There’s only so much you can do with pointing and clicking on a flat screen. To me, part of the problem is that most non-mobile OS’s still haven’t embraced touch as part of the UX. Hopefully, there’s more inroads with “spatial” computing too.
Conversely, there is only so much you can do with fat oily fingers on a screen. Finger input has poor precision. Also, you cannot expect a user to operate a vertical touch screen for many hours. Our human upper body isn't built for this. Vertical workstation screens will always require some indirect pointing input modality.
> Also, you cannot expect a user to operate a vertical touch screen for many hours. Our human upper body isn't built for this
Indeed. Back in the days when people thought light pens were cool[1], "gorilla arm" was a common term for the way your body felt after using one for a while. I doubt it matters much whether you're using a pen or your finger, in terms of the fatigue that develops.
Ha! Just checked, and "gorilla arm" is still apparently in use.
[1] Edit: Some say that what really killed off light pens was company lawyers freaking out over the idea of Junior using a pointy stick on a fragile glass CRT with vacuum inside. Definitely something that could go wrong in a big way.
you’re right. I guess what I meant to say is that there’s only so many ways we can bang our head against the same wall. The wall being a flat screen. We’d probably have new solutions once we transition to a spatial interface.
No thanks on touch screens for desktop monitors. My monitor is right at the limits of my reach without leaning forward. Plus, I have enough problems keeping the screen clean as it is.
> It’s actually Microsoft Edge. How would I know this by looking at the application? There isn’t any way to do it, as far as I can tell. You have to go somewhere else to know what app you are looking at. Grrr.
I have absolutely no idea why the author thinks it's important to see which browser you're looking at, at all time. It's a waste of screen space.
> We need to bring back the Ok and Cancel buttons.
As long as we never use the words "Ok" and "Cancel"
"Save Settings" and "Keep Current Settings" for his example please
No the point in article is "OK" and "Cancel" were fairly standardized buttons for ANY general action the user might initiate -- that requires a confirmation.
In certain situations where the action itself is "Cancel my Order" or "Cancel Job" etc ... then the button labelled "Cancel" can cause confusion through a double negative.
In other routine instances ... Cancel was a fairly standard and universally understood option to back out of an action -- across scenarios and across applications. Similarly OK to confirm the intended action.
* the left-slider switch where you do not know if something is on or off
* flat shading (as opposed to motif/windows-95 3d effects)
which does not make use of the brain's spatial abilities.
It shouldn’t have to be enabled. But on iOS at least, the accessibility settings allow you to surface button shapes and on/off symbols over switches. If you’re using the native tooling in your program I think you essentially get this for free.
This should be retitled as "I'm getting annoyed with the Microsoft/Windows UI."
Two of the three complaints are about Windows specifically (resizing windows and lack of application titlebar info). The 3rd appears to be an issue the author has with the theme they have applied in VSCode, which doesn't seem to match the theme shown on the VSCode homepage, which clearly shows which tab is active.
There's no look at macro trends nor software outside of the MS ecosystem.
> theme shown on the VSCode homepage, which clearly shows which tab is active
When I glance at the VSCode home page, the only thing which clued me in on which tab is active is the fact that there are two gray ones but only one black one. If there were only two tabs open, I'd have expected the gray one to be the active one. Sure, the argument is probably that the active tab color should match the background, which is black, but I still think it is a terrible UI.
And I really agree with the sibling comment about "wait, those are tabs?" Can't tell you how many times I've had that thought cross my mind. Not just for tabs, either, but for many types of UI elements. It really is a shitshow these days.
This isn't addressing the main issue I have with modern UI
Back in the era of Windows 98, buttons were beveled; one corner was light as if the sun was pointing at it, and the opposite corner was dark, and it made it look like the button was sticking out of the screen. When you clicked on it, the bevels got mirrored as if it was now sticking into the screen.
This showed "I am a button, and you pushed me". But most importantly, it became the universal language for "I am clickable", and you didn't need to hover over it, or click on it, to know that it was clickable.
The same bevel was then used for everything. The scroll bar, the resizable borders, and so on and so forth. If you could click it, it looked clickable
This got dropped progressively in favor of cooler looking UIs, but what we lost in the process is that now, the UI expects the user to have integrated some baseline of "software logic" (I'm trying to think of a software equivalent of "video game logic")
Now to know that something on your screen is clickable, you rely on hovering.
So the result now is that it got even harder to onboard who are new to technology. Most often old people.
They don't even have a legacy "windows 98" theme on Windows 10 & 11 anymore
Even worse is the web, most of the web stopped making links react to hovering, links are not necessarily colored blue or underlined anymore, nothing is unified
How would the web feel if you were the kind of person who didn't instinctively know that clicking on your avatar is supposed to bring you to your user's profile?
