Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: A Point of Contention - Modern User Interfaces
Reader Artem Tashkinov writes: Here are the staples of the modern user interface (in varying degree apply to modern web/and most operating systems such as Windows 10, iOS and even Android):
- Too much white space, huge margins, too little information
- Text is indistinguishable from controls
- Text in full-CAPS
- Certain controls cannot be easily understood (like on/off states for check boxes or elements like tabs)
- Everything presented in shades of gray or using a severely and artificially limited palette
- Often awful fonts suitable only for HiDPI devices (Windows 10 modern apps are a prime example)
- Cannot be controlled by keyboard
- Very little customizability if any
How would Slashdotters explain the proliferation and existance of such unusable user interfaces and design choices? And also, do you agree?
How would Slashdotters explain the proliferation and existance of such unusable user interfaces and design choices?
Phones and tablets.
On web pages, at least, the excessive white space is an obnoxious side-effect of current "responsive design" practices.
#DeleteChrome
Fashion over function.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
One of my biggest beefs is with those apps whose windows can't be resized, and you're forced to scroll all over the place -horizontally as well as vertically- in a window barely the size of a post-it note.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Font sizes are at least 50% bigger than they should be.
I agree, I cannot stand this push to flat GUIs. Give me a button that looks like a button, that way I know I can push it.
heh, captch: condemns
New generations always rebel against the ways of the previous generation. It's human nature.
During the Renaissance we had visually brilliant works of art created. Later generations shunned this and decided that a canvas painted a solid color had just as much merit. Which is "right"? Neither. They just are.
And so it goes for UI design. From my perspective, we had a very consistent standard for UIs for a good 20 or so years. This was in part driven by technological limitations, but it worked well. The barriers are gone now, anything can be done. Therefore anything will be done. I've actually worked with people who are "UX Specialists" and completely disagreed with what they thought was intuitive. I also regularly have to look up how to do things on modern gadgets because they don't include manuals anymore and they most certainly are NOT intuitive. To me. I'm probably just old. And so is the submitter. :-)
Very much so. You see advocates of the new, ugly paradigm disparaging older interfaces as not being "modern."
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
I'd extrapolate this to modern software in general. It seems acceptable now to leave things broken, unsupported and undocumented so that six months after purchase or download things no longer work and can't be fixed. I appreciate things become more complex over time but the number of boneheaded things I see on a day-to-day basis is extraordinary.
Oh. And get off my lawn...
I had a dream, bright and carefree, but now there's doubt and gravity
My manager never alots enough time to make one smaller!
"Knowing everything doesn't help..."
I fear that many of the issues listed in TFS are the result of decisions made when the OS UI conventions are defined. Then, apps follow these conventions without regard to what what it means for their product.
That is not to say that the original conventions are always bad, they were designed for a certain feature set to provide for defined functionality - the problem comes when they are applied, without thought in third party applications. The decision to follow the OS conventions are either made by executives who feel the application needs to be a "seamless" part of the system (and Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. spent millions on the UI conventions so let's just copy their work) or by designers that don't know any better or are just trying to get their product out quickly.
I have never seen a great set of tests for UI developers to self-evaluate the end product. We've all been there when after working with a product for a while, everything you've done seems to make sense and you develop mental shortcuts that allow you to fly through the UI.
The only real solution is, as part of the development process, set aside time for third party user testing with feedback sessions. I've been through a number of them, they're humbling, surprising and educating - then there's the fun part where you need to take the results and tell your boss(es) that they're wrong.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
it's designers that need work and want to stand out and differ from others, and doing a right user interface is something that has been done before and would not stand out. To me, most modern UI's are really bad, and I'm one that want a lot of information in one view, not having to go through hundreds of pages because the designers thought it was cool having 3 lines on one screen instead of 30 or 60..
At least there's some attempt to combat this. For example, if you screenshot something and paste it into LibreOffice, the image is autosized from margin-to-margin. For bonus points, if it's in "web view", the autosizing is to window width.
Of course, this is a slightly old version of Libre Office, and I'm having trouble updating it on that computer. Then again, I should update that computer entirely, it's a several years old.
But still, it's universal. Being more modern won't fix that, even if the modern paradigm is to have whitespace to make touch screens more usable.
That's more of a UI bug.
Too true. Especially when viewing some apps, such as those that show reddit comments.
Seen this quite common. Especially ones which toggle between Red and Green. Fun for those who are red-green colourblind.
I recall DOS being like that... 16 font colors, 8 background colors for the font and option to blink well before the HTML tag.
Out of the list, I think that's the only one that a problem specifically with modern user interfaces.
Especially when manufacturers dump their old low-resolution systems.
and the ones that do require memorizing various hotkeys that really shouldn't be necessary.
Really love to disable that backspace hotkey in Firefox (cause it conflicts with backspacing over content in a web form), cause that browser is taking its sweet time.
Still, there's plenty of UIs that aren't customizable. Only the major applications had the effort invested to make themselves customizable, and even then, there's still static patterns that can't really be customized.
On iOS, Slashdot doesn't let me resize /. to a comfortable size. They made a decision that actually being able to read the ant-sized writing was less important than having rabid control of the layout.
As the user base ages (We're not all in our teens and 20s any more, and I suspect the majority of /.ers are in our 40s) being able to resize the font matters.
Its arrogant designers who think they know better than the generation before, want to be seen to be different and "edgy" and "new" and so chuck out all the lessons learned and fuck things up royally. So we end up with an OS in 2017 that looks more primitive than Win3.0.
Part of the huge white-space and big button modern trend comes from the advent of touch screens. Remember Windows 8 and how it practically forced users into touch with gestures and "charm zones"?
I appreciate some of these new features. For example, in Siebel's database Open UI, buttons and selection targets are now easier to hit. The downside is less information in the same screen space. (Also, the new interface does not require IE and ActiveX, a positive but not related to the UI's functionality).
I suspect that the concept that touch would completely replace dedicated controls went a little far. Honda's bringing back the volume knob. I expect some of these design elements to be, ahem, "dialed back" as time passes.
What are the consequences for designing an unusable, obtuse user interface? What are the consequences to the user who cannot use such an interface? Are there any "web 2.0" or phone interfaces that are used for real, consequential work?
If a San Francisco SJW cannot post a self-indulgent, anti-Trump screed on Tumblr 2.0 is the world really any worse off?
UI ergonomics is not easy, and rather than learning it, people copy. Modern UIs are as intelligible as a message that's gone through Chinese whispers.
Hate:
White text on a bight yellow background, on Galaxy Note 3 Android.
Where the fuck have the icons gone? Windows.
Why can't I cut an paste information from your dialog.
Why are things still not resolution independent. Adobe, and most music production applications.
Don't think you need files and folders? Think again, and the includes you Firefox mobile bookmarks.
The creator of "material design" need to be shot. There's a difference between not being limited by the physical world, and needlessly disconnect us from what we have already learned.
In the battle between KDE, Gnome, and Unity, Cinnamon won.
Love:
Rounded corners rule!
Shadows show us what's on top!
Maxims:
Just because Apple did it, doesn't make it right. Remember, they had a bad year last year.
People need to work, more than you need to masturbate over your own art work.
Most serious file management takes place in two windows.
Clean means that you are too lazy to update the functionality in your program, so you are leaving useful stuff off.
Those who think that the command line and a GUI cannot coexist have never seen a 3D CAD or design program.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
You're right about people's motor and vision skills are not what they used to be, but I find that primarily to be because it's not the same people.
Things have been dumbed down for about a decade now, and young users expect things to be simplified, not having experience with anything else.
40-70 year olds have computer experience, and handle cascading menus, middle mouse buttons and overlapping windows just fine - it's the young generation that requires a single application on the screen with simplified controls. And not too many words they have to read.
tl;dr: It's dumbing down for a dumber generation.
