering work, which was rejected in the next sentence. So what is it?
Like, "validating implementation against specification", but replace implementation with design and specification with business requirement
I appreciate the article ending with the impossible NY website for COVID-19 vaccine registration. The situation is the same in Maryland, except that one must register for three so as to be on a waiting list with the county health department and the private pharmacy and the local hospital (as there is no telling which might get supply first). Not to mention the larger problem: the target group is people age 75 and up! No one seems to have thought that maybe an optional system of registration by phone, or through a call center representative authorized by the caller to register them on their behalf, is plausible. Somehow, three bad websites is considered fine. And one can’t blame this on ‘government’- the private pharmacies are as bad.
So is it incompetence, laziness, or sheer lack of concern whether the most vulnerable elderly get vaccinated? Incompetence might be the most comforting interpretation.
On the supply side the profession has ballooned and subjectively it feels like a disproportionate amount of the growth has been folks who tend towards the "aesthetic" side and/or who lack stat/psych/research/engineering experience. Not that aesthetics isn't valuable, mind you, just that the balance feels off.
On the demand side more product teams are considering UX but many of them seem to have the impression that UX is there to "make it look better". In my experience most teams are receptive to doing user research to identify and solve the underlying problems, but occasionally I'll get someone who insists that the solution is to use the latest UI fad.
Combined and I can see why UX is being perceived as more shallow.
If your title is UX designer, and the UX problem is 'overall speed', how do you solve that given your skills and responsibilities?
As software engineering has grown from someone hacking in their basement to large corporate teams practicing SAFe agile, the responsibilities of the individual software engineer have been reduced. The lone basement hacker is responsible for everything, but the corporate engineer is a cog in the machine with requirements handed down from project managers and ux designers.
Overall speed is a systems quality encompassing the whole system. It's something a lone engineer responsible for the whole system can tackle and be diligent about, but the corporate engineer must rehash the design over and over with ux designers and project managers until an efficient design, not just an aesthetically pleasing design, is what is used.
Another systems quality besides speed is security, and you'll notice more and more systems are less secure than they used to be.
It's not that latency isn't important to Slack, but it's not AS important as everything else.
It's even in some games I've played recently, where I'm in a menu and hitting down twice then a button will sometimes ignore the second press because it's still playing a 'move the cursor' animation.
I was pleasantly surprised last time I snuck a look at the screen in my local post office where I saw an ASCII terminal UI full of text with hotkeys. There is a mistaken belief that complicated is bad, but in a job where you spend your whole day all week long it can be very beneficial because everyone can be a power user.
I believe this is a part of the problem. Because there is a word "designers" in "UX designers", a lot of designers expanded their credentials to include UX. In my experience, they invariably suck at it (at least the ~5 I had the pleasure to work with).
The proliferation of high-fidelity wireframes (and tools like Adobe XD, Figma) is another testament to that; impressive looking designs that hide basic UX mistakes. Low fidelity wireframes would make them obvious, but who wants to look at the "wires" when you can have colors?
I think the designers simply prioritize aesthetics over content / usability and it is difficult for them to get past that. The best UX designers I have worked with in the past were either engineers or coming from completely unrelated fields.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210128223057/https://creativeg...
Do the research? Listen to customers? These are so 1990s.
I'm surprised the author didn't cover that one explicitly: how much of the problem with UX comes with it being "data-driven" these days? In lieu of acquiring direct feedback from the users, everyone these days just overloads their products with telemetry, runs countless A/B tests, gaze tracking experiments... just about everything imaginable except talking to the users.
It's nice to be data-driven - good, quantifiable data is easy to gradient-descent on. But somehow, the metrics tend to be selected in context of what profits the business the most, and not what maximizes the value of a product to the user...
The divergence happens when the user isn't the one paying for the product; e.g. when the user's company is paying for it or when advertisers pay for it instead.
So, in some ways, it is genius, and I really hated it when Apple killed it off. The problem wasn't the concept itself - it was trying to sell it as UX for everyone. I think that's one of the big problems with UX today - the things that are done under the guise of "simplification" aren't actually simple.
