Back on Android, (or Windows, or Linux), it makes sense, whereas she loses her way. Just to point out, a part of discoverability I guess is familiarity with the underlying principles the UI follows as well.
To add two more points to this. I think there's one thing platforms in general got very right: simple touch controls. My one year old is discovering that sliding fingers across a screen, touching and pinching (the three basics) does stuff. Hidden menus, press-and-hold, and so on is secondary. Second, icons are something which is wrong. You need to guess their initial meaning, and translate badly in conversations, like recently with my mom: "press the rectangle with four arrows pointing out of it" (fullscreen or whatever it was).
"Here's an image, guess what is supposed to happen when you click it, also i will give you no info on hover over -- you must push me and then try to guess what i did!" (btw if there's a bug or a configuration state in the app that you or i am unaware of -- you might've pushed me at the wrong time and i might've let you do that)
The Apple II was the first computer that was widespread enough for people to have seen that had a floppy disk. It came out in 1977. Apple dropped the floppy disk in 1998 (21 years later), so it's been 22 years since it was standard in Macs.
Even allowing for some switching time, it has meant "save" for longer than it was a common physical object.
But if i really have to come up with something, I'd say green arrow pointing up. Meaning 'upload to your (own private) cloud'
Windows 10 introduced the navigation bar, which is essentially a vertical version of the Windows Phone application bar, just using a "three lines" icon as the "show labels" button instead of an ellipsis. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/controls... The start menu and inbox mail app use this control, for example.
This is one reason why UI patents are not a good idea. When different platforms are forced to adopt differing UI patterns because they can't do what their competitors are doing, you get the current mess.
Accessibility can help normal people in extraordinary situations too.
With examples given like curb cuts for wheelchairs helping everyone, and OXO brand kitchen utensils meant for impaired hands just being better for everyone.
Better is better.
Over time, they started hiding it by default and require you to scroll up to access it.
I think that, at a general level, this principle of development is reasonable: things that used to require being extremely explicit can become more implicit over time as users become adapted to it. Computers used to feature tons of skeuomorphic design to make it obvious what everything was (so you could think about your computer with the same lens as you thought about your desk, for instance), and now we've mostly done away with that because the vast majority of users don't need it.
Where Apple fails in this regard is two things, I think:
1. They assume prior familiarity among groups who won't have it.
2. They do not leave any affordances to even suggest the presence of something hidden for those who won't know it (or have forgotten).
For the scroll bar issue, I think they could introduce an affordance in the form of, say, a couple small horizontal bars at the top of the page that kind of indicate "you can pull down on this". While early versions of this same design were pretty large and could be considered intrusive, I think users are familiar enough with the "tactile" touchscreen elements that we could develop a smaller version to use for these things.
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Your point in general still stands, though. Apple has become more and more egregious about this over time. Things used to be very discoverable, and now there's tons of hidden functionality in most of their apps (both mobile and desktop). I think they've succumbed to more feature creep over the past couple of decades than they want to admit.
I honestly never bought that, because I've never seen it in practice. Personal observation / anecdote time:
(I'll hesitantly be generalizing from myself & people I knew as a kid/teenager to entirety of my generation of non-English-speaking countries, but I feel it's justified.)
As a kid first discovering computers, I never got the connection between various skeuomorphic terms and their meatspace counterparts. Half of the time, I wouldn't even know what the word referred to outside computers! E.g. I was a proficient Windows user before I figured out that "desktop" is the top of your desk (or, in Polish, "pulpit" is something a very old school desk would have). I didn't know until many years later that "icons" are religious pictures. Or take window - the only connection between GUI windows (one or more rectangular frames in which an application is contained) and real windows (a rectangular frame you can see some part of the outside through, and that parents regularly ask you to clean) is the "rectangular frame" part. Might as well have called it a "frame"[0].
Point being: myself, and my family and friends, and (almost) everyone I came to physically know in my country - we've learned all these terms, in Polish and English, without understanding the skeuomorphism. We grokked the concepts through interaction and explanation of what happens on a computer ("programs draw stuff in 'windows', 'windows' can be resized, closed, etc..."). The terms could've been entirely invented words (like "foobar") for all they were worth - hell, they often enough were, from the POV of someone who sees an English word without knowing English.
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[0] - And in fact it's how Lisp world referred to it before computers were available to general population. Emacs still retaining the nomenclature, which leads to no end of confusion for 21st century users.
But I should clarify that I wasn't even thinking about terminology when I mentioned skeuomorphic design. I meant things like how the "trash" on the desktop looked like a physical trash can, how the "save" button looked like a floppy disk, how the calendar app was meant to look like a physical calendar, etc. The system was designed (visually, I should say) to remind people of their physical offices so they could more easily interact with a computer when they had no prior context for it.