Text with such low contrast that it is unreadable in all but the best of lighting conditions
The problem is that there's a glut of "UX" designers convinced that if someone else has successful, and you copy the superficial hallmarks of their design, you'll be successful too. Take Facebook's "infinitely scrolling" page design for example - suddenly you have every damn app and website using an infinitely scrolling layout, even things like weather apps where the information is finite and is best presented using another paradigm such as tabs. Combine this with the prevailing attitude that if less is more, then even less must be even more, and you get the current mess we're in now.
This is not only the case with the current "flat" design epidemic ("Apple went flat and look at how successful they are! If we go flat we'll look modern and we'll be successful too!") but in many other elements that have been taken to an extreme at the cost of usability and accessibility:
- The use of razor thin fonts
- White text on monochrome, pastel backgrounds
- The loss of critical UI elements like scroll bars and button outlines, because apparently they just clutter things up
- The use of "hamburger" mystery meat menus
- Loss of status bars (which attempted to at least give some idea of percentage completion of a task) in favor of things like dots that twirl, spin, and dance in circles
... and every idiot in the world thinks he's an artist.
People associate lots of white space with "modern" and "clean", but in fact the key is to use white space intelligently to help guide the user's attention. The question isn't whether you have a lot or a little, the question is how much mental work does it take for a user to accomplish his task?
It's easy to ape interfaces that work well, but that's cargo-cult design. Design should be as much evidence-driven as it is fashion-driven. First (design) principles are only a starting point.
Recently I was using a smart TV app and when the content I requested took too long to buffer I decided to quit the app. I was presented with a dialog warning me that I was leaving the app, and asking me whether I wanted to "cancel" or "continue". This gave me a moment's pause, because I didn't want to "continue" waiting for the content to load. However as a developer myself I understood the programmer's mindset: "cancel" and "continue" referred to the event the dialog was responding to: a request to exit the app.
This division of responsibilities is backwards: the user shouldn't have to get into the mind of the designer, the designer needs to get into the mind of the user. And that's hard. UI guidelines help, but there's no substitute for watching actual users struggle with your design. Any time you find something that makes them pause, even for a moment, you should file that bump down. That'd catch problems like confusion between text and controls, or inscrutable state widgets.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If you notice throughout software history, developers have *always* copied each others styles, in ways no different than a fashionista would. In the 90s it was pseudo-3d buttons because people wanted buttons that looked like buttons. (Personally, I *still* do.) When the WWW got popular, people started making *everything* to look like hyperlinks. Thank god that didn't last long.
But now... I just don't even know what to say. Style has completely overrode any semblance of usability. Google started the 3 parallels bars=menu thing, and now everyone is doing it. 2D flat everything is now all the rage wherever you look, and people think they're being cool if they use obscure icons for things that may or may not have a passing resemblance to the function they're trying to perform. Intuitively has basically been thrown out the window.
Case in point: Whoever came up with the UI for snapshot should be tarred, feathered, shot, multiple times. While I eventually figured out how to use it, it took *effort* to figure it out because it made about as much sense as Trump walking into a soup kitchen.
I can only hope that sanity will return soon.
But like customizing the colors and fonts, there are featres I want on my small devices as well.
Developers traditionally make efficient, functional, ugly interfaces. They did this by using standardized UI controls. They were largely constrained. Today, without those constraints, those same developers make inefficient, semi-functional, pretty interfaces. And with the focus on form over function, they are pushed in this direction by management. (Thanks Apple, for telling me that I want to get rid of all the jacks in my laptop so that it can be be 0.00001 inches thinner.)
A good UX person -- not the kind of BS "UX" that I see lambasted here -- but a real one -- can improve the look and feel of an application, optimize the workflow, and make it pretty too. I work with a UX engineer who uses statistics on the average hand size of our target demographic, and can quote the average size and resolution of the displays they are using. On touch-screen apps, our UX team optimizes for right handedness, and organized the screen so your hand doesn't cover the things you are looking at and so you make minimal movements. A few years ago we even created a mock-up, and had actual users go through a workflow and timed them, counted number of clicks, etc. This is good UX. It's human factors engineering + graphic design.
A sad anecdote: A few years ago I had the pain of designing a UI with a bunch of managers. It was a screen to add/edit/delete users who had access to an account. I drew-up a typical text box with a list, and then an add/edit/delete button at the bottom. You could fit 50 users on a typical screen, quite readably. They HATED it. Their design fit about 10 users on the screen. Big margins all around. Each row had a separate add, edit, and delete button, a large single-color icon of a person. All the icons were the same, so they communicated nothing. The text was so large that long names needed an ellipsis to fit. The add/edit/delete buttons were tiny icons without text. It was pretty, wasteful, and slow. They loved it.
On another project, which was an industrial machine, they wanted icon buttons. Their previous version used 16-color EGA graphics so it needed an update. So I used actual 3D renderings of the parts as icons. Initially everyone loved it because it was clear what the icons did. 3 years later, it laughed-at because it is too "realistic." So on the next project they replaced the realistic icons with single-color conceptual representational icons. Unless you were on the project, you had no idea what the icon meant. The customers came-up with names for the icons: the "one-eyed cat" let you search. The "disney castle" was to load a tray into the device. The "laser broom" was the barcode scanner. This interface is loved by development because it is so pretty, and is the new standard moving forward. The customers (and training department) complain that unless someone uses the device regularly, they forget if they should start the workflow by clicking the "one-eyed cat" or the "laser broom."
At with the next project, they are using text under the icons again, so users know what they are.
"Get Off My Lawn".
Also known as "You are not a representative sample of the larger population", or the "Personal Incredulity" logical fallacy.
This signature can save you $400 on your car insurance!
See one of my posts above about moron graphic artists in the late 1980s. It was true then. It is true now.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
To eventually be added to the heap with:
- Flash intros
- Putting "e" on the front of every word (eService, eGovernment, ePay)
- Blinking text
- QR Codes
- Hit Counters
- Frames
- Dancing Jesus
And followed later by:
- Share buttons to social media sites
- Large photo homepages with no text / lots of scrolling
- Hamburger menus
But only if you make sure to change it up and punch them in the groin later.
Caveat: I am not a designer, but I do program some programming for various Apps/Websites as a side job(but focus on more behind the scenes stuff in my day job).
I do not understand all the design decisions, especially the proliferation of interfaces with generic icons that could be mistook for Ikea instructions. It is frustrating when you run into an icon that could be interpreted as "light phone on fire" or "turbo mode" but you really don't know for sure which it is. Do you try it???
That being said, if I create an app or website that has nice instructions on it, the end user's first impression is to hate it. They say it does not look modern enough. However, it is intuitive to use and they can figure it out quickly. On the other hand, if I create an Apple/Material design type app, customers love it and accept it immediately. Of course, the UI is impossible for their customers, but hey, at least the company that requested the app likes it.
I think a lot of this stems from the Instagram/Pinterest world we live in. Everyone wants to be blown away by the beauty of the app when they casually glance at it. Of course, that beauty greatly limits the possibilities to make an app intuitive and easy to use.
As a developer, I find that I try to balance these things. But as someone who generally likes to get paid for my work, I will often say screw it, and give the "artsy focused" people what they want because they are the ones that sign the checks. The quicker I make them happy, the sooner I can get paid and move on to the next gig.
Some of this is web design (I use the word "design" very loosely) and some is application design:
o the "designer" mindset has gifted us with extreme low contrast backdrops and fonts - STOP THAT
o bloody pop-up/over dialogs that were not asked for are constantly used - THIS IS HOW TO MAKE ME GO AWAY
o menus drop without being requested because mouse went over them - WAIT FOR A BLOODY CLICK!
o Videos autoplay just because I've arrived, or because the mouse pointer went over them. Ever think *I* might want to control what damned noise comes out of my computer, or what data I want to stream on my phone? You should. Because while I'm desperately trying to figure out how to shut up / stop your video abortion, I am hating on you and everything you represent, and vowing to NEVER come back to your site, which I promptly implement via my hosts file because you SUCK.
o Do NOT change the web or application UI: NEVER make a modal UI. Present a consistent interface that can be learned and incorporated into muscle memory. Enable/disable elements as appropriate. IOW, if a document isn't NEW or Loaded, Save should be disabled - not GONE. This is so everything in the interface remains where it was. We want to work, not read your damn interface over and over and over and over just to see where we're at.
o Make ALL keyboard commands configurable. In some apps, some of the things I do most often have no shortcuts and no way to add one. How annoying. How stupid.
