I believe that this approach to UX testing is to blame for some of the most infuriating UI changes: when you design UI experiments with actual users you do that because you want objectivity. And what could be more objective than selecting "perfect blanks" as you test subjects?
The problem with this approach is that everything you gain in objectivity is lost many times over in relevancy. Those people are not representative of your actual users, not even when you are building a geriatry self-serve kiosk.
Unfortunately, once that kind of experiment has taken place, it inevitably dominates all other concerns. Every critical voice will reliably get shouted down with "We have the numbers to prove it. We did science, you didn't. You are just a grumpy old power-user disrespecting the needs of the weak".
To further this point, imagine testing HN with people that can't read. Do we rebuild it for children under 6 or do we wait they learn to read and grow to an age that let them make sense of the contents of the site?
And a car analogy/tale. If you drive different models of different makers you find many little differences and unobvius ways to operate some controls. I remember I had to read the manual of a rental car 25 years ago to figure how to reverse. I had to lift a ring on the stick and I never saw something like that in my life as a passenger or as a driver before (and I barely saw automatic gears by then.) That was not very discoverable. However one shouldn't bother to design car controls for elderly people like my mother. She never got a driving license, she'll never will and yet she had no problems living their life. Not everybody needs computers.
Well put. What's the counterargument? There has to be a way to solve this problem.
Yep and sometimes it happens in unexpected places. I just went to the dentist the other day.
The receptionist accidentally moved her task bar to be oriented vertically on the left and couldn't get it back to the horizontal bottom position.
We're on very friendly terms so she asked if I could show her how to fix it which involved going around the desk. Naturally I requested she hides any windows that might violate HIPAA compliance before I swung around.
It was interesting to see her facial expressions and "whoa!" reactions when I mentioned how you can left click and drag the task bar to different spots and how to prevent this from happening in the future by right clicking and locking the task bar.
What was really interesting to me was when I said right click on the mouse, her eyes immediately looked at my hand on the mouse so you can't take left and right clicking as granted knowledge that everyone has as muscle memory.
This is someone who has been using that computer for years to manage appointments and whatever else, but things like right clicking the task bar is a move that very few people do out in the wild unless they are approaching enthusiast levels. She's not out of the loop with tech either. She has a smartphone and does a lot of things with it.
A lot of people hate the lack of features in gnome, but this is why I think KDE's style of configurability is a terrible idea. I can give my dad a gnome desktop and it just works, give him a KDE one and 3 hours later there will be six menus bar taking up half the vertical area of the screen, and that's from a locked config. As a power user I'd prefer text configuration or to use the separate tweak-ui app anyway.
Today it’s interesting to see the favored device at both kindergartens and retirement homes: iPads.
Yet iPad’s also fine as my daily driver.
Computing is entering its appliance age.
https://www.macworld.co.uk/how-to/mac/right-click-3610351
I don't own a Mac so I don't know how new Mac users discover how to do it. I remember there is something like a right click on Macs and I asked how to do it last time I had to use one for a few minutes. But if there are people that don't explore a UI with a visible right button, what are they doing with invisible controls?
One would always let go of the mouse to click. He would position the mouse, lift his hand a few centimeters above the mouse button and then press down on it fast. Sometimes worked, mostly didn't because the mouse would move during the click. Now imagine him trying double clicks..
Another guy would make extremely detailed notes. I would show him some setting in a dropdown menu of Word, and he would perfectly draw these menues in his notebook. By the end, he probably hat 20 pages of beautiful notes, it was actually quite impressive.
I missed that article. It sounds fascinating -- I don't suppose you have a link?
This kind of exposure tends to generate a lot of empathy towards the user, as well as to the demands of the designers and user experience specialists. It also helps engender the right kind of intuition as to the level of UX complexity and cognitive load non-engineer users are prepared to tolerate. And that level is very, very low indeed.
Now it doesn't even say "Start" on it, and yet they persist in calling it the "Start menu".
What did you find when you opened the Start menu (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d3/Windows_95_St...)? Programs (click on one to start the program), Documents (click to start a program handling the file), Settings (click to start a Control Panel applet), Find (click to start a find dialog), Help (click to start the help viewer), Run (click to start an executable by name), ...
> After all, clicking "Start" was the first step to shutting down your computer!
You are, after all, starting the shutdown procedure.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120213-00/?p=83...
This was before the advent of "windows keyboards" and the menu key on them.
EDIT changed link to a better one
they fixed it some way through Win98 I thought...
No, the point of the Start menu was to provide a root node to a navigable hierarchy of all of Window's available functionality. Calling it "Start" makes sense from the perspective of the act of navigation - it is the user's "start point". While logical, I think this metaphor was subverted in many ways even when it was new; the hierarchy afforded by the Start menu was neither particularly well structured nor even the easiest way to access much of its functionality (it seemed to compete with "My Computer" for the title of "blessed root node").