But over time, we have moved away from these physical allusions because people have simply become familiar with computers.
It boggles my mind how that is something you could actively want.
But that's the point of this article. As a matter of empirical fact, they do. Visual appearance/attractiveness has dominated over usability since smart phones became our ordinary means of interaction.
(NB. artists never "churn out art for its own sake". They usually want to do something with that art. But to the extent that we allow usability to compete with visual appearance, it can be called "churning out art for its own sake".)
Or, your software is niche and its alternatives have such terrible UI that trying to do what the user expects is adding 3x clicks and actively hurting their productivity.
There can be legitimate cases for learning curve, especially if unlearning is involved. If so, the fact that your designer wants the user to learn is a very welcome position. If they make learning effortless and intuitive, you may end up with a solid piece of software.
This is something that we have lost completely with the web. Just having OK/Cancel buttons in the same place in the same order in evert dialog box was very important to developers at the time. Now it's all over the place
Actually, it didn't work because I told him to Shift-Tab to go from the starting Tab to the ending Tab in one go, except he had an extra Tab on his computer (I think due to a graphics card) at the end. If I had told him to Tab 5 times instead, it would have worked.
Learning something new requires more effort, because you have to unlearn other things. But it's not even clear what needs to be unlearned. So we founder.
Internally, we feel like we stopped learning. But I'm certain that if you were airdropped into a new domain, you'd be a voracious learner.
As @strogonoff pointed out elsewhere, there exist domains and niches where a complex and different UI is warranted. Scientific and creative software, for instance, falls into this category. Most software I use does not. I just want to change my account settings, or search for something without feeling lost. Personally, I'd like to see innovation in UX beyond hiding stuff, moving it around, or making it look a certain way. Whenever I see that some app I use has "revolutionized" their UI, the changes usually make me think of this:
http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...
That's a pretty good rant. Very Donald Norman. Know that I mostly hate rants about UI, ergonomics, design.
The follow up is pretty good too.
I've long had some notions about incorporating haptic and tactile stuff (I'm not saying "feedback") into the communication channels. Alas, I've never had the gumption to execute.
One very old notion was adding physical feedback into the mouse. A clicker/knocker, so the mouse would feel like it was passing over a bump. And one of those whirly things to make the mouse buzz.
Someone's actually done the physical part. But I don't think anyone has integrated it into the UI/UX.
Certainly nothing as sophisticated as Apple's trackpad.
Any way. Thanks for sharing.
One of the common responses I see when I complain about a bad UI is someone saying "no it's easy you just do ____". It's frustrating because that's not the point - the point is that I had to do research to find the answer!
There are cases, especially with specialized tools for complex tasks, where you are expected to spend time learning how to use the tool effectively. Photoshop is a great example. Vim is a great example. Figuring out stupid stuff like whether that grayish light blue vs dark gray fill on the checkbox means "enabled" or "disabled" is not an example.
Like, I would naively assume that the arrows would move your selection up, down, left, right, and one of the extra buttons would be "select/confirm" and the other would be "escape". But no, that would be too easy. Depending on exact position in the menu, sometimes the right arrow, sometimes the first extra button, and sometimes the second extra button selects the highlighted thing. Sometimes up and down arrows increase the selected thing (e.g. volume, brightness) and you need to press one of the extra buttons to stop doing it. Sometimes one of those extra buttons acts as a hotkey that will switch you to a completely different menu, so it will take five minutes to navigate back.
Then sometimes a confirmation windows opens, with two buttons "yes" and "no", one of them is pink and another is light blue, if you press any of the four arrows, the colors switch, and you are free to make your guess whether pressing the extra button will confirm the pink option, confirm the light blue option, take you to a completely different place, or turn off the menu.
Bonus points: turn the monitor to portrait mode and do it sideways.
That's a little hard to believe. Nothing is hidden on a VCR. There's input connections, a tape, and a big record button. At most there is an additional source button to choose the input source. It's all there, in the open, and not hidden.
Today's interface design is really all over the place. There's just too much stuff hidden and inconsistent. The source of this is our ever increasing reliance on software. If one thinks of writing software as both storing knowledge and communicating with people, it makes sense why software experiences are so bad. Communication and knowledge transfer are in general difficult processes, and now we've automated them at scale but hurried and botched them. Something even more is lost in translation. When we use a software-based product, we're experiencing all the stored miscommunication embedded in the device.
Some VCR’s had a timed recording setting. More commonly, and you see this on cars before they got touchscreens, there were settings and options that you had to navigate to by hitting a specific sequence of buttons to get to the appropriate menu.