I swear, there are days when I'd like to hunt down these so-called "designers" and yell at them until my voice gave out.
All of the above is effete nonsense that designers engage in an attempt (which is actually abject failure) to justify their title; stop all that, and just do it right. Don't even try to be "fancy" unless you're writing a game.
Also, if you say "UX", I just want you to know you've made me work to suppress an urge to slap your face. Hard.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
You're right about people's motor and vision skills are not what they used to be, but I find that primarily to be because it's not the same people. Things have been dumbed down for about a decade now, and young users expect things to be simplified, not having experience with anything else.
40-70 year olds have computer experience, and handle cascading menus, middle mouse buttons and overlapping windows just fine - it's the young generation that requires a single application on the screen with simplified controls. And not too many words they have to read.
tl;dr: It's dumbing down for a dumber generation.
I never thought of this before, but now I will have a hard time not thinking of it! That was damned insightful!
There is no reason that the user can't be offered a large quantity of differences in the shell. It is basically just a theme. Forcing a new UI on billions (literally!) of users is insane.
When the bring out a new model of car they don't mess with the pedals and steering wheel because that would be stupid. About as stupid as changing an ingrained UI just to make it "NEW!!!" Almost as bad as the use of the "white it out and spread it out" interface in Windows is that so many websites are now "updating" their look to this new user vicious standard so they can be "NEW" too.
If I could run XFCE on MacOS...shiiiiiiiiit.....No one that actually uses their computer for more than just gaming likes the new GUI's. It's all simplified garbage for touch screen lovers. I thought touch screen would be helpful, but who actually uses it? Tablets aren't even powerful enough to run modern desktop apps and those that appear so only work because of cloud computing. They say open source, but unless you plan on running your own servers, kinda pointless and very controlling/limiting. That's how Google and Micro$oft gets ya. Qt is slow as hell compared to GTK and the only reason Qt seems to be better is because the almighty Ubuntu decided to stop using Xorg and hasn't been maintained as well as Mir and Wayland because of such a zeitgeist. I got a laptop from 2008 running a distro I made that mostly uses GTK with new software and it is freakin fast. Of course, Susestudio decided to let the 32-bit build servers rot. So, things are just going to get more CPU/GPU/RAM demanding while dinky Windows laptops stay at 1.3Gz and no RAM at all.
However, we moved to the 16:9 format for most monitors which adds horizontal space, often at the expense of vertical space which is utterly useless for most things beyond watching movies filmed in a 16:9 format.
Then split it down the middle to get two 8:9 ratio windows. Each 960x1080 half has more vertical space than the old 1280x1024 monitors it replaced.
Studies that were done over 100 years ago found that the best line-length for human reading was around 4 inches at most. The extra width that modern screens provide don't give much benefit
The real problem is the "all maximized all the time" window management policy of smartphone-derived tablet operating systems, which didn't allow splitting the screen that way until very recently.
From the CEO's mind to your screen:
Oooh! Look! Shiny!
Microsoft's philosophy, since the introduction of The Ribbon, seems to be: "Well, we don't have any real features to add to our product, and we're sure not gonna waste time fixing bugs, so let's totally change the UI (no, sorry, no option to keep using the old one) and bump the version number!"
Apple is the worst at this, where they have policy documents that force app creators to behave the wrong way
FTFY.
"Hey, let's make them put the app configuration deep in the device preferences instead of in the app" ...morons.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
They're painful, and I hate them.
For me, the #1 modern UI sin, which wasn't included in the list here -- Non-discoverable interfaces. Interfaces based on some "gesture" which is never explained, and for which one cannot find an explanation (unless you already know the gesture to get there, if it exists). Pinch-zoom, hover in a magic corner, drag from edge, press screen for short vs. long time, invisible menu bars, etc., etc. In the 1984-2010 era I could follow the words in the menus and discover new features in any piece of software (and so could anyone, assuming they weren't illiterate). The last few years have brought my first experiences with software that I just couldn't begin to figure out how to do anything with.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
In terms of websites the culprit is mobile first responsive design. The interfaces are designed to work well on phones and tablets and to be good enough for desktop machines. So they are designed first to work well with fat fingers and good enough for keyboards.
Forgot one more: "Responsive UIs" which are usually anything but. Seriously, if you're going to make major changes to page layout and/or content based on the size of my screen or browser window, at least have the decency to give me the option to override it when needed.
I normally run two browser windows side by side in portrait mode. Unfortunately, many web sites now days see an 800 pixel wide window, automatically assume I'm on a phone, and promptly reformat the page, hiding navigation in hamburger menus and shading content behind headings that only expand one at a time. Useless!
Just to jump on the grumpy old man, It's new and therefore bad, bandwagon, but the latest incarnation of the wireshark UI... hipstery bullshit...
As a heavy linux user, I will chop between two UI's, for the desktop where there is more space I use ratpoison, it allows for fast switching between programs and can shift the desktop around accurately and consistently. For the systems with smaller displays that I have around netbook size I use evilwm.
Both are fast and easy to control. They're both very stable and do not take long to learn. Both give back nearly 100% of the screen real estate and have next to no clutter.
Why UNIX?
I was initially annoyed by the Material Design specification that button text should be in all caps, and I wish that they'd explain their rationales more thoroughly. However, after a bit, here's what I think is going on:
We all know about the tendency for users to click buttons blindly; browser security warnings were notorious for a decade. All-caps text is known to be more difficult to read, and I suspect that having buttons as all-caps (in combination with strong advice to make them action descriptions rather than "OK" and "Cancel") is intended to slow users down just a tad so that they have a moment to think about the action. Once the UI is learned, it's irrelevant, and any slowdown doesn't apply.
Requiring a user to input unnecessary and unrelated data in order for the user to access their primary intent. A perfect example is the way Uber requires a rating from a previous ride before requesting an additional ride, without an obvious (or any) method to bypass. Nothing pisses me off more than in an RF challenged environment, all necessary telemetry is obtained and exchanged, the application/server requires the user to rate the previous ride. Whereas I don't have a problem with providing ratings, and agree they can improve services, holding me hostage before accepting a ride request creates a bad user experience, over and over again. Fix it Uber, provide a bypass and if necessary pop-over a nag for unrated rides.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Also, for a couple of years ago, websites were desktop-oriented, making browsing on mobile devices hard if not impossible, which now have turned 180 degrees; "Modern" websites are mobile-optimized, but more or less idiotically designed for desktop use.
A, well.
I guess the pendulum will swing back to a reasonable "good enough" middle-state within a year or two or so ...
A couple of observations from the perspective of high-mileage eyeballs:
While the idea of using the same toolkit for phone and desktop UI development is good for efficiency, trying to unify the interfaces is spectacularly misguided. I use an enormous main monitor and often another on the side, specifically so it can show a lot of info at once doing mechanical and electrical CAD and software development. The idea of having to mouse around over a huge area trying to make utility details appear just wastes my time. At this moment I am about one more annoyance away from returning to X+command line and abandoning my long wait for a Linux desktop I could recommend to friends and family.
Second point: whoever started the "design language" idea of light-fog text on a white background really needs to be identified and punished. At least let me blanket-forbid all applications from overriding my color settings.
Bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated.
The white space I see on my web pages comes as a result of my AdBlocker at work. Gives my eyes a rest.
Love it!
tl;dr: It's dumbing down for a dumber generation.
...or "It was hard to write, it should be hard to use."