The web isn't built for you anymore, the expectations for the user are higher
Yes. I think your issue is a symptom of a broader problem: the takeover of UI by graphic designers, causing the virtual extinction of usability experts.
UIs today, first and foremost, are built for branding and marketing reasons. Usability and information accessibility have fallen way down in priority. I think this is the main reason why we see so much “responsive design” which is really just shoehorning mobile UIs into the desktop browser. To product managers it’s far more important to maintain consistent look and feel / branding across mobile and desktop than it is to achieve optimal usability for each platform.
Maybe the extinction is the population of users that's entirely unused to graphical user interfaces. You don't need to take that group into consideration anymore, so, goodbye to usability experts.
But the obvious result is that now, computer illiterate people are completely fucked
I had a father (he was 56 in 2022 so not even that old) who refused to learn how to use technology. But in 2022, he couldn't find an apartment without help, he couldn't find a job without help, he couldn't do his paperwork without help, even finding a restaurant's phone number to make a reservation would take him ages because who the fuck bothers filing for the yellow pages anymore? Are they even still a thing?
At some point surely he would've caved and pushed through to get a smartphone and a laptop. But at that point, how hard would it be to learn it all on your own?
Maybe the extinction is the population of users that's entirely unused to graphical user interfaces. You don't need to take that group into consideration anymore, so, goodbye to usability experts.
I think that's selling usability experts short. Good UI design isn't just for computer novices. It's also for power users. An extremely well-designed user interface can dramatically enhance productivity and allow a power user to get into highly efficient and satisfying workflows. Conversely, a poor user interface (such as all the modern ones we have today) can be extremely frustrating and unproductive to use, to the point where power users give up on trying to complete their tasks efficiently.
You are definitely correct about computer illiterate people. I have several older relatives who are in the same boat as your father was. My father is 73 and he's a capable user of his phone, though he still needs a fair amount of tech support from me.
> Maybe the extinction is the population of users that's entirely unused to graphical user interfaces. You don't need to take that group into consideration anymore, so, goodbye to usability experts.
> But the obvious result is that now, computer illiterate people are completely fucked
IMHO, the things that "fuck" computer illiterate people also annoy and decrease usability for computer literate people, it's just that the latter group can adapt to the damage.
Take those fucking horizontal slider switches, for instance. They're fucking everywhere now. It's fucking medium gray, does that mean on or off? Guess I have to toggle it and see what happens. Oh, the gray got lighter, so it must've been on?
Or, the app/website/whatever looked "dated" so they "refresh" it by changing some colors and moving all the the buttons and menus around. Thanks for invalidating my muscle memory, for no good reason.
IMHO, usability experts need to design all the UIs (keeping both novices and power users in mind), and give the graphic designers who are concerned about looks very little freedom (i.e. they can make suggestions, but need approval). If they want more freedom, they can design UIs for movie computers (if you want to see a good one, watch Until the End of the World).
One of my biggest issues is that "flat design" by definition also dictates "borderless". Meaning, a dialog or other window adjoins or overlaps another, you sometimes need to stare for a few seconds to tell where one window begins and another ends. Seems to be worse on Windows and Chrome, but I see it on Linux sometimes too and try to file a bug when it happens.
Adding at least a 1-pixel border and drop shadows to all windows can go a long way to fixing this, but I don't believe that the latter helps "dark mode" users much.
(Of course, a lot of developers these days only use and develop apps and websites in full-screen mode on a tiny 13" laptop screen, so they never see a lot of the issues that "flat" causes.)
A lot of oldest GUIs were flat by hw limitations (often 1bpp displays) and they absolutely didn't dictate borderless. Sometimes there wasn't an "always on" border, but a border would show up when your mouse was over a clickable element, sometimes there was a border. Activation of UI element was often done by swapping foreground and background colour, something that was immediately visible.
Windows 3.0 brought "3d" styling to windows, actually - where available at least. Windows 2.0 had some simple shading or rather "complex borders" if you had colour display, but nowhere close to 3D shading of 3.0
It seems we are suffering as a "profession" from serious cognitive dissonance as we preach the importance of accessibility and function over form, but design for aesthetics and follow trends in style.
If I had to estimate I would say about 70% of the apps on my phone don't have button outlines or menus, have no contrast, abuse jargon and worst of all don't respect my decisions. Except ofcourse, in the basket and the checkout pages. But boy do they look pretty.