HN commenters tend to be power users of desktop-style UI more than touch or mobile-style UI which can make it hard to see similarities between them (right click conventions really aren't much more consistent or obvious than swipe conventions)
With the advent of the Web, this idea of 'the experience' has mostly supplanted much of the research and test-driven usability I participated in.
Yes, it's supposed to be a news site.
Besides that, it looks like no one did any design at all, like what you'd get on the default template of wordpress or other CMS
Usage hint: Reducing the browser window to what is approximate smartphone width in portrait orientation somewhat helps with the experience. Clearly, using anything other than a mobile device is deviant.
On the other hand, in terms of UX, I felt somewhat neglected as there wasn't a "Use our App!" popup. Also, the lack of welcoming "Subscribe!" popups (options "I can't wait!" and "Later, but for sure!") is a bit reminiscent of past decades of public services and their arrogant attitude towards customers needs. I was even left to my own on any attempts to scroll without any reassuring popups gratifying my engagement by another opportunity to click a button. I could just scroll and scroll without noticing, accompanied by a growing feel of loneliness and solitude in this digital void. If this isn't pure negligence… ;-)
It's clearly a massive improvment on the last design: https://web.archive.org/web/20210101011826/https://www.tages...
As an additional correlation to the timeline, Taboola took off from 2007 to 2013 especially, when all the online journalism sites were trying to figure out how to stay afloat and suddenly they were all handed a guaranteed monthly income, all they have to do is mix scams and health-scare and "Tommy Chong CBD" fraud in with your news, your readers will love having relevant recommendations for what to read next!
(It's my conspiracy theory that the only reason these ad networks pay out so well is to keep the surveillance dragnet wide, track what information every person sees -- for the price of a little click fraud)
But back to the topic, these design changes (even editorial changes to what headlines are on your front page) are certainly not done with the user in mind.
Another design trend that has completely taken over of course is algorithmic timelines. Both Twitter and Instagram started pushing non-chronological sorting on previously chronological feeds in 2016. This is a transparent effort to take advantage of the slot-machine-addiction of reward and disappointment brought about by a refresh of content -- requiring you to refresh the page and load more ad impressions. I can't tell you how many times I tried to use facebook's search feature, but eneded up scrolling down the timeline trying to find a post I saw earlier, how many dozens of ad impressions were bought and sold while I scrolled, all because facebook couldn't be bothered to write a useful timeline search?
The places where people spend most of their time online (social media, youtube) are designed to act like quicksand, information is re-arranged every time you hit the back button, just because they need to mix some payola in and keep you on the site.
/rant
I think there is still a log of creativity to be had with computers, for my part I'm building a WYSIWYG CMS that frames all of its data into polygon 'tiles' that fit together into a mosaic in 2 or 3 or more dimensions, just something to get away from the rectangles and single column timelines that make everything look the same. I can't even remember what website I saw something on because I can't tell one from the other. So, see also another great piece on web design from 2016 [1] relating to design trends in physical spaces, the trend of cafes and airbnbs to ignore any of its local context in favor of a bland Le Corbusier-meets-Edison-Bulbs style, a full on mcdonaldization of service so that you never have to try anything new (except even mcdonalds adapts the menu to local taste)
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/3/12325104/airbnb-aesthetic-...
If my theory here is right, then the problem can’t be solved by preaching UX to businesses. I think it can only be solved by reminder end users that they deserve better.
The main issue though is that you aren't the customer anymore.
Look at Facebook - they've done an absolutely incredible job becoming a dream experience for advertisers. Youtube has catered to these advertisers as well and blocked controversial content that wouldn't look good next to their brand. It's a golden age to be at the head of a marketing team with a large ad budget. These companies have made golden escalators for getting sponsored content in front of the productized consumers.
If you want UX to succeed and become something that benefits you as a user, then you should focus on platforms where you truly are the customer. Look at Square or Patreon - in both platforms you are truly the customer, and their UX is incredible.