Have a little grace. I use dozens of programs and web sites every day. Very few of them are so important to me that I'm willing to invest a lot of time learning the site or program's quirks and tools. When designing a GUI, I have to assume my users also have lots of things to do and little time to do them. We really try to focus on understanding what you're likely to be trying to do and making sure that works easily and fast.
My biggest beef is with mobile apps and web forms that do not have a confirmation step. It can be very hard to hit the right spot to toggle the right key on a touch screen, and yet many touch screen forms have the "send" button in the middle of other keys (say, next the the "delete" key). Press the wrong spot on the screen, and, poof, everything goes off, regardless of whether it was what you wanted.
Just because it's old doesn't mean it's bad.
Just because it's new doesn't mean it's better.
I often click on a background window to bring it to the front. Windows sends that click to the window and if there is a control there, it will active. It isn't that hard to have Windows not pass the click to the window and just send a bring to top message, but no, they won't do it.
https://support.google.com/ads...
"Starting April 21, 2015, Google Search will be expanding its use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal."
So if your site doesn't have HUGE buttons/links, tons of whitespace around elements so a finger doesn't hit two controls at the same time, and small bite sized paragraphs that fit on a phone screen, you get deranked compared to sites that do.
Have a little grace. I use dozens of programs and web sites every day. Very few of them are so important to me that I'm willing to invest a lot of time learning the site or program's quirks and tools.
The solution isn't to make the interfaces simpler, but to standardize them. Make them compatible in function to what users are familiar with.
Interfaces have existed for long enough that time has proven what's effective and what's being used. Presumptions that you know better than the UI designers of yore vetted by time and choices will likely lead to dead ends like Gnome 3.
Don't put the steering wheel under the seat and replace the gas pedal with auto-acceleration even if it's more aesthetically pleasing.
My biggest complaint is the constant attempt to "abstract" simple concepts such as directories. For example "My Libraries" abstracted over top the easy to comprehend directory file system is an abomination. Ask the average user how to go to a directory hanging off the user directory (c:/user/$user) and they don't know how. You click on "my documents" but there is no clear way to go up one level of hierarchy or even understand where "My Libraries" really resides. Of course this was even worse in the "my documents and settings" days. People readily understand a hierarchical directory and file system. Why do they attempt to further abstract directories and files is beyond me. This is why Gates could not find the "downloads" directory in the anti-trust trial - where the hell is it? Even he didn't know! Gnome3 makes the same mistake IMHO.
I was with you until the very last point. Lack of customizability is a good thing. It creates standardisation. It means when people pick up a device of same or similar model to their own they know how to use it without any guess work. It makes support and training easier, though admittedly at the expense of finely tuned specific tasks.
Text in full-CAPS
Which should have been either: "Text in FULL-CAPS" or "TEXT IN FILL-CAPS" - just sayin'.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
"Mobile first" is partly to blame, but lazy/cheap teams are more so.
Take a look at what's popular in trendy web app design today: flat everything, big rectangular colour blocks, lines and rounded corners, text. Look at the boxy, side-by-side layouts, almost invariably collapsing into increasingly linear formats for narrower screens until it's just a single column.
Now look at what you can do easily and portably with CSS. In particular, look at what you can achieve by just slapping Bootstrap or the like on your site, without spending much time or money considering the design and layout, and certainly without hiring any sort of designer or, $DEITY forbid, a digital artist to create custom graphics that fit the style of your product/service and build any sort of distinctive branding.
There was, at the time, some justification for this in that downloading lots of large images on the mobile networks of a few years ago really could significantly slow down loading a page, with resulting poor user experience and app/site performance. But for most of us, our target markets are on faster networks today, and CDNs are much more developed now as well. And certainly you don't get any allowance for this if your site includes megabytes of JS frameworks, ad content, or auto-playing hero video.
Likewise, there is some justification for minimal UI chrome on small screen devices where every pixel is precious, but you don't get any allowance for this if you replace a simple hairline with half an inch of whitespace because your visual style is so generic and unguided that the user can't actually tell how the UI works otherwise.
Frankly, Microsoft, Google and Apple are amateurs when it comes to nerfing design by being flat and bland. Web developers have been moving in this direction for at least as long as smartphones and tablets have been around, and people with actual UI design skills have been criticising them and pointing out the obvious and horrible usability flaws for just as long.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
menus drop without being requested because mouse went over them - WAIT FOR A BLOODY CLICK!
This is because CSS supported :hover before it supported the sibling-of-labeled-checkbox hack as a means to make the menu behavior work even with script turned off.
The automobile has gone through quite a few control redesigns which are continuing. If you jumped into a Model T (maybe only early ones), you'd find it hard to figure out. Besides the controls that have been automated away, choke and ignition advance, the parking brake was operated by your left hand, along with ignition advance, throttle by right hand and gears by the pedals along with the brake being the right pedal.
The steering wheel started out as a tiller and as late as 1899 was introduced in America as a wheel. Since various controls have migrated to the wheel or right beside. The turn signal operated by your left hand, which has acquired more and more functionality such as operating the lights, wipers, high beam. On the right, there was the gear shifter for quite a while before mostly migrating to the floor. And all the various controls that can be found on a modern steering wheel. Even my old truck has the cruise control buttons on the wheel. The shifter pattern has also changed at times. Had an early 5 speed where reverse was where 1st usually is.
Speaking of my 25 year old truck, while most of the pedals are standard, on the left there's the parking brake release and the hi-lo headlight dimmer button on the floor. Turn signal only operates the turn signals with a knob on the dash that you pull to turn on the lights and turn to dim the dash lights and turn on the interior light. The wiper switch is besides it, turn one way for normal wiper operation, further for high speed, turn the other way for intermittent operation, push for squirting cleaner (still have to turn the wipers on manually).
Another set of controls that seemed somewhat standardized for a long time and now are in flux are the climate controls and radio/sound system where automakers keep screwing around with stupid touch controls. Stupid due to breaking the paradigm that the driver should be able to operate everything by feel while watching the road.
It took close to 50 years to standardize just the pedals on the car UI, while the modern computer UI is at the most 30 yrs old. Hopefully in another 100 yrs, things will have mostly settled down, but as the automobile has shown, new tech such as touch screens, still puts basic interface into flux, often with stupid design decisions such as trading easy to feel buttons for hard to use, changeable, touch screen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The 1%, who control the budgets of corporations, have no interest in spending enough money to attract customers, no matter what their individual GUI/platform is. They firmly believe that "OSFA" (One Size Fits All). Yea, I'm looking at YOU, Wells Fargo. A GUI that is equally unsuited for all platforms.
Corporations are focused on THEIR margins. Most fail to answer one question correctly: "What is the first thing you must have to be a successful company?" They'll answer "Money" (or "Capital"), "Product" or "Service," or "cheap employees," etc. There is but one answer that is correct: CUSTOMERS. If you have no customers, everything else is irrelevant. But, if you're just an investor, you have no interest in customers, you have only your own wealth as the focal point of your interests. And, investors insist on larger dividends (or rises in stock value), which motivates corporations to cheapen everything, including "customer service" (now an oxymoron).
And there is the driver for unusable UIs: Focus on lowering expenses in IT development, without paying attention to what attracts more customers, but might cost more. So long as customers are an afterthought, the same UI mistakes will keep being made.
I'd add the recent Firefox location (url) bar (I refuse to use the term "Awesome Bar", 'cause it's not awesome) drop-down is a huge waste of space. It seems that the Old Bar extension has stopped working with FF 51 and Classic Theme Restorer only allows some customization of the urlbar -- grrr.... -- but the "new" bar is slower and has way too much unnecessary text on it than the older bar. Sure, the newer one probably looks/works netter on a phone and table with your finger, and I'll adapt on the desktop, but it still annoys the crap out of me to see the drop-down slog its way down 1/3 to 1/2 of the window.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'd go to a UI designer.
Hand him the software.
Say "Right, what do YOU think the UI should look like that would follow all your rules?"
