Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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."