The philosopher Rick Roderick does a talk about existential
priorities, about how the necessary conditions for appreciating
literature are having food in your stomach - that kind of Maslow's
stuff. In it there's this absolutely devastating, knock-down line
where he says of modernity;
"People aren't afraid of dying any more. We're afraid of being seen
wearing the wrong trainers"
That was like 1997, and it sound truer today than ever. In a culture
so steeped in vanity, with entire economies built on vanity, it's no
wonder that form triumphs over function. To even talk about function
is to invite ridicule. This is an age where people need a _thin_
laptop, no matter that it costs 10x the price, breaks if you stare at
it too hard, and catches fire when you charge it.
This is a low-effort article that completely fails to understand why a couple of the nits even happened, which would have been actually interesting.
* On confirming changes with ok/cancel:
Online and collaborative apps have trained many users to expect that all changes are automatically saved. Where Google Docs used to have a "save" button that did nothing, we may have now entered a new era where some users don't know what the state of things is if you don't hit one of the ok/cancel buttons. That's interesting, and maybe there's a more clear way of doing things because of this expectation change.
Not to mention that the OK button has hopefully deservedly died because it wasn't clear. The affirm button should have a custom label that describes the action that will happen if you click it.
* On apps (more specifically browsers) not being identifiable: This is good mostly? Browsers are presumably responding to users who care more about having maximum screen real estate dedicated to the content they're reading that the browser which hosts the content. An app that realizes that I often don't really _want_ to interact with the app itself is good. The removal of excessive toolbars and separate URL and search boxes is a all great. I want a browser that's almost full-screen content but still usable for navigation and window management.
* On gray selection: A code/text highlight example, really? Yes, I personally don't want a bright blue background for my selected code. It would be too distracting. But you can change this with your theme! Choose a theme you like. If other users like it too it'll be popular.
Or is he complaining about the selected tab? That has bold text and a color highlight line above it. I have no idea why the selected gray is so similar to unselected in his screen shot when the Dark and Dark Modern themes in VS Code for me have more contrast. Again, bright colors would be distracting and you change change the theme.
The interesting question here would be how you balance obviousness of UI state with not being distracting, especially for editing apps.
These are tough design challenges and this article kind of flippantly dismisses the current state as "aesthetics" rather than considering that there are competing usability concerns and the author simply doesn't like where the tradeoff has landed, and completely ignores the market leading apps and OSes to similar design decisions.
I think so, yes. No borders to indicate the selected tab, no background color. It took me a while to notice the selected tab is likely to be the one with the "close" cross and the 1px thin accent red above it. It is plainly bad. Oh and the text is not bold, just a bit lighter than the other tabs.
> there are competing usability concerns
This is very true, especially since the author uses red and green for ok/cancel buttons. A colorblind colleague of mine actually likes the current trend of grey-ifying stuff because there is an increased difference in luma, not only in chroma, between elements.
> Not to mention that the OK button has hopefully deservedly died because it wasn't clear.
I disagree. The great thing about the OK and Cancel buttons were not that they were a good description for what you were doing, but that everyone understood what was going to happen. It is that consistency that has been lost. Trying to get terminology to be more accurate is a laudable goal, but what really kills me about modern UI design is how every single app or web page feels like they need to roll their own.
I disagree here. OK/Cancel only make in the context of the text in the dialog, and are only clear if there are clear negative and positive actions. Even when there are clear positives and negatives, it's almost always better to just label the OK button with the actual action. Save, Revert, Close, Send, etc., are always better than OK.
This is a weird comment. The fact that users expect changes to be saved is not a problem, they will see a "how you sure you want to leave" if they don't. Even browsers support this now, if you were to try and close the whole tab/window.
The "ok" button can be labelled "save" if that makes sense. I don't think that takes anything away from the article's point.
"Just get another theme" is not a solution. The point is that most themes are this way, whether default themes or others. Most apps also don't have theming options, other than light/dark. Or do you mean that end users should make their own theme?
> low-effort article that completely fails to understand
More of an old-man-yells-at-cloud rant than anything actionable here. I agree with the broad strokes, in particular the UX trend towards making everything as flat and monochrome and sparse as possible. I really get the impression that "modern" UX designers won't actually be happy until their app is functionally reduced to a big white fullscreen borderless rectangle with a three gray words in the middle that you have to mouse over before you discover they are actually clickable.
I disagree with this part of the article, though:
> We need to bring back the Ok and Cancel buttons.
Historically, OK and Cancel was mainly a Windows UI custom, and the problem with them is that they often leave a lot of room for ambiguity. I see some variation of this at least once a week, you tell me what happens here, I'll wait:
> Are you sure you want to cancel the upgrade? This may result in an unbootable system.