Nowadays it seems that it is not even possible to navigate to all Windows functionality through the "Start menu".
Ah yes, because the competition's UI of having you click on an icon of a literal piece of fruit to shutdown the computer makes more sense!
You can of course push the power button and Windows will go ahead and gracefully shut down, been that way since at least XP, if not 98 on computers that supported it!
Shutting down become a rather destructive option, putting it as a first level item on the task bar would lead to accidental clicks. Putting it as a first level menu item on the most prominent UI feature of the entire OS seems like a decent alternative!
> Now it doesn't even say "Start" on it, and yet they persist in calling it the "Start menu".
Eh, and we still say we save stuff to "disk". Never mind that it probably isn't even remotely disk shaped.
If I am writing instructions for a website, should I tell people to tap or click on things?
The pantomime for talking on the telephone is to stick thumb and pinky finger out to make it look like a device that a lot of people under 20 have possibly never even seen.
Starting the shutdown process is hardly the worst English faux pas the technology industry has made!
It was a different time. The Windows 95 team had this idea of a "beginner's UI" to make computers more approachable -- an idea they subsequently shelved. But their research told them that:
> Beginning users and many intermediates relied almost exclusively on visible cues for finding commands. They relied on (and found intuitive) menu bars and tool bars, but did not use pop-up (or "context") menus, even after training
Ironically newer UI designers have forgotten that 'visible cues' lesson -- both on Windows 10's Flat UI and on touch interfaces such as iPad OS, which imho suffers from really poor discoverability.
> Although we abandoned the idea of a separate shell for beginners, we salvaged its most useful features: single-click access, high visibility, and menu-based interaction. We mocked up a number of representations in Visual Basic and tested them with users of all experience levels, not just beginners, because we knew that the design solution would need to work well for users of varying experience levels. Figure 5 shows the final Start Menu, with the Programs sub-menu open. The final Start Menu integrated functions other than starting programs, to give users a single-button home base in the UI.
(Here's a picture of what earlier iterations of the UI looked like: https://imgur.com/IWCGPzU)
These extracts and image are from Kent Sullivan's very readable "The Windows 95 user interface: a case study in usability engineering": https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=238611 (previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330899)
The upshot is: "Start" is just a label that worked well during UX testing, what mattered more was the anchored, affordance-rich, highly consistent button that let you interact with the GUI in a predictable way.
Old entertainment content however, I'm afraid that it might be pretty much lost to those growing up with on demand streaming. In the age of linear TV, back catalog content wasn't just available to consume in lieu of something new, it was actively fed to us by the fixed schedule on failure to tune in when the new stuff was aired. This introduced us to a lot of content from before our time. But with streaming, I just don't see how it would happen, not in culturally relevant volume. Nostalgia is an acquired taste. Just like so many of my generation I madly binged Friends when it appeared on Netflix, but how many streamed Friends who completely missed it's original run?
23 year old here. I had never seen Friends, thus I never had any nostalgic interest in visiting it.
One weekend last year I had an onsite interview in Denver just before a blizzard hit, snowing me into a Motel 6 for 2 days. No wifi, so I did nothing but watch Friends and Seinfeld reruns on the TV. Probably the first time I'd used a television in my adult life.
I also caught Forrest Gump for the first time late that night. Not a bad film.
Anecdote time: I surely did not learn anything about the Korea war from MASH reruns other than "the time depicted is too recent for ww2 and too long ago for Vietnam, so apparently America had yet another war in Asia". But that was enough to create a gathering place inside my mind for all those tiny information scraps about this part of history that would otherwise new lost, surprisingly helpful.
Techie snobs scoff at the iPad but without its simplicity some of the older people in my family would have never used a computing device.
It wasn't something they ever needed – having done without computers for so long just fine – but it did bring them joy and entertainment and even helped them with some tasks, like notes and contacts.
And yes, abstracting away the file system played a big role in the iPad's accessibility.
Just vanishing the keyboard and mouse alone greatly lowers the intimidating barriers for some tech-averse people.
Not only this, but the icon style is different from when they last looked at it just different enough to probably confuse them.
> This answer is not helpful. There is no start button.
Because it's just a little windows icon now - easy to forget that that doesn't just make sense to some people.
> Thank you, Brian- I would surely never have looked there, for anything, never mind notepad! It is on my start box now.
Some people just haven't/won't learned the grammar and vocabulary of computer literacy. I think this person means "start menu?" But it looks like a box to them so that's how they described it.
A while ago there was an article where a woman was trying to user testing in a mall and instead found an old guy who had literally never touched a computer. Reading that experience was fascinating.