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What Comes After User-Friendly Design? (fastcodesign.com)
Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, writing for FastCoDesign: "User-friendly" was coined in the late 1970s, when software developers were first designing interfaces that amateurs could use. In those early days, a friendly machine might mean one you could use without having to code. Forty years later, technology is hyper-optimized to increase the amount of time you spend with it, to collect data about how you use it, and to adapt to engage you even more. [...] The discussion around privacy, security, and transparency underscores a broader transformation in the typical role of the designer, as Khoi Vinh, principal designer at Adobe and frequent design writer on his own site, Subtraction, points out. So what does it mean to be friendly to users-er, people-today? Do we need a new way to talk about design that isn't necessarily friendly, but respectful? I talked to a range of designers about how we got here, and what comes next.
Only apps can app apps, NOT LUDDITE users!
Apps!
It is not one that gives you half a dozen options (all equally badly described:: telling the user what they do, not what their effect will be) for half a dozen more operators. It will have intelligent defaults - possibly ones that vary, depending on circumstances. It will provide a clear workflow: top - bottom, left-right, corner to corner -- whatever, it will be CLEAR what to do first, next and to finish.
Having said that, it will still be possible for users to make their own decisions. A good design will not railroad a user into one single path, one single process or one single methodology. If it did, there would be no point providing a user interface.
I look forward to the day - at the rate of progress, in the dim and distant future, when user interfaces work like this. Without any "I have just crashed and wiped out all your work. OK" style messages,
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Oh, and as a follow up. You know the auto-industry has huge focus groups (usually done by email) where they present icons to people, like a trunk opening button. But they don't tell the people what it does initially - they ASK them what they think it does.
Because if you have efficient button and icon design, you don't need menu trees and your dependence on language (and all the misunderstandings it creates) is decreased by an order of magnitude. Just have a British Person ask an American where a boot is if you want a good example.
"What Comes After User-Friendly Design? "
As far as I can tell, user-hostile design does.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
You can have all the UI research in the world, but a clueless PHB or marketer will likely override you with some stupid fad or whim. Science doesn't work on idiots and big egos.
Table-ized A.I.
Modern UI / UX design is a clusterfuck of bad design.
Everything that was learnt for the past 40 years has been thrown out the window. These morons are so focused on Form over Function that you get stupid shit like this:
* How dare we "clutter up" the UI and show the user a scroll bar so they can gauge spatial proximity. Now we have "endless" scrolling with no scroll bar -- so you have no fucking clue how far along the content you are. Want to QUICKLY scroll to a specific spot? LOL. Waste even more time trying to remember where it was. At least with scroll bars the slider position was a VISUAL MNEMONIC to help you remember roughly where it was.
* We get idiotic error messages that don't:
i) explain WHAT caused the problem in the first place,
ii) nor HOW to resolve it.
I just ran into one this week. I purchased an album off iTunes and only half the album was downloaded. Clicking on a song that was in grey pops up a dialog Item not available. No Shit, Sherlock. HOW do I _fix_ the problem ?! Really, there was no room to say "iTunes > Purchased Music" ???
* Worse, everything is "flat" so you have NO visual cue to tell what can be interacted with and what is purely informational. You are kept playing a stupid guessing game of "Can I press this?" In the past we had 3D shading for objects that you could interact with and flat shading for informational. From the _context_ you could figure out the UI. Now a days? HAHA.
* Gaudy colors are now "in vogue" because they have been smoking Hollywoods Orange and Teal crack pipe.
The only progress is that:
* "Search" has now been added to "Options" because who needs manuals, right?
* At least they are _finally_ starting to get a clue with 120 FPS. Consoles are still stuck on a shitty 30 fps.
Modern UI / UX people are morons. I fight with these people weekly where their latest design is always half-baked. Hell, just getting them to understand "mach banding" and the simple concept of adding noise to reduce it is an uphill struggle.
--
"Those who forgot the past are condemned to repeat it."
Why does it constantly have to change? Most people can learn less than friendly user interfaces (have you seen some of the stuff low-paid clerical staff have to use in 3270 terminals?).
What's totally obnoxious is having the user interface redefined every year because some new crop of developers has decided they need to leave their mark and they have somehow determined that changing everything is necessary.
IMHO, GUI user interface changes not driven by significant changes in functionality really haven't improved ease of use. The original Macintosh or Windows needed user interface enhancements when they went full-on multitasking, but by and large those interfaces were probably as functional as the flat, widget-and-gesture-laden interfaces foisted on us as improvements now.
Touch-driven, small devices like smartphones benefit from UI changes (physical use case and interface technology), but I really don't think desktop PCs have benefited at all from the UI churn.
I think they mean user friendly used to mean things like ergonomics, efficiency, simplicity, and the like, but more and more 'design' seems to be about things like getting the user to purchase stuff in a 'store' / getting them to install stuff they don't want but now must install or else lose out on some functionality they do want / or getting them to do things like run through a 'design maze' in a way that maximizes things the software owners can track and monetize.
So, if good software design should be about being friendly to the user's wants, and what we often get is the opposite, then maybe what designers are lacking is respect for the users.
So, to the question what comes after today's so called user-friendly designs -- hopefully it's designs that are actually user friendly.
I don't know whether they do these email focus groups or not, but if they do, they aren't very effective. My wife's car has a picture of a tire tread with an exclamation mark that indicates low tire pressure. Looks confusingly similar to a thermometer in water so you may think you have an overhead. The check engine light is useless if you have never seen an engine on a test stand. Honestly text would work way better than icons for these interfaces. A 16 character display with an actual text message would take up less space and convey more information. Of course it's not language-neutral which is a disadvantage but it's much more expressive.