(Enough said.)
I've moved to Emacs, TUI, and CLI tools to escape the madness, not because they'r e better, but they let you do stuff and are at least stable so you don't have to alter your workflow every quarter.
Also IRC looks and works like ass. As a teenager I used it without putting in the time to getting used to it, and it was really really impenetrable.
The problem is when we are getting inconsistent themes with wildly varying contrast levels shoved down our throats, in what is supposed to be productivity applications.
(They grouped against the first paragraph of his section instead of the fill the section)
I think the lesson here is people have different desires and priorities, and that’s ok.
I distinctly remember some scroll-enabled UI elements on Windows displaying a completely greyed out scrollbar when the content wasn't actually scrollable.
Indeed, I can verify this today with PUTTYGEN.EXE even on Windows 11, where if I generate an RSA-2048 key there is an active scrollbar, while if I generate an Ed25519 key which is 1/8 the size, there is a greyed out scrollbar.
That having been said, I think this is the right way to do things. The greyed out scrollbar tells me that control is meant to be scrollable. So if I do something that changes the content, I can expect to be able to scroll it.
You need to get the cursor in the right zone (which is invisible, and quite narrow) and keep it there for long enough (so you have to slow down in order to not overshoot).
This is a pretty annoying thing to have to do many times every day.
Sometimes, for narrower scrollbars, it might take a few attempts until I succeed. It's distracting.
(This also illustrates the fallacy with the sibling comment blandly asserting that scrollbars should 'simply be hidden when not necessary'.)
Case in point: I tried to install ChromeOS Flex on one of my laptops. After booting from the USB drive, the installer went through a series of screens. On the 3rd or 4th screen, it would hang and make no progress. I rebooted and re-installed. Same thing. Tried a third time. Same thing.
On the 4th try, I accidentally discovered that the dialog box had an invisible scrollbar. WTF. If I two-finger scrolled on the dialog box after moving the mouse pointer into it, it would reveal some additional text on the bottom which indicated that it was not hanging but doing some work.
After I had finished installing ChromeOS, I discovered ChromeOS has a Settings option to "always display scrollbar", but the Chrome browser completely ignores that flag. Awesome. I blew away ChromeOS Flex on my laptop.
I do understand why designers don’t wish to clutter their pretty UIs with navigation elements, but surely the need of users to use the site should outweigh the desire of the designers!
I'm 38 and have used computers since I was 5.
But at least I got more whitespace on my screen now...
Letting you go from a song you like to its respective album (or really, doing any navigation other than “start/pause this algorithmic playlist”) is counterproductive to that goal and so needs to be disallowed, or at least made as difficult as it can be.
Same as on/off controls, they should have clear external labels, e.g.:
Off |X | On
This is a generic problem in Blender. You can't do something because you're in the wrong state, but nothing tells you that you're in the wrong state.
GNU GIMP has always been much worse than Photoshop in this way. When inserting text, the text is in a default size. If you change the size, and then click on a new insert point, it goes back to the default size. Whether or not the last change has been committed is not obvious, and until it has been committed, many menus and icons do nothing, silently. Selection vs. layers vs. commits are very confusing. Just keeping the dockable menus visible is tough.
My recollection is that MsWord is particularly bad at this, but since I no longer have it installed (one reason is exactly this!), I can't show it.
But I do have Ms's Visual Studio Code on-screen. There is (thankfully) a real menu, with File, Edit, View and Help (the latter no longer exists on most Microsoft products). I happen to have a terminal open; it has six mostly indecipherable icons across the top of its pane. All the panes--the terminal, the file edit panes, and the "bar" at the right-hand side, have a '...', which seems to be the equivalent of a hamburger menu for that pane. Finally, the status bar down at the bottom of the window has still more indecipherable icons near the left end, and a few info things near the right end, some of which are controls ("Select Interpreter", inexplicably highlighted in brown with yet another icon), and some of which appear to be just info (line and column)--except these at the bottom of the window turn out to pull down a special menu item at the top of the window. For example, the control labeled "Ln and Col" (the latter means the character within the line, not the column in a tab-delimited file) pulls down a menu item that allows you to go to a particular line (but not a particular "column").
However, I just noticed one big UI flaw in this interface. The keyboard shortcuts for finding the next and previous occurrences of the search phrase (enter and shift-enter respectively) are not easily discoverable. They ought to be mentioned in the tooltips for those buttons.
EDIT: And another problem: the next and previous buttons aren't even correctly marked as buttons. It's worse than the "flat" buttons used elsewhere, it's "stealth flat" buttons that only appear when you mouse over them.
the ribbon didn't fix it. the ribbon just replaced an invisible right mouse button click on the general toolbar region with an unavoidable huge eyesore.
I have to say that from my experience, ribbons make it harder for people to remember where buttons/functionality is located, and harder to remember that it even exists, relative to full menus + toolbars. And yet - newbies used to MS Office keep clamoring for ribbons, ribbons, ribbons (e.g. in LibreOffice).
For the upcoming 25.8 release of LibreOffice, we have decided to make the UI mode selection part of a welcome dialog on the first run - as a compromise between the majority opinion, which is that the MSO ribbon is undesirable, and the desire to make the transition easier for MSO users who expect a ribbon-like UI since that's what they're used it. The default choice will remain menus+toolbars.