And then implement the program exactly as specified.
Then watch it crash and burn under the first rounds of user tests as "impenetrable", "unintuitive", etc.
Honestly, UI designers designed Windows 10 and MacOS. I couldn't fathom a more hideous and confusing set of UI notions if I tried.
But some guy who just wanted a simple menu brought the start menu back with Classic Shell back and made it work. Ever seen Windows 3.1's desktop? The icons were pretty obvious, the screen layout was used, and it wasn't pretending to be anything other than "a program on your computer with an empty screen behind it" rather than a fixed, unchangeable, ever-present interface paradigm that you can't escape.
Don't even get me started on interfaces like the iPad which has a setup routine that I've seen baffle hundreds of people. Swipe to select a date on fake rotatey widget that's not obvious that's what it even is. And then a series of next, ok, yes and no answers required where EVERY ONE is in a different place on the screen, and where there are double- and triple-negatives trying to fool you into signing up with Apple services which you could do at any point later.
And let's not even mention the shit-heap that is a modern browser. Or keyboard navigation (that's gone the way of the dodo). Or actually working out what the fuck some icons are actually supposed to represent.
And that's before you get to swipe, drag, "bonk" (when you hit a window against the side of the screen), etc. gestures.
How wonderful, I'm not alone in despising these modern interfaces targeted towards tiny, touch screens, with an aim to suck a user into staring at a screen all day with eternal sliding, etc. Amazing how the site, "Web Pages That Suck" is still relevant, with things like mystery meat navigation, contrast, figuring out the site in less than 4 seconds. Apparently it got so bad he had to take a break, but the author is now back. I would like to see his site as required reading for the graphic designers pushing this stuff out.
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.co...
"You'll get my clunky desktop interface when you pry it out of my cold, dead, hands."
I used to be an adult but then I grew up.
Anyone remember /. beta. This list just about mirrors the ./ user complaints about beta - just ask the beta designer what they were thinking.
Our screens are way bigger than they were back in the old days, so we have plenty of room for things like menus and toolbars. Yet the trend in modern UI design is to make things magical and non-discoverable.
Just yesterday I helped my father with a problem: the menus and toolbar from Thunderbird were gone. I was on the phone with him for a while. The task was to find the one magic part of the Thunderbird window where he could right-click and find the context menu with the checkboxes for hiding/displaying the main menu and toolbar. Thank goodness I have him running MATE so every window has a title bar... "find the blue bar at the top that says 'Inbox - Mozilla Thunderbird' Now right-click in the dark grey area underneat that, to the right of the tab that says 'Inbox'..." "It didn't work" I'll spare you the back-and-forth, he had multiple tabs and was clicking in a tab to the right of "Inbox". Once I got him over to the correct magic spot, he found the context menu and restored his menu and toolbar. (The stupid hamburger menu is part of the toolbar, and hides with the toolbar... which means it's possible to hide all the menus! And my dad somehow did so by accident!)
The original UI spec for the Macintosh required menus all the time for every app, and the menus had to be in the same place. And I learned very quickly that I could browse the menu, find the command I wanted, and the keyboard shortcut was documented right there in the menu. Hidden menus are far too magical, and if you are going to have them, the very least you should do is to make every context menu have the ability to unhide them, rather than requiring the mouse pointer to be hovering over a particular magical few pixels of your screen.
I also remember the 45 minutes it took to help my dad un-mute YouTube videos. First I had him use the MATE sound preferences dialog to test his speakers, which just took a couple of minutes. Then I had to walk him through moving the mouse pointer over the YouTube video window to make the controls un-hide... (he wasn't full-screen, why do the controls hide when there is plenty of screen real estate available?) Then he had to move the mouse pointer to touch the audio control (and a slider pops out when you get it right) and click to un-mute... and when it's un-muted it says "MUTE". Because when it's un-muted the button becomes the "MUTE" button, and when it's muted the same button becomes the "Un-mute" button. The old-school solution would be a checkbox labelled "MUTE" that's checked when it's muted; the newer way would be a GUI toggle that slides left for un-mute and slides right for mute. There's plenty of screen real estate for either of these.
I know, I know, on mobile devices these magical hiding tricks are not so pointless because screens are smaller. But desktops are not mobile devices and trying to treat them the same is a bad idea.
My dad is not stupid and I don't want to sound like I'm making fun of him. I'm just annoyed over the modern trend in UI design where everything is so magical that it's tricky and weird.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
But the car is a single-purpose device. The computer is not. Every application does something else. Saying that all should have the same controls is like saying that a dishwasher and a car should both have steering wheels. I'm not really sure that standardization is meaningfully possible, except perhaps for one thing - voice interface (and even there, different software components would still have different vocabularies and accepted syntactic structures, which means basically the same thing as having different controls).
Ezekiel 23:20
Reduced palette? : check
Too much white space? : check!
Awful font? : check
Reduced information? : check
Space wasted on unnecessary graphic art? : check
In my opinion; the new look for Slashdot looked altogether too much like an attempt to copy the look and feel of a glossy traditional print magazine. The overall effect made me think the (new) target demographic was people who didn't want details, people who wanted the web equivalent of a nice sound bite. The approach seemed like it was trying to give you an awareness of a news item, not an in-depth article for people who want to understand and debate the deeper aspects of it. Thankfully; the new look was not only disliked by a large majority of the Slashdot membership, but said members were also quite vocal in opposing it. More to the point; I believe the Slashdot membership did so in a more effective way than most websites would have experienced. I know of several of us, including myself, who took the time to go beyond the usual "the change sux and you suck for making the change!" that makes up the usual negative feedback any site experiences. In the comments appended to the article devoted to it, and again in many other articles, I and many others detailed each change from the previous look, why we disliked it and why we preferred the previous look. A LOT of it tied back to the idea of "who is your target demographic, what level of engagement/interaction are you expecting from them?"
In general, if you only give the bare bullet points of information and limit or obscure the users ability to customize things, you are planning for a one-way dialogue. For a news site, that is "sound bite journalism". For an application, that is promoting your concept of the desired workflow, not what the users might conceive as the best workflow for them. Contrariwise; if a news site gives the full story, links to supporting information and a full fledged forum for the readers to contribute, it is building a community and encouraging actual understanding of the news in question. It was that desire to understand, critique and debate that made and continues to make Slashdot special IMHO and was the detail I think the Slashdot staff at the time had overlooked.
It is my personal opinion that modern UI look and feel has its place, but that it is too often overused and largely because of the same error in thinking that Slashdot staff had been guilty of. The UI designers are going for something that looks pretty in presentations to management, is easy for the users to use as long as they are following the predicted workflow, on the predicted devices.
I need a wheelchair van for my son. Help me get the word out. https://www.gofundme.com/wheelchair-van-for-jj
As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, or in this case 73 words.
And touch controls are stupid because knobs and buttons allow you to rest your hand on them while you use them. This means your hand does not leave the control when you hit a bump in the road. With touch controls, you have to keep your hand floating in front of the screen, where every bump and jiggle causes it to shake around relative to the screen. It's actually worse than just having to take your eyes off the road to use them. You also have to concentrate on keeping your hand aligned with the screen while the car bumps along.
Just tested CUA cut/copy/paste. Still implemented in Win10!
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Insightful and wrong. I work on a daily basis with 20 somethings supporting multiple networks and I definitely new less about this shit at the same age.
The problem is the one-size fits all mentality, 5" phone screen to 28" QuadHD monitor. The motto should be fit for purpose.
I agree with the features pointed out and about the cause... well, maybe UI are designed by people which doesn't use them
Whoa, you expect Millennials to be able to work the choke, ignition advance, clutch, and gear shifter on the car at the same time. These are the same people who have trouble walking and chewing gum while looking at their iPhone. Why do you think their UI design is going to be any better?
Thank you, I thought I was the only one. I have apps on my phone where I cannot tell if those on-off toggles are meant to indicate it's on or off. Use checkboxes, damn it.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Microsoft creates a new gui, others copy it. Google creates a GUI, others copy it.
