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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.
Khoi Vinh, principal designer at Adobe
lost interest right there
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
Computer Programmers (I'm looking at you microsoft) need to learn that these things are important:
1. Appropriate icons
2. Minimizing clicks to task completion
3. Common control placement
4. Self-explanatory menu trees
5. Consistent menu trees
I'll give you a good idea how NOT to do it. Windows 10 is a mashup of numerous operating systems. You'll find control panels from the original 95, and new 'tile' or web-page-like looks woven together. You'll find some with buttons you push, and others with highlighted words you need to click. You'll find important features like configuring the lock-screen not under right-click display like you would expect, but buried deep inside the user-accounts system. And clicking to find what you want has gotten so counter-intuitive that most people utilize the typing in the search box to pull things up now.
I could keep going on, but Windows 10 is a prime example of how non-user-friendly programs from tier 1 vendors have become. Photoshop is a right up there too.
"What Comes After User-Friendly Design? "
As far as I can tell, user-hostile design does.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Boozer-friendly design
An interface that's easy to use when inebriated.
My UID is prime!
As more options pile up, menus are becoming too big and deep to be useful. It's time to meta-tize options so one can search for them google-esque. Give each a unique ID so that one can bookmark them and even add their favorite option into their own tool-bar and/or menu as they choose. It could be kind of a friendlier version of Firefox's about:config tool.
If there are dependencies, then the "parent" option(s) or group-set can be also displayed. Old-fashioned menus can still be available, but not be the only way to access options.
And make the scope clear: is a given option just for the current document, all documents, all documents of current user only, a given domain, a given sub-domain, etc.
ruff draft schema:
options TABLE: // longer explanation // string, int, double, datetime, bool, path, etc. // out-of-box value // depends on app // id of optional group, null if no group // id of menu for the old-style menu position // synonyms to aid in searching
id
title
descript
type
value
default
scope_type
group_ref
menu_ref
keywords
Table-ized A.I.
"Unix is user-friendly. It's just very selective about who its friends are."
Anyone know who said it first?
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
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."
From TFA:
It’s a balance any designer with a brief to design an effective, engaging experience has to strike: “You want people to spend money on your game and you want them to spend time in it, but there comes a point where that can become detrimental to what’s good for them and what’s healthy for them.”
If you're wondering whether or not your UI is good or bad for the user's mental health, the problem is that your design has already gone off the rails and into unethical territory.
You're not designing a UI to be good or effective, you're designing it to be manipulative. Worrying about whether that manipulation is good or bad for your users is merely distracting you from the root problem.
Some designs encourage "errors". For example, the practice of making the "Close this window" button small and hard to see on advertisements.
You can of course do the opposite, making it big and red. Part of this involves making major decisions AFTER the product has been tested.
Good design should not be focused on "if the user wants this, they should do that." Instead it should reverse the process, asking "If the user does this, what is it they want?"
A good example is the horrendous, evil "Video that refuses to scroll away." When the user scrolls down to read the article, a well designed video would shut itself OFF not move down to block my view because of your desires. I clearly do not want to hear or see the video, otherwise I would not scroll away.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
All software needs to have the equivalent of that 'List of Ingredients' you find on the side of a soup can. It should tell you exactly what data it collects, what kind of privacy you have, and how to switch it off. That information should be listed in a short, concise manner with a few icons that will make it easy to recognize. You should not have to wade through a 10 page legal document (after clicking though a dozen pages to even find that) in order to find out what it is doing with your information (assuming you understand cryptic legalese). The company should not be able to change the terms at the next update without throwing up a big 'red flag' and tell you exactly what they changed. Maybe we could even get some kind of standards body to come up with a 'Rating' from 1 to 10 about how intrusive a piece of software is (1 = saves your screen name, 10 = records the contents of your medicine cabinet) and make the software display it in the 'about box'. Adherence would be optional, but market pressures could drive out anyone who refuses to show the information.
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.