The core loop was generally fine. It was when you needed anything else that suddenly you needed the manual.
[1] https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19830424&id=...
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The other hidden complexity was reception and tuning - so many people had problems getting the antenna pass-through working, and then getting the VCR picture to display on a TV channel (no switchable inputs in those days).
Warframe is the THE game I can think of doing this most. Even when I learned how it all worked, I needed a bunch of reference tables/posts so I could grind with maximal efficiency!
Nowadays, if a game has "crafting" I am 90% inclined to skip it.
I know my willingness to explore UIs went down a lot when
1) All the buttons became icons instead of text that clearly explained what was going to happen and
2) My phone became the place where all of my social media accounts were always logged in and all my internet activity was centralized. It became easy to accidentally share between different worlds.
This has burned me more times than I’d like to admit. I have a macbook for work and activated iMessages for my personal account. One day I accidentally posted something in a chat room meant for someone I was chatting with in iMessages. It was kind of personal but thankfully vague enough that I could brush it off. I also was on some screensharing sessions when I switched to iMessages which briefly showed personal conversations. After a few times of that happening I disabled my iMessages account for on that machine and made it a personal rule to never mix business and personal activity on any company-issued device, which has served me well over the years.
Somehow they made it impossible to specify or indicate the account in the URL to squash any uncertainty, you just have to hope the cookies are right.
So a ".../mail/u/0/" means the first Google account you're logged into, ".../mail/u/1/" means the second, etc. But if you did it in a different order on a different machine (or even browser), it'll redirect to a completely different one.
I would love to have been a fly on the wall in the meeting where it was decided that was a good idea.
I type the konami code as soon as I discover a web app supports keyboard input. I have no problem pulling-to-reveal and shaking to undo. In fact, it makes me feel awesome to know all this little secrets and have people all like: Wait! how did you do that?
But when I design software I don't do it for people like me. I want my users to feel awesome and delighted without being UI spelunkers. Good design doesn't make you think.
It all sucks. I'm convinced that devs are trying to frustrate me, and it's working.
Don't get me started on the icons-without-text design shit.
Side note, I've always suspected it's an issue of too many cooks in the kitchen. They spend tons on UX but end up with something barely usable.
WHAT?!
I use it all the time. I work off-shift so most of the messages I receive were sent quite a while ago, and pending when I wake up and grab my device. Knowing when they were sent is a very important bit of context.
It seems natural to spend a little time exploring the interface of an extremely complicated instrument that is an integral part of your daily life, reading Tips, etc. That also means if this device is not exactly that heavily used (say you have assistants for that), you are spared of wasting your cognition cycles on simply being aware about all the features it has in store.
FWIW search field in Apple’s own apps like Settings mentioned upthread is revealed to me every time I scroll from the bottom back up to the top of the list due to inertia, I don’t know if they changed it recently or not. (Other apps often make a mess of the same UI pattern. In WhatsApp it is much more difficult to discover, requiring to really pull down and wait to see Archived Chats, and meanwhile Search field is just there wasting screen space despite being used once every few months.)
That said, I don’t have a strong opinion about message timestamps in particular—I believe there are ways of showing them smartly if you haven’t used your phone for a while and missed a bunch of messages without overloading the UI for people like me who couldn’t really care less about that (RIP my IRL social life as of late). Perhaps Messages could use more attention from a good product designer.
So sometimes I'll grab a window to move to my left monitor, decide instead I want it on the right one, and suddenly everything is gone and I now need to go open every single window one at a time. It even took me months to understand that the shaking was what caused it. I would just sometimes be working and suddenly everything is gone and I had no idea why.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
- discover which registry key
- discover how to craft shit in a game
- to find where my Android setting is and what the searchterm/keyword for it is.
Without google/duckduckgo 80% of the options in my world would be undiscoverable or take waaaay too much time to figure out.
If you're refering to Minecraft, one of the reasons why Minecraft blew up that much was that it was around at the exact right time in history: when online gaming had become viable and let's-plays were just becoming a thing. Minecraft, as originally intended, is a communal experience where you learn from the friends you're playing with and from sources on the internet. If I had to describe Minecraft in one sentence, it would be "let me show you that cool thing I saw Pewdiepie do last week". The idea has become commonplace in video gaming at this point, but back then it was fairly new.
(That said, opaque game experiences have been successful before, like the original Legend of Zelda. I guess the schoolyard served a similar purpose back then.)
But I agree that it's a bad feature, and IMO it's a rare miss from the Windows UI team who if nothing else have developed excellent window management.