Have a look at kde for a prime example. Ugly Keramik GUI? Windows XP clone. Current too flat plasma design? Win 10 ... ... we know this concept ... from checkboxes.
BUT kde has alternative themes. And that's important.
GNOME copies from Android and iOS. Checkbox? Probably to small to hit on android. So we use a switch. On android you may slide it (who does it anyway?), on the pc its just stupid.
The problem is, that the useless trend continues. Scrollbars? Make them tiny. Switch instead of checkbox? Hey, when it shows "off" in its middle, it doesn't mean moving the switch to off will set it to off. But to on. The indicator? Switching from gray to blue color. Erm
Its amazing how perfect Windows 95 was UI-wise. Its been downhill since. They got the UI right and then they decided that for the sake of being new, they had to break what was working well. You cant do much better than the taskbar/desktop model with the object oriented icons and drag and drop popularized by OS/2 and picked up by win95.
I hate all of those things and more. I have to use Windows10 every day at work, and I hate it. Macs anger me, nothing makes sense.
At home, I have used Linux since 1998 exclusively. I use XFCE and love it! It's got just enough slickness and all the usability I need.
I can also tell you that you don't really appreciate a good UI until you get a bad one.
Example: Roku. After a couple of minutes it was easy. Now, not all parts of it - I still make some oopses if I do something out of the norm. They went with the 'simple remote' options, so there are some things that had to be compromised (e.g. entering passwords is still painful). But overall it is very good.
And I am a Netflix user, and the UI on the Roku is great. How do you know? Go use Amazon Prime. *shudder* Or some of the network TV channels *ugh* They are menus of show screenshots which are simple to browse, but damn near impossible to find something if you are looking for it. I think the Netflix UI is pretty good on the Roku. How they assemble their content is another matter, but the UI itself is pretty good save a few things.
I don't mind my Android UI. It's a near-stock on a BLU Life One X. I am not all about customizing it though, just give me simple and effective and I am happy. I boggle the developer's minds at work when I check my email using pine though.
And you know... sometimes you just have to google something. Want to do a one-handed zoom on Google maps on your phone? You can. Double-tap, then drag your thumb (or finger) up or down to zoom in/out.
We can probably agree on a lot of what is bad, but which ones do you really like?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
No more crap! No more guessing I want to highlight the whole document, and not just one letter. No more filling in words I type with words I don't want. Quit auto adjusting everything, and making me spend hours trying to turn all your bullshit off. Enough Already!
Remember how the web was originally designed. Text mark up would declare that some text should be a Header1, or emphasized, or whatever, and it would up the browser, and possibly even the end user, to determine what that should look like. The idea is that everyone could customize the web to fit their preferences. Non-nerds hate that. A website looking one way in one browser, and looking another way in another browser, is a bug, not a feature.
People would prefer to have professionals decide, what buttons and controls should be taking up their screen space. The only customizability that the masses want is to be able to set backgrounds to pictures of their families. Beyond that, they trust that the professionals have done the right thing.
Think of the consistency of Facebook pages, back in the day, vs MySpace pages.
Most browsers also allow you to hold down the left mouse button to access the tab history menu, which is what I do. I hate Edge for not using it, but it also doesn't allow you to drag and drop to rearrange the bookmarks toolbar, a more important feature. I have an alphabet running along the bookmarks toolbar and all my bookmarks live there.
So far I see a lot of comments from people who don't seem to like modern interfaces much. Does anyone think they are an improvement over what we had before (and I don't mean the bad examples of what we had before, of course)?
As for the question at hand, I blame smartphones. Their tiny screens means information had to be greatly condensed. Everything that could be removed was removed, and placed in hard to discover locations (like swipes and hamburger menus).
And then, for some unfathomable reason, the largest software company in the world (or second largest or whatever, but surely large enough to support two teams, one for mobile and one for desktop) decided that it wanted the exact same user interface for mobile phones and for the desktop. Not that anybody out there actually writes applications that work on both, but that didn't stop them. So now desktop users also have to deal with missing menu bars (which are absolutely essential to learning a new application, and didn't take up that much space), tiny monochrome icons, lousy contrast, constant pointless animation, and all that other crap. Makes you wonder when someone will inflict the "three button mouse swipe" on us... I actually worry that, after posting it here, someone will think of it as a cool idea and actually implement it :-(
Also: Material Design is an awful UI paradigm. All those gratuitous animations, increasing latency all over the UI -- it irks the heck of out of me. (I have as many animations as possible disabled in Android.)
We have (relatively speaking) super computers in our hands now, light years more powerful and capable of quality graphics and all the current 'fisher price' iOS design and Google material design make absolutely no use of it. Android apps used to look good, there were boarders around buttons and shadows and don't forget texture, so you knew you could interact with that part of the screen and it looked pleasing to the eye. Now everything is flat and boring with confusing and hard to find buttons. It's brutal. Take advantage of the powerful graphics hardware that can easily handle these simple things and make my screen look good. Otherwise what is the point of cramming the most powerful hardware inside phones & tablets? Games? lol right, I'm going to play games on my phone? umm no, I'll use something designed for gaming like a PS4 or PC.
In short fire the people/teams that came up with android&ios visual design, they suck, have no taste and apparently not enough skill to produce something that looks good and takes advantage of my expensive hardware. Begone simple childlike graphics!
Wow, I haven't actually logged in to Slashdot in a long time. A long long time.
So, I'm old. Like really old. I did Unix before Linux. I did Windows 1.0. I still, after all these years, miss the Turbo Pascal editor. I use Total Commander.
Far as I'm concerned, if I *have* to use the mouse for your stupid application, you've failed.
But actually, Windows 10 is a step in the right direction. I can't think of a thing in W10 that can't be done with the keyboard. Here's an example. Want to swap your displays? Type Windows key / type "display" / use the arrow keys to move the little pictures of your monitors.
It's actually kinda cool. Windows 10 does get one thing wrong. The currently focused app is not sufficiently highlighted. The currently focused app has it's titlebar text in black whereas other apps get gray. Pisses me off.
And, actually, Office 2016 is also a step in the right direction. There are actually keyboard commands for pretty much everything. Now, if you hate Micro$oft, I don't blame you. If you are going to hate Windoze forevah no matter what, I can understand that. But if you want to or have to use it, if you keep an open mind you might be pleasantly surprised with it. I know I've been.
Cheers.
Gratuitous use of JS
I was responding to
When the bring out a new model of car they don't mess with the pedals and steering wheel because that would be stupid. About as stupid as changing an ingrained UI just to make it "NEW!!!" Almost as bad as the use of the "white it out and spread it out" interface in Windows is that so many websites are now "updating" their look to this new user vicious standard so they can be "NEW" too.
with the fact that even car UIs, something that as you say, does basically one thing, still had the UI take a long time to settle down and lately parts of it have been breaking the paradigm of keep eyes on road.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Good points about bumps though I consider that not being able to use them without taking your eyes of the road as a good enough reason to damn them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The solution isn't to make the interfaces simpler, but to standardize them. Make them compatible in function to what users are familiar with. Interfaces have existed for long enough that time has proven what's effective and what's being used.
I respectfully disagree. It's difficult for me to believe that we've already reached the acme of UI design. I think it's more reasonable to believe smart people are experimenting with new approaches. Some experiments will fail, others will take off. But to believe we should stop experimenting is the road to stagnation.
Let me give you an example. The WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) GUI paradigm ruled from around the '80s to the mid-aughties, a 20 year run. It works really well, especially for desktop computing. Then mobile devices came out. The WIMP paradigm stinks on touch devices. I don't even think it's all that great on laptops. Material is an attempt to provide an interface which works well on both desktops and mobile. It's doing exactly what you want, creating a standard and compatible interface for a wider range of devices. Should we really have just stuck with WIMP for all devices?