For example, when you create a calendar appointment in office, it's one click to make it a teams meeting.
figuring out privacy settings... not as easy (basically send an email)
Engagement is often at odds with productivity.
I'm sorry, are we talking about the same Patreon? Because patreon.com has a bunch of seemingly pointless clicks for posting content.
Here's the step-by-step for posting a video from the creator page:
1. Click on Posts in the sidebar. An animation creates a dropdown - this frequently stutters even on a reasonable desktop and creates a small delay.
2. Click on New. This loads a new page where you can select a post type.
3. Click on Video. This loads another new page where I can select Vimeo or Add URL.
4. Click on Add URL. This immediately creates a textbox under the button that I can paste a URL into. I can set a title, tags, additional content and post it.
---
Compare this to uploading a video to Youtube:
1. Click on Create. This immediately opens a dropdown.
2. Click on Upload video. This opens an upload video box that you can click on to open a file upload dialog or you can drag a file onto it. If you're on the Youtube frontpage then there's a page load in this step, but if you're on the Creator Page, then there's no page load.
3. While the file is uploading you can fill in the title etc and even press Publish immediately (while it's still uploading).
I understand that the two cases aren't equivalent, but the experience of posting content feels better on Youtube. I think in terms of UX something like imgur or streamable are great examples.
Edit: I was overly harsh at first. It's just a part of UX that has consistently annoyed me with Patreon. Overall it's decent, but these small things make it feel worse than it is.
The creators are an important part of the platform, but arguably will put up with more because they are getting paid.
What you've described is exactly what I'm talking about - the UX is optimized for whoever is paying. Your example is a perfect showing of this. A creator's experience is secondary for Patreon - a patron's experience comes first (hell, it's even in their name). Patreon improved the UX of funding creatives.
Sign up to be a pateron of some artist to download their works. Your only way to do this is to scroll through the list of all their posts one at a time in an endless scroll. And to add insult to injury the page will crash and you have to start over from the top of the scroll, there is no way to start 50 or 100 posts in.
For artists offering media via pateron a good UX might be something like Mega.
It's literally getting in the way when I'm trying to buy something!
You're kidding, right?
They're both disasters. Patreon's UX feels like it was designed by someone deliberately trying to tank the company.
1. It is slow. 2. It is buggy. 3. They often introduce new features (instead of fixing old ones), call me on phone, and convince me to use them, only for them to not work right. 4. The UI seemly tries it hard to obscure useful stuff and make easy to waste money, sometimes it is blatant, for example when I was getting a ton of click fraud coming from mobile apps, I found a hidden option to disable ads on mobile apps, 2 weeks later they removed the option entirely, restoring the fraud, when I went to research how to fix that, the answer was that I had to either let the fraud happen, or stop advertising on mobile (even in sites) entirely. I took the second option (and the SEO and ad-ranking hit, since google hates when you ignore mobile)
I think the latest thing in the 1950's was Touch-Tone. The telephone itself is actually 1870s technology.
This is about incentives and business. You cannot design your way out of that.
That must suck; but at least they probably make more money than they would, helping people. Unfortunately, in the US, at least, we value the reaper, more than the servant. Teachers and social workers are paid badly, treated with immense disrespect, and sidelined.
People who make money by treating their users like chattel are lionized and held up as national models.
Ah...well. That's the USofA.
For me, I decided that I love UX -the original kind, and I write software that implements it. I don't particularly care if I ever make a dime off it. I love to write high-quality, non-manipulative, useful software. It's a rare luxury, and I'm grateful to be in that position.
It does make me sad to know that the kind of work that I do is scorned, but that won't stop me from doing it.
I like the anglerfish metaphor. Perfect.
Another shout out for “About Face : the essentials of interaction design” which everyone should read, especially programmers.
And the result is websites that do technically check all the boxes in the document thought up by someone charged with "getting a website built for this", but rarely anything that would be considered a good experience.
The federal government has gotten a lot better at this since the founding of 18f, but state and local still has the problem of checklistware
The one big tech exception to all this is Facebook which basically zoomed straight towards the lowest common denominator version of itself yes continues to plough ever deeper trenches each year