Also, the LO tabbed UI is not "fully-baked", and still has quite a few issues :
https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=107237
and more generally:
I think that the Mac, possibly even the Lisa had that before the CUA. https://andymatuschak.org/files/papers/Apple%20Human%20Inter..., page 23: “A dialog box appears whenever the user chooses a menu item that is followed, in the menus itself, by an ellipsis (…)”
* Do you have a link to the IBM CUA document?
* Can you trace a sequence of widely-adopted or highly-regarded documents of this vein, after 1987? And perhaps how they relate?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44043157
TL;DR: I use gnome only indirectly. In the past I've cut them slack, because (I thought) they were designing for touchscreens etc. Turns out they indeed destroyed the usability of their desktop but somehow forgot to make it work for touchscreens.
I have a starlite linux tablet where no gnome video player works acceptably, and I've tried around five. More than one looks like it is made for touch, big round corners/buttons, etc, but requires a keyboard for all but trivial functions... like rewind 15 seconds. WTF, can't tap?
Freetube, Netflix, and Kanopy work fine from a browser, so the problem sure as hell ain't the hardware. Defeat snatched from the jaws of victory.
it's a bankers box (a cardboard box for files) which I guess is not a thing one sees often now? skeuomorphism doesn't work on a digital generation because all the real world touchpoints for information have been replaced by digital
Infuriating.
"usability forensics"
aka point & click adventure games
Some _visible_ and _usable_ scrollbars would really help. I really think that people who come with "new ideas" in UI design shall make their name public, so we lnow who to curse.
A labeled archive box. https://kagi.com/images?q=archive+box
This raises the question of the universality of icons. They are contextual to territory and time. Until recently, a diskette was the universal icon for saving. Yet nobody under thirty today has probably ever seen one.
- Having keyboard commands is helpful.
- Good documentation is very helpful; a program is understandable if it is documented.
- Some of the difficulty seems to be due to the programming environments and libraries that are used for making these programs; due to badly designed UI libraries and programming environments, the result will also be bad. However, this is not the only thing that can cause these problems.
- On a computer it should also be helpful that the operator is able to make other external programs and can interact with them too, with your software. Command-line programs, user configuration settings, API, etc, can also be helpful in doing this.
Not just having keyboard commands, but using standard ways to make them discoverable, such as by tooltips, menu item annotations, and underlined characters in labels.
Another aspect in today’s UIs is that they often introduce latency in operations (due to network communication, among other things) while not buffering keystrokes accordingly, which makes it borderline impossible to press memorized sequences of keyboard shortcuts in quick succession, because you always have to double-check that the application is in the right state to receive the next keyboard shortcut. That goes against developing muscle memory for frequently performed operations, and forces a conscious back and forth and constant ascertaining that the command was correctly received by the application, instead of being able to blindly trust it and thereby reduce cognitive overhead.
My favourite is the Windows password dialogue. If you start typing before it appears, your keystrokes are lost.
OS should prevent any dialog from a background application from coming to the foreground of it detected that use is in the process of typing. It's not that difficult of a task after all.
[Edit: auto-incorrected text]
Having some place where they are described is ... priceless. MS keyboard commands: press ALT (bangs head)
There is a happy medium between something written by a ham radio operator in 1997 and what counts as "good ui design" today.
Though you probably shouldn't listen to me. I still prefer the look of the Windows 3.1 GUI.
Three lines? Three lines? That's what we settled on? Okay. Yeah okay.
Although not so good as Win2k UI, it still looks thousand times better than Windows 10 or 11 GUI. I really think that, today's UI developers, leave their brain at the entrance.
In order to solve this irreducible complexity, all modern IDEs are simply trending toward the simplest, """cleanest""", bare minimum of functionality.
It might look great to your UX design artists that want that promotion you promised, but where the rubber meets the professional with thousands of hours of experience, it falls apart. By removing complexity from your tools, you remove the ability to do complex tasks.
When my work involves processing huge amounts of information as fast as I can and my tools doggedly remove as much information as possible from my screen... Do these 'designers' actually know any programmers? Does anyone involved here actually write complex programs where you actually need the hidden 90% of functionality?
I've given up at this point. I canceled my JetBrains subscription and I'll be using the 2024.1 versions of all tools until someone comes out with a more modern IDE that's designed to be used by professionals and not children or c-suite types.
On a plus not I noticed that the Movistar TV app has a wonderful keyboard (in the context of using with a TV remote). Instead of a querty keyboard, which was designed to make common letter combinations far apart to avoid typewriters jamming, it has a horizontal a-z alphabet. It is so much more efficient to use, just left or right buttons, no farting about trying to locate the key and having to move up down left and right.It's both simpler and more efficient.
tsunamifury•1mo ago
But to the authors point about power tools usability likely the core issue is new customers need an easier entry point into a power tool than existing customers. This results in simplified designs.
If they don’t do that cruft design builds up over time and you end up in a different usability trap like adobe products in the mid 2000s
mcswell•1mo ago