When the bring out a new model of car they don't mess with the pedals and steering wheel because that would be stupid.
Jeep/Dodge/Chrysler did exactly that, changing the way you work the automatic transmission shifter, and had to issue a recall after a Star Trek actor was killed in a rollaway accident.
So you get hired (a real job ... salary, not just hourlies) and are given the task of cleaning up the GMail interface.
What should you do?
What will get you promoted?
Fix the fact that the cursor jumps all over the place or add a new feature?
Oooh ... how about animated, sparkly text?!?!
(poor poor neglected cursor)
Originally, "hacker" meant somebody who claimed to build fine furniture but, in reality, used an axe. The products showed it.
Something similar has happened to UI.
Has anybody read Edward Tufte's work? ... anybody ... please.
Does anybody even know who Edward Tufte is?
Hands
Here's my armchair analysis:
...too little information
Too much white space, huge margins...
-Facilitates usability on touchscreen devices. Fingers are significantly less accurate input devices than mice, and have a variable size selection surface. An effective touchscreen UI provides large enough spaces between screen elements to accommodate the full range of human hand sizes without increasing the errors due to mistaken selection.
-Result of one size fits all UI design for touchscreen devices. An effective touchscreen UI must have sufficient space between elements, as described above. However, screen sizes are also variable. The most popular touchscreen format is the cellular telephone, which has a very modest I/O space. An effective touchscreen UI must switch between output centric and input centric display modes in order to make the best use of limited screen space.
Text is indistinguishable from controls
-Risky UI design choice. Possibly a result of taking context sensitive design to an extreme. Since no indication is made as to which screen elements are controls, any could potentially be controls. New functionality can be added with no change to the existing UI. If sufficient potential usage is anticipated, software is deemed intuitive by those who use it. Otherwise, it is likely to be considered incomprehensible.
Text in full-CAPS
-Stylistic choice. Reduces readability, but is one mechanism for distinguishing text from controls.
Certain controls cannot be easily understood (like on/off states for check boxes or elements like tabs)
-Subjective. Possibly a result of an ever expanding number of UI toolkits. Graphical controls must be sufficiently unique to comply with copyright law, but sufficiently similar to existing controls to be understood. More toolkits means less room for unique controls, unless similarity is sacrificed.
Everything presented in shades of gray or using a severely and artificially limited palette
-Results from desire for consistent UI presentation. Can be used to differentiate text from controls. If colors indicate function, or have some other logical mapping within the software, makes it easier to provide alternate color palettes with consistent, non overlapping usage.
Often awful fonts suitable only for HiDPI devices (Windows 10 modern apps are a prime example)
-Results from tailoring UI design for an ideal output device, and failing to have suitable alternate presentations for other devices.
Cannot be controlled by keyboard
-Results from tailoring UI design for an ideal input device, and failing to have suitable alternate controls for other devices.
Very little customizability if any
-Results from lack of resources to implement. User defined alternate views add additional challenges for development, as well as documentation and technical support.
I would add the following peeves to the list:
Lack of initial input field focus and tab order on forms.
-Results from mistakes made during application planning, development, and testing.
Entirely pictographic user interfaces.
-Results from need for internationalization of UI controls. Text costs money to translate. Pictographic interfaces shift the onus of translation to the user. Can lead to the phenomenon described by the OP, "certain controls cannot be easily understood." Also, graphics often can be made to fit in less space than the written word would. Pictographic interfaces may help ease screen space constraints on mobile devices.
Whatever. I find the CUA keys for copying and posting more memorable than the Microsoft ones. And I feel bad when they are not implement.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Actually the lack of "progress" in automobiles is partly a result of heavy safety regulation. There are lots of ideas for changing things that would probably be more usable than the current system, but they are not likely to be brought to market anytime soon due to these safety regulations. I remember seeing years ago about a design to use side sticks to control a car and they found they were quite a natural and more precise method of controlling the car. However it's unlikely the benefit outweighed the risks to clueless drivers.
Current laws include the placement of the pedals and the placement of gear positions on an automatic transmission shift lever. PRNDL is a matter of law, in case you wondered.
Designers chase trends n cool instead of doing serious study of user workflows. They need to go further. Work with product managers n users to create better workflows that exist. SW developers too resist changes to ui elements and lack sensitivity to render intended design faithfully
Ahhh... Everything that's wrong with the UX religion in one post. Thanks!
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I used to think, in the days of DSSL, that web design secretly aspired to match the standards of print design, and would do so when the technology could support it. And then advance further. Ink on paper is highly evolved. And smells nice. But we seem to have got to papyrus and somehow been dragged back to tablets. With print design values dragged down too. Although I'd concede that I can now do template automation in Word that would have taken 5-10k worth of software a decade ago. I dunno.
Here's the metaphor you're looking for (I'm sure). 3d icons are like having Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. Flat icons are like having Lego blocks as Indiana Jones.
I want to amen this: "The currently focused app is not sufficiently highlighted." This abomination started with MsOffice 2010 or so.
For the record, Winaero Tweaker (http://winaero.com/comment.php?comment.news.1836) helps you fix this. It isn't perfect, and there may be apps that resist it, but it can go a long ways towards improving this problem (and a few others).
Here are the staples of the modern user interface (in varying degree apply to modern web/and most operating systems such as Windows 10, iOS and even Android):
The mobile catastrophe is the obvious thing to point at, and there's a lot of truth in that. (Infinite scrolling webpages with no auto-incrementing URL piss me off the most.) However, it goes a lot deeper than that. It goes deeper even than the widespread conscious emulation of Apple's "the customer is always wrong" dictatorial style (GNOME, I'm looking at you. But Microsoft and to some extent even Google, too.)
The middle ground of usability--power users, people who want to configure things and experiment with all of the features offered, but don't actually want to code it themselves from scratch--are a woefully underserved segment of the population on any platform. I'd get drunk and rant about something simple like file browsers, but I already did that a while back. Desktop linux (particularly the non-GNOME varieties) is the most configurable by far these days, but it's still just so *stupid* about the simplest of things.
And how come no one, and I mean *no one*, is working on a project where the computer bends itself to the user's expectations and not the other way around? Why not set out to design a desktop environment that could duplicate the feel (with a bit less glitter, at least at first) of any common desktop OS? I mean make that user configurable; have one fairly constant UI element that's easy to find and from there the user can change it to look like the latest OS X or Windows 95. Back up your customizations to USB drive or even the cloud, then instantly get access to your preferred setup (or popular setups that others have designed and shared) anywhere. Why the hell not? Not easy, but it's not an impossible-sounding task on its face, and there's surely tons of demand for it. And I can't help but adopt the exact opposite conclusion of the GNOME devs: that by forcing the devs to think and develop with maximum flexibility and modularly, it will (in the long run) be easier to maintain and easier to improve.
Barring something ambitious like that, let me just reiterate that all you folks who develop 'next generation' desktop environments like Unity, GNOME 3, or KDE 5 (which admittedly I haven't used much of yet) should really consider whether your time is better spent trying to force people to care about sexy new paradigms in lieu of doing something simple and amazingly useful like tabs handled by the window manager. Put them on the titlebar itself like Chrome, put them below it, put them above it, put 'em over the task bar, whatever. Let the user customize tab behavior and install tab UI tweaks like you can in web browsers. And all apps would instantly have tabs, right out of the box. Toss in the ability to turn this off (for apps that have tabs implemented internally) and also perhaps an API for tab interaction that new programs to target so that a new process doesn't need to be launched for every tab and bam, you've just done something revolutionary and long-lasting. And it will be so easy to use (or to not use) that no one will hate you for doing it.
Well, almost no one. Havoc Pennington might get a bit upset, but I hear that for every tear he sheds an angel gets its wings.
I actually really like most of Material Design. I often have to design HMI displays (user interfaces for industrial automation). There are good reasons for much of the design:
* colours should be limited and subdued for user interface elements so as to focus attention on content. Bright colours and animation are intended to call attention to important information.