> (Cancel) (OK)
There are multiple other problems with OK/Cancel which I don't have the energy to get into, but the highlights are:
1. Who decided that OK/Cancel made better answers to boolean questions than simply Yes/No?
2. Buttons like this should _always_ be verbs for very short phrases that describe what you are doing when you click on the button. That way, the user is much more sure of what they are doing, and the programmer does not have to write (as) complicated questions. This has been a standard UX concept for decades that is still frequently ignored.
3. I have seen multiple websites/apps where OK/Cancel buttons are swapped arbitrarily. Sometimes OK is on the left, sometimes OK is on the right. This how programmers can gaslight their users.
I lament the death of always-visible, easily-grabbed scrollbars. Every scrollbar is transparent, disappearing, tiny, and exceedingly difficult to grab. Why? I guess UI designers decided that scrollbars are ugly. Same with obvious buttons; at some point, half of buttons were made into obscure symbols, and even when words are still used, any kind of bordering that points them out as buttons is gone. Just freestanding symbols and words. It's infuriating.
Low-contrast colors EVERYWHERE also angers me. Low contrast is great for being easy on the eyes, but certain interactive elements need contrast to indicate their function. My best example is that Linux desktop themes across the entire DE space focus on low contrast at the expense of almost everything else, and it's hard to figure out stuff as simple as which window is on top and active, or which elements in a window are clickable.
I have to scroll with the mouse wheel just to make the scroll bar appear, and then be quick enough to get the pointer over it so I can drag it before it disappears again. It is super irritating.
> Every scrollbar is transparent, disappearing, tiny, and exceedingly difficult to grab. Why? I guess UI designers decided that scrollbars are ugly.
It’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? Every mouse now has a scroll wheel (or corresponding mechanism) and on touch displays, scrolling needs no scrollbar either.
Of course, it’s still terrible to remove the only indication that a box has more information available that can fit, and is therefore scrollable. Not to mention the useful property of seeing both your current approximate position and the total size at a glance.
in many situations we need to scroll both vertically and horizontally -- for example a Excel spreadsheet / google sheets, or maps
even on touch screens -- depending on the UI -- if the entire display area is "hot" the scrollbars might be the only way to pan around without editing / triggering other actions
one can also use page-up / page-down / home / end / arrow / ctrl+arrow etc. ... if keyboard has to be used.
scroll bars indicate visually how big the scroll area is and where you are ... and let you directly click or drag you position. there was a lot of useful functionality available at a single mouse click that has been sacrificed in pursuit of visual prettiness / minimalism.
Grabbing and manipulating the scroll bar can be significantly faster in large windows than scrolling incessantly. I know Logitech mice allow you to scroll freely, but a user shouldn’t have to purchase specific hardware to rectify for a failure in software
I try to remember how the general demise of OK/ cancel buttons came about. There was a time when almost all of the more complex tools in an application would use modal dialog boxes without an ability to preview the result before the user clicked OK. This was rightfully deemed inadequate and eventually tbe "modeless" side panel was invented, and its lesser sibling, the "apply" button. This gave users more tools that allowed instant previews. And these were mostly good changes.
But somehow the idea of modeless UI spread into all parts of UIs, including settings dialogs, where it sometimes doesn't feel appropriate at all. Why did that happen? Why is there no consistent pattern anymore for discarding unwanted changes in a dialog?
> I try to remember how the general demise of OK/ cancel buttons came about
I think there was a time when dialogs had all three: Apply, Ok, Cancel. I formed the habit of clicking Apply and then Ok back then.
Either way, I think Ok went away when smartphones were introduced, because they traded checkboxes with those horizontal slider buttons. Then someone had the idea what works on a smartphone should work everywhere and now we have that everywhere.
The Apply button was pointless. OK is supposed to apply. Apply simply made the changes, but it did not dismiss the dialog. Apply seemed confusing to most users and there should have only been two buttons. If you click OK, there was no reason to keep the dialog visible since you should be able to click the same thing (easily) to get back to it.
If the Apply button was necessary because you could not easily get back to the dialog, then it was a problem with the interface before the dialog opened. That is, it should be easy to open dialogs, close them, and open them again.
That change is explained in the human interface guidelines of the era. There was some debate in the GNOME world when this was first implemented and the rationale was explained in threads like this one:
I think despite the fact that "UX" entered the picture a long time ago now, most people who are "UI/UX Designers" still focus heavily on how things look and have a much lower understanding of how things work and feel to use
I also suspect that universities are still mostly teaching design as if it is something printed in a magazine and not rendered in a browser
Designers I have worked with have shown a lack of understanding of the basic HTML input components, failing to understand what the difference is between a radio button and a checkbox for instance.
