Comment by abanana
1 day ago
> Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research
Too many developers nowadays don't know this. On any HN discussion of UIs, I've been noticing a growing number of younger devs insisting that usability is entirely subjective (their words, not mine). It's not just that they don't know about cleverly thought-out things such as safe triangles in nested menus or all the affordances/signifiers espoused by Don Norman et al. The bigger problem is that they don't know what they don't know, and they come across as being unwilling to learn.
It does make UX discussions frustrating and meaningless when they could, and should, be interesting and a learning experience for us all.
> Too many developers nowadays don't know this.
Guess they've never been on the phone with an elderly relative in tears because she can't figure out basic tasks on an iPad anymore after years of learning how.
That's when you realize you, as a highly-skilled technical person, can't either, because they've moved, hidden, or otherwise obfuscated them.
Yesterday I learned there are two icons in the Files app called "..."
Yes, two.
Incidentally I was looking for how to delete a file, which is now deliberately missing from the object's context menu, and intentionally hidden under one of these.
A few weeks ago I was co-hosting a live coding session (in front of a crowd, it was pretty collaborative, back-and-forth).
I had to authorize something with Firebase, for which I had to auth with Google, for which I had to do a MFA with my (Pixel) phone.
Usually it's "are you trying to auth" and finger-to-the-scanner, but around that time this particular way didn't work. It also didn't want to send me a text or a call to auth me.
No, I had to find an OTP code. Easy, right? Wrong. The instructions, and the docs, don't match where it was in that particular version of Android, and there were a bunch of blind alleys that were named basically the same.
It took me like 10 minutes, on stage, browsing my phone (thankfully, not casted to screen) to find the friggin' option. Thankfully the cohost was doing the presenting at that time, but it was pretty lousy.
And this is using Google's OS on a Google phone doing a Google auth flow for a Google property. And I'm a techie who's been using Android for 15+ years now. And I did the exact same dance a few weeks before that - also so roundabout I had no idea how I stumbled on the correct page.
User experience my ass.
PS. The regular "are you trying to sign in?" flow works again. No idea what happened - wasn't me.
Even with screen sharing, I've said "click the three dots" and then "no, not those, not that one, wait there's another one, no that's the wrong one ..."
But if we didn’t use ••• menus everywhere then some parts of the UI might be cLuTtErEd!!! The worst sin of computing.
To think that we used to trust mere mortals - without even a signing certificate or developer membership - with the power to customize every toolbar in a Microsoft application, and to set every font and color for the whole UI of the system. People made their computer environments ugly in some cases. And it was fine, because they owned those freaking computers, so who the heck has any business telling them not to?
Sorry, clearly it bugs me a lot how much we’ve lost.
7 replies →
> safe triangles in nested menus
I did not know about this, but I did notice my own menu-rage every time a submenu disappears!
I was trying to use Orca Slicer (which itself is intractable) and it had a combo button whose menu was disconnected from the button. The menu would disappear as soon as the cursor left the button boundary, but because it was disconnected, there was no way to get to the menu without leaving the button boundary, traveling a void, and then getting to the menu. I’m unsure what incantation allowed me to finally choose the right command, but forget how it looks, it was if no one even tried to see if it works.
Most fun is when the menu opens both on button hover and on button press, but if the menu already opened, clicking the button closes it instead, so the first 2-3 you use it, you end up opening the panel and closing it immediately.
Not sure how stuff like this gets deployed in the first place, guess we're just a few people left who test things we develop before we push them to the public, I'd rather believe that than that people just don't care anymore...
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Potentially keyboard arrows?
There are still UX research. It's just that the collective "we" has changed and we can/may build on some existing design decisions.
You are always designing something with a target audience in mind, and the next, e.g. mobile phone will very likely be used by someone who has interacted briefly with a similar device, so you may re-use some already learnt patterns.
The very early UXs built heavily on desktop metaphors (like folders), but at this point many (and an increasing number of) people are more familiar with OS UI n-1 than a typical office setting.
So I don't think jumping to this conclusion is correct - there are well-designed software, it has just become much much cheaper to create new ones, so the average quality has necessarily went down.