* textures, gradients, transparency and drop shadow effects for the sake of visual flare cause visual confusion and eyestrain. Important elements get lost in the clutter otherwise
* ability to customize is often good but there can be too much of a good thing. If there are 100 "themes" or "skins" and all controls can be moved around by the user on a whim it severely detracts from usability. There is no consistency with the system and it makes it very difficult to train a group of operators when they all can mess with the UI. Also all the code that goes into extreme customzing is bloat.
* Skeuomorphic Design has no business in UI Design. If it was ever a good idea then MS Windows would have fully embraced Microsoft Bob to this day. Making controls look like photorealistic pictures of real life objects just causes frustration unless they behave exactly as the real object does, and are usually more cumbersome than what can be done on a computing device. Skeuomorphism is especially bad when it badly emulates something that is bad to begin with. Using a Blaupunkt stereo from the 1990s is a miserable experience in real life. Who was the idiot who thought we should have an audio player skin that imitates that crap?!
Good riddance to Bob, to Fisher Price gummi Windows XP and glassy Vista and 7. If you have to sit in front of that kind of garbage continuously for 12 hours a day as an operator in a power plant or refinery or whatever it is refreshing to see this "modern" trend. There are some teething pains as designers evolve, such as obscuring too many options or the wrong ones, lacking visual cues as to what is a control and font choices that are form over function as examples, but I for one am very glad designers are "growing up" and dropping the useless toys.
Page based navigation is so much better.
I'm sure that material design is excellent for certain use cases. But for the uses I put my machines to, both mobile and desktop, it makes everything much, much worse.
I agree that if you must use the mouse, the UI has failed. But this has been true for a lot longer that modern UIs have been around.
The way that modern UIs tend to implement keyboard shortcuts has a serious discoverability problem, though. It used to be that you could pop open a menu and see what the keyboard shortcuts are. That's becoming impossible, forcing you to leave the application to google or open a help page (if you're lucky) to learn what the shortcuts are.
Slashdot is as much a perpetrator of this as anyone. Check out my websites, http://www.levicar.com/ and http://www.proacctive.info/ and see how dense they are, with limited wasted space.
An interesting perspective to be sure but the actual goal of every business on earth is attracting customers, otherwise they die.
Murphy was an optimist
On the Web, UI's appear to suck to most folks because they don't understand the creative director / client relationship. The client demands a web site that looks "more creative" and "more awesome" than last year. Sprinkle in the need for responsive/adaptive with three snap points and all websites look like stack able boxes. So what is a creative director to do? Well, get creative...
On the desktop the cost for Microsoft or Apple to redesign the UX is huge, and no matter what they do everybody will hate it because it's different.
On tablets/phones it's impossible to do any better than iOS for the "average joe" and as that belongs to Apple what's everyone else to do?
The folks with Linux have the best of all worlds, but Linux is not for the average Joe. There's no Linux support line, no Linux Genius Bar, no Linux Geek Squad.
Murphy was an optimist
Google's bad design influence, in general. It's been corrupting even good names. And, now talking exclusively web: the big villains are WordPress and Bootstrap! =\ I've seen too many pseudo-devs giving up of their brains to just code whatever they wanted and leaving the visuals to bootstrap without any care. It's quite sad.
DARTH VADER POWERED! http://hanike-treisce.spaces.liv
Actually, thanks for this - it's the first time I've seen a good concise attempt at justifying the modern "minimalistic" UI approach.
Unfortunately, I hugely disagree with just about every point on the list.
colours should be limited and subdued for user interface elements so as to focus attention on content. Bright colours and animation are intended to call attention to important information.
Utter nonsense. I was never distracted by icons that had colour in them. I find it bizarre that anyone does get distracted by that. Perhaps they have ADHD. Whatsmore, UI elements are often important and get used a lot! Don't assume that just because it's not classed as "content", it's basically irrelevant. The removal of colour and complexity in icons has really pissed me off and made it a lot harder for my brain to discern what the heck an icon is supposed to mean. I am NOT distracted one iota by a colourful icon.
textures, gradients, transparency and drop shadow effects for the sake of visual flare cause visual confusion and eyestrain. Important elements get lost in the clutter otherwise
Only if you really overdo it. Some amount of this stuff is absolutely fine (see Windows 7).
ability to customize is often good but there can be too much of a good thing. If there are 100 "themes" or "skins"
So have a decent default skin, and let the people who want to apply another skin do so (see Winamp). There is no problem here.
Skeuomorphic Design has no business in UI Design
Yes, making knobs look like physical knobs looks dumb, so to some extent this is valid. But it doesn't extend to making every icon totally abstract. The brain has all sorts of images from the real world and it makes perfect sense to have icons and widgets often resemble stuff the brain is already familiar with. Any attempt to go against this for the sake of some holy design guideline is guaranteed to make the UI less user friendly.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
No. There is a frustration level when some control does not DO what you want it to do. Control interactivity alleviates such frustration because at least the control is reacting, which is expected, so you can be sure it is not the control itself what is not achieving what you want. Try clicking a flat button when it does not make the icon show up again, vs clicking a satisfyingly depressed button while watching the icon is not showing up again! The experience is not the same. Some buttons change color while hovering and change color by clicking? Did it active or do I still have to click? FACT IS: computing GUI is so flexible that sin is not in the style but in the lack of OPTIONS. Obvious two state buttons give a clear chance to make up your mind keeping the mouse pressed and sliding back to cancel the command. This is not so clear with flat buttons. Customization can be very ordered and restrictive and undone with a simple reset. For some devices may be bloating, but for a laptop with gigas and gagas? I do not think so. Frankly, I love when buttons have textures, are rendered, and activation provides animation effects like slowly illuminating a virtual LED and the like. I had the idea for this kind of interface a few years ago (before), but the idea was... kind of a console with fixed window relations for simultaneous applications, a customizable console where you could see the application different ways (icon, logo, splash, document sample...), and swap between maximized and all visible. It was a surprise to see it as Windows 8... So now I feel frustrated that I click flat buttons for no effect, then I have to use HTML-like links to get a more standard window which may NOT do what I need it to anyway...
The first thing I do on my Plasma 5 / Cinnamon installs is loading up the Arc-Dark theme. It's a wonderful dark flat theme which looks modern, yet I never have any problems with "is that a button?" thing. The design is clean, simple and hardly any confusing. From what I see KDE's Kirigami design is going after what Arc theme was doing so far and seems to be what Material should be in the first place. What I hate personally is trend towards bright white UIs which are ok if you are some hipster using your Mac Book 30 minutes a day in Starbucks I guess. For me, if I have to stare at the screen for few hours a day I'd rather not have all these whites burn into my eyeballs. This is where Google did a major f-up with Android UI. They created UI standard which could work perfectly well with black themes on AMOLED displays, yet they insist on the most suboptimal use of AMOLED technology you could ever think of.
There are no laws related to a wheel or pedal placement requirement in the various top rank motor racing series. Why don't they have a single car EVER with the "much more natural and precise side stick"?
A side stick would be WAY less precise then a steering wheel. Most driving of a car can be accomplished within 720 degrees of rotation of a steering wheel. With a smaller then stock steering wheel (with a 1' diameter) you are talking about more then 6 feet of control movement. So you are going to have a stick with MAYBE 9" of movement and claim it is more precise?
Another thing that people don't realize is you don't actually steer the car by turning the wheel. You turn it by PUSHING against the force created by the spring action of the distortion of the tire's contact patch. (The slip angle.) You cannot control the car accurately without having the feel of the feedback and in slick conditions it is impossible to control the vehicle. (When the car is sliding and not pointed straight forward the feedback forces are the only thing telling you what kind of steering force you are applying.)
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In airplanes you don't need the huge control defections and when you add high G-forces a stick makes a lot more sense. A side stick is used in some fighter aircraft so the arm is supported by the armrest so very high g-force maneuvers can be performed with much greater ease.