But there's a lot more than that. They build designs without considering scrollbars, or without considering paginating large datasets. They don't plan for asynchronous operations that may not return immediately. Yes these are more technical concerns but they do impact the design! Designers should be asking questions about how long an operation they are building mockups for might take and planning accordingly
But it's even worse than that. They want everything to neatly fit on a single screen, but they don't really understand display sizes and aspect ratios. This means they don't build (or really understand) responsive layouts. Very common to hear "this spacing looks off on my screen", as if it were designed for a consistent page size (print media)
I don't know. Maybe I've just had pretty bad luck with designers. I'll admit most of the ones I've had trouble with are fairly fresh out of university, so it could just be a lack of real world experience. But some of the stuff just really gives me the impression they weren't taught to design for web or digital displays at all
> I think despite the fact that "UX" entered the picture a long time ago now, most people who are "UI/UX Designers" still focus heavily on how things look and have a much lower understanding of how things work and feel to use
Yeah, use of the term "UX" has been a red flag for me for a long time now.
The author is not wrong, but swimming in the shallows.
It's a very old problem that goes back more decades than are accounted for here. To their credit, at least when the joint venture between IBM and Microsoft happened around OS/2, CUA still set a broad standard that was widely met and meant that many of these problems were rare, or at least the keyboard was guaranteed to work consistently. Apple does not deserve the free pass it gets here.
Why? Because design choices are not governed by designers. Rather, they are governed by cost and time-to-market, much like car interiors, and chosen from a shared parts bin.
Depending on the ISV this means that the GUI or widget toolkit may be Microsoft.net, Java, Qt, or 30 years of other toolkits recombined poorly ad nauseam.
Frequently, this means the evil of two lessers since there are no clear winners. Users will continue to suffer as a result.
I try to solve this with Sway on Linux, but the further into left field I go, the screaming just gets louder, not quieter.
I believe these will come back at some point and someone will claim they invented them. But right now we're in the enshitificaiton phase, UI things are changed but slowly functionality is taken away from users on purpose.
- No I am a masochist. Nag me every time I use this browser.
--
WE RESPECT YOUR PRIVACY AND CHOICE. <fine print> Turn on Alerts and Notifications and full permissions to scrape your contacts and data collection and personalization and Email spam and enable trial of AutoAIMagic(TM)?
- <default> Yes I agree I want to use this software. (or other irrelevant text that is worded like you are routinely agreeing to use the software as per terms)
- <hidden> Remind me (or secretly turn these on at next update anyway)
One thing that I see glossed over on the engineering side is reactive UI that changes as the models its built from change. This is good for many things except when it comes to presenting the user with UI objects they need to interact with. It has to be one of the dumbest and most infuriating things in UX and is often seen as working as intended. If you present something to the user do not change the options right before they click. If you aren’t ready to show any options, don’t!
Windows, icons, menus, and pointers ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WIMP_(computing) ) had its origins in the late 60s and was codified at PARC in the early 70s. It's ridiculous that we still use it despite the radical change in hardware capabilities and our understanding of coding.
This article really missed an opportunity by complaining about trivia instead of the core problems.
70 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadIndeed. Back in the days when people thought light pens were cool[1], "gorilla arm" was a common term for the way your body felt after using one for a while. I doubt it matters much whether you're using a pen or your finger, in terms of the fatigue that develops.
Ha! Just checked, and "gorilla arm" is still apparently in use.
https://www.techopedia.com/definition/31480/gorilla-arm
[1] Edit: Some say that what really killed off light pens was company lawyers freaking out over the idea of Junior using a pointy stick on a fragile glass CRT with vacuum inside. Definitely something that could go wrong in a big way.
I have absolutely no idea why the author thinks it's important to see which browser you're looking at, at all time. It's a waste of screen space.
> We need to bring back the Ok and Cancel buttons.
As long as we never use the words "Ok" and "Cancel"
"Save Settings" and "Keep Current Settings" for his example please
In certain situations where the action itself is "Cancel my Order" or "Cancel Job" etc ... then the button labelled "Cancel" can cause confusion through a double negative.
In other routine instances ... Cancel was a fairly standard and universally understood option to back out of an action -- across scenarios and across applications. Similarly OK to confirm the intended action.
* the left-slider switch where you do not know if something is on or off * flat shading (as opposed to motif/windows-95 3d effects) which does not make use of the brain's spatial abilities.
Gestures are horrible for discovery. If I can't see it, how am I supposed to know it exists?
Two of the three complaints are about Windows specifically (resizing windows and lack of application titlebar info). The 3rd appears to be an issue the author has with the theme they have applied in VSCode, which doesn't seem to match the theme shown on the VSCode homepage, which clearly shows which tab is active.
There's no look at macro trends nor software outside of the MS ecosystem.
When I glance at the VSCode home page, the only thing which clued me in on which tab is active is the fact that there are two gray ones but only one black one. If there were only two tabs open, I'd have expected the gray one to be the active one. Sure, the argument is probably that the active tab color should match the background, which is black, but I still think it is a terrible UI.
And I really agree with the sibling comment about "wait, those are tabs?" Can't tell you how many times I've had that thought cross my mind. Not just for tabs, either, but for many types of UI elements. It really is a shitshow these days.
Back in the era of Windows 98, buttons were beveled; one corner was light as if the sun was pointing at it, and the opposite corner was dark, and it made it look like the button was sticking out of the screen. When you clicked on it, the bevels got mirrored as if it was now sticking into the screen.
This showed "I am a button, and you pushed me". But most importantly, it became the universal language for "I am clickable", and you didn't need to hover over it, or click on it, to know that it was clickable.
The same bevel was then used for everything. The scroll bar, the resizable borders, and so on and so forth. If you could click it, it looked clickable
This got dropped progressively in favor of cooler looking UIs, but what we lost in the process is that now, the UI expects the user to have integrated some baseline of "software logic" (I'm trying to think of a software equivalent of "video game logic")
Now to know that something on your screen is clickable, you rely on hovering.
So the result now is that it got even harder to onboard who are new to technology. Most often old people.
They don't even have a legacy "windows 98" theme on Windows 10 & 11 anymore
Even worse is the web, most of the web stopped making links react to hovering, links are not necessarily colored blue or underlined anymore, nothing is unified
How would the web feel if you were the kind of person who didn't instinctively know that clicking on your avatar is supposed to bring you to your user's profile?
The web isn't built for you anymore, the expectations for the user are higher
UIs today, first and foremost, are built for branding and marketing reasons. Usability and information accessibility have fallen way down in priority. I think this is the main reason why we see so much “responsive design” which is really just shoehorning mobile UIs into the desktop browser. To product managers it’s far more important to maintain consistent look and feel / branding across mobile and desktop than it is to achieve optimal usability for each platform.
But the obvious result is that now, computer illiterate people are completely fucked
I had a father (he was 56 in 2022 so not even that old) who refused to learn how to use technology. But in 2022, he couldn't find an apartment without help, he couldn't find a job without help, he couldn't do his paperwork without help, even finding a restaurant's phone number to make a reservation would take him ages because who the fuck bothers filing for the yellow pages anymore? Are they even still a thing?
At some point surely he would've caved and pushed through to get a smartphone and a laptop. But at that point, how hard would it be to learn it all on your own?
I think that's selling usability experts short. Good UI design isn't just for computer novices. It's also for power users. An extremely well-designed user interface can dramatically enhance productivity and allow a power user to get into highly efficient and satisfying workflows. Conversely, a poor user interface (such as all the modern ones we have today) can be extremely frustrating and unproductive to use, to the point where power users give up on trying to complete their tasks efficiently.
You are definitely correct about computer illiterate people. I have several older relatives who are in the same boat as your father was. My father is 73 and he's a capable user of his phone, though he still needs a fair amount of tech support from me.
> But the obvious result is that now, computer illiterate people are completely fucked
IMHO, the things that "fuck" computer illiterate people also annoy and decrease usability for computer literate people, it's just that the latter group can adapt to the damage.
Take those fucking horizontal slider switches, for instance. They're fucking everywhere now. It's fucking medium gray, does that mean on or off? Guess I have to toggle it and see what happens. Oh, the gray got lighter, so it must've been on?
Or, the app/website/whatever looked "dated" so they "refresh" it by changing some colors and moving all the the buttons and menus around. Thanks for invalidating my muscle memory, for no good reason.
IMHO, usability experts need to design all the UIs (keeping both novices and power users in mind), and give the graphic designers who are concerned about looks very little freedom (i.e. they can make suggestions, but need approval). If they want more freedom, they can design UIs for movie computers (if you want to see a good one, watch Until the End of the World).
Adding at least a 1-pixel border and drop shadows to all windows can go a long way to fixing this, but I don't believe that the latter helps "dark mode" users much.
(Of course, a lot of developers these days only use and develop apps and websites in full-screen mode on a tiny 13" laptop screen, so they never see a lot of the issues that "flat" causes.)
If I had to estimate I would say about 70% of the apps on my phone don't have button outlines or menus, have no contrast, abuse jargon and worst of all don't respect my decisions. Except ofcourse, in the basket and the checkout pages. But boy do they look pretty.
"People aren't afraid of dying any more. We're afraid of being seen wearing the wrong trainers"
That was like 1997, and it sound truer today than ever. In a culture so steeped in vanity, with entire economies built on vanity, it's no wonder that form triumphs over function. To even talk about function is to invite ridicule. This is an age where people need a _thin_ laptop, no matter that it costs 10x the price, breaks if you stare at it too hard, and catches fire when you charge it.
* On confirming changes with ok/cancel:
Online and collaborative apps have trained many users to expect that all changes are automatically saved. Where Google Docs used to have a "save" button that did nothing, we may have now entered a new era where some users don't know what the state of things is if you don't hit one of the ok/cancel buttons. That's interesting, and maybe there's a more clear way of doing things because of this expectation change.
Not to mention that the OK button has hopefully deservedly died because it wasn't clear. The affirm button should have a custom label that describes the action that will happen if you click it.
* On apps (more specifically browsers) not being identifiable: This is good mostly? Browsers are presumably responding to users who care more about having maximum screen real estate dedicated to the content they're reading that the browser which hosts the content. An app that realizes that I often don't really _want_ to interact with the app itself is good. The removal of excessive toolbars and separate URL and search boxes is a all great. I want a browser that's almost full-screen content but still usable for navigation and window management.
* On gray selection: A code/text highlight example, really? Yes, I personally don't want a bright blue background for my selected code. It would be too distracting. But you can change this with your theme! Choose a theme you like. If other users like it too it'll be popular.
Or is he complaining about the selected tab? That has bold text and a color highlight line above it. I have no idea why the selected gray is so similar to unselected in his screen shot when the Dark and Dark Modern themes in VS Code for me have more contrast. Again, bright colors would be distracting and you change change the theme.
The interesting question here would be how you balance obviousness of UI state with not being distracting, especially for editing apps.
These are tough design challenges and this article kind of flippantly dismisses the current state as "aesthetics" rather than considering that there are competing usability concerns and the author simply doesn't like where the tradeoff has landed, and completely ignores the market leading apps and OSes to similar design decisions.
I think so, yes. No borders to indicate the selected tab, no background color. It took me a while to notice the selected tab is likely to be the one with the "close" cross and the 1px thin accent red above it. It is plainly bad. Oh and the text is not bold, just a bit lighter than the other tabs.
> there are competing usability concerns
This is very true, especially since the author uses red and green for ok/cancel buttons. A colorblind colleague of mine actually likes the current trend of grey-ifying stuff because there is an increased difference in luma, not only in chroma, between elements.
I disagree. The great thing about the OK and Cancel buttons were not that they were a good description for what you were doing, but that everyone understood what was going to happen. It is that consistency that has been lost. Trying to get terminology to be more accurate is a laudable goal, but what really kills me about modern UI design is how every single app or web page feels like they need to roll their own.
I disagree here. OK/Cancel only make in the context of the text in the dialog, and are only clear if there are clear negative and positive actions. Even when there are clear positives and negatives, it's almost always better to just label the OK button with the actual action. Save, Revert, Close, Send, etc., are always better than OK.
The "ok" button can be labelled "save" if that makes sense. I don't think that takes anything away from the article's point.
"Just get another theme" is not a solution. The point is that most themes are this way, whether default themes or others. Most apps also don't have theming options, other than light/dark. Or do you mean that end users should make their own theme?
> low-effort article that completely fails to understand
Except when they are not. Consistency is not a virtue anymore.
This was a long time ago. Today it is either dark or light.
I disagree with this part of the article, though:
> We need to bring back the Ok and Cancel buttons.
Historically, OK and Cancel was mainly a Windows UI custom, and the problem with them is that they often leave a lot of room for ambiguity. I see some variation of this at least once a week, you tell me what happens here, I'll wait:
> Are you sure you want to cancel the upgrade? This may result in an unbootable system. > (Cancel) (OK)
There are multiple other problems with OK/Cancel which I don't have the energy to get into, but the highlights are:
1. Who decided that OK/Cancel made better answers to boolean questions than simply Yes/No?
2. Buttons like this should _always_ be verbs for very short phrases that describe what you are doing when you click on the button. That way, the user is much more sure of what they are doing, and the programmer does not have to write (as) complicated questions. This has been a standard UX concept for decades that is still frequently ignored.
3. I have seen multiple websites/apps where OK/Cancel buttons are swapped arbitrarily. Sometimes OK is on the left, sometimes OK is on the right. This how programmers can gaslight their users.
No one did. It's programmers choosing the wrong MessageBox options, and other programmers following bad examples.
Plenty are doing it right (even though I can't name them right now)
Low-contrast colors EVERYWHERE also angers me. Low contrast is great for being easy on the eyes, but certain interactive elements need contrast to indicate their function. My best example is that Linux desktop themes across the entire DE space focus on low contrast at the expense of almost everything else, and it's hard to figure out stuff as simple as which window is on top and active, or which elements in a window are clickable.
It’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? Every mouse now has a scroll wheel (or corresponding mechanism) and on touch displays, scrolling needs no scrollbar either.
Of course, it’s still terrible to remove the only indication that a box has more information available that can fit, and is therefore scrollable. Not to mention the useful property of seeing both your current approximate position and the total size at a glance.
even on touch screens -- depending on the UI -- if the entire display area is "hot" the scrollbars might be the only way to pan around without editing / triggering other actions
Hold down shift to scroll horizontally.
scroll bars indicate visually how big the scroll area is and where you are ... and let you directly click or drag you position. there was a lot of useful functionality available at a single mouse click that has been sacrificed in pursuit of visual prettiness / minimalism.
The god damn scroll wheel does not work in half of the cases in Windows. When you have work to do is very annoying.
But somehow the idea of modeless UI spread into all parts of UIs, including settings dialogs, where it sometimes doesn't feel appropriate at all. Why did that happen? Why is there no consistent pattern anymore for discarding unwanted changes in a dialog?
I think there was a time when dialogs had all three: Apply, Ok, Cancel. I formed the habit of clicking Apply and then Ok back then.
Either way, I think Ok went away when smartphones were introduced, because they traded checkboxes with those horizontal slider buttons. Then someone had the idea what works on a smartphone should work everywhere and now we have that everywhere.
If the Apply button was necessary because you could not easily get back to the dialog, then it was a problem with the interface before the dialog opened. That is, it should be easy to open dialogs, close them, and open them again.
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/hig/2002-January/msg00079.ht...
I also suspect that universities are still mostly teaching design as if it is something printed in a magazine and not rendered in a browser
Designers I have worked with have shown a lack of understanding of the basic HTML input components, failing to understand what the difference is between a radio button and a checkbox for instance.
But there's a lot more than that. They build designs without considering scrollbars, or without considering paginating large datasets. They don't plan for asynchronous operations that may not return immediately. Yes these are more technical concerns but they do impact the design! Designers should be asking questions about how long an operation they are building mockups for might take and planning accordingly
But it's even worse than that. They want everything to neatly fit on a single screen, but they don't really understand display sizes and aspect ratios. This means they don't build (or really understand) responsive layouts. Very common to hear "this spacing looks off on my screen", as if it were designed for a consistent page size (print media)
I don't know. Maybe I've just had pretty bad luck with designers. I'll admit most of the ones I've had trouble with are fairly fresh out of university, so it could just be a lack of real world experience. But some of the stuff just really gives me the impression they weren't taught to design for web or digital displays at all
Yeah, use of the term "UX" has been a red flag for me for a long time now.
Honestly, I wouldn’t start with “which tab is active”, I’d start with “wait, those are tabs?”
It's a very old problem that goes back more decades than are accounted for here. To their credit, at least when the joint venture between IBM and Microsoft happened around OS/2, CUA still set a broad standard that was widely met and meant that many of these problems were rare, or at least the keyboard was guaranteed to work consistently. Apple does not deserve the free pass it gets here.
Why? Because design choices are not governed by designers. Rather, they are governed by cost and time-to-market, much like car interiors, and chosen from a shared parts bin.
Depending on the ISV this means that the GUI or widget toolkit may be Microsoft.net, Java, Qt, or 30 years of other toolkits recombined poorly ad nauseam.
Frequently, this means the evil of two lessers since there are no clear winners. Users will continue to suffer as a result.
I try to solve this with Sway on Linux, but the further into left field I go, the screaming just gets louder, not quieter.
--
Make this your default browser?
- Yes!!!
- No I am a masochist. Nag me every time I use this browser.
--
WE RESPECT YOUR PRIVACY AND CHOICE. <fine print> Turn on Alerts and Notifications and full permissions to scrape your contacts and data collection and personalization and Email spam and enable trial of AutoAIMagic(TM)?
- <default> Yes I agree I want to use this software. (or other irrelevant text that is worded like you are routinely agreeing to use the software as per terms)
- <hidden> Remind me (or secretly turn these on at next update anyway)
Wish the post provided more screenshots to name and shame.