Anyhow, I just tried shaking a window from my work laptop and discovered that this behaviour activates on the second change of the direction in rapid succession.
While I was experimenting, I also discovered that shaking the window again restores the other windows so you don't have to restore them individually if/when this happens accidentally.
I don't think anybody needs that "quick" way to do that, and that nobody needs to change the icon sizes often. I have no idea if that misfeature could be blocked.
It’s insanity.
It's akin to shaking my head before focusing on a specific task. I shake the task window and the other applications that I still want open but won't be using for a bit all hide away.
Shake the window again, and they will all come back.
This conversation happened a thousand times: "but you can hit them again and restore what you were doing"... no, I can't, specially if I have pressed a dozen keys since.
I used to buy IBM keyboards from more civilized times, but my dealer disappeared, maybe he was arrested?
Thank you very much :)
Somehow my 1 year old son can invoke it repeatably every time he gets his grubby little hands on my phone...
Settings | Home Screen & Dock | Multitasking | Allow Multiple Apps
No idea if the same setting exists on iPhone or if it disabled split screen through.
The whole feature is so badly designed on iPad. I was forever detaching a Safari page and ending up with two Safari apps. So tapping the Safari icon wouldn't take me back, it only takes you to the detached page, and you think you have "lost" all the other pages. You need to close the detached page (none of that would be obvious to a novice). Also getting a page to detach into a popup by mistake, and then not being able to get rid of it (I still don't know the correct swiping motions!)
So if you accidentally hold the press for a fraction too long you block that number.
And then you wonder why your friend(s) don't love you anymore...
To unblock it, you have to go to the Contacts and dig through options there, the SMS app showed nothing of help. It wasn't obvious that you had it blocked!
golem$ ed
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help
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quit
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exit
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bye
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hello?
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eat flaming death
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^C
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^C
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^D
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Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity. [1]
If an application isn't either essential to me or incredibly obvious to use, I am unlikely to learn it's fancy new UI. Why bother?
This extends to APIs and DSLs too since there are often so short lived.
* It's the experienced users who were were less likely to recognize the "burger menu" or the three dots (does that have a catchy name) as something potentially useful. They didn't look like "real" controls. It was the less experienced users who just naturally tried clicking on anything near the top that looked interesting, or waving the cursor around looking for hovertext on active components.
* Confronted with a landing page that seems to have nothing more than some splashy graphics and a few words - notably no scrollbars - experienced users are likely to wonder if the page is broken for them (because that was a very common experience at the height of the browser wars and still persists). Less experienced users who grew up with smartphones are more likely to start swiping right away.
A user who was older but not experienced with computers would align more closely with the young 'uns on most of this. When everything's completely new you just start experimenting. It's when you think you know things work but they don't work that way any more that things start to get frustrating.
Hell yes. In most instances, I'm way beyond this point at only 30 years old. Come to think of it, it actually makes me wonder how I will feel about UIs at 50 or 60 years old.
Dear Google developers: if you decide to randomly delete a somewhat irrelevant word from a search query and you're left with "ten minute", it's far more likely that a person wants a ten minute timer than that they want to search your database of videos for ten minutes. Also, why do you search youtube instead of the web? Are you doing this specifically to irritate the hell out of me?
Perhaps but even when I don't know how an app works I can usually figure it out, either by trying different things or just googling. Older generations tend to be afraid of "breaking" the device and avoid doing anything they dont already know.
When the older folks in my life tell me exactly that I take their word for it. They usually they no issue being brutally honest about other aspects of life.
A designer. Probably the same person who wanted to turn links from blue-and-underlined to same uniform gray with zero indication
I suspect I don't know some crucial (in Apple designers' mind) swipes on my iOS devices, because they're just hard to discover.
It's a leftover from when iPhone screens where much smaller: https://postimg.cc/WFdqPwfd
Pull down for search is something that it maybe Apple is trying to cement (and only for mobile, I guess?), but hasn't crossed (and maybe won't) to Android devices. Apple is known for doing stuff like this and pushing changes, sometimes it takes, sometimes it doesn't (e.g. no floppy in laptops, no CD-ROM in laptops, no Mic jack, etc)
I'm know my tech and I can't figure out how to reliably get Safari on IOS to display the bar at the bottom.
Makes me crazy
- swipe down from anywhere in the vague middle of the page?
- swipe down on the right hand edge where an "invisble until you need it" scrollbar might be lurking?
- swipe down at the "not quite the top/bottom edge of the screen" because you don't want the OS swipe, you want the app swipe.
Aarrrgh! I don't even have an iPhone and the options drive me crazy.
On Chrome I could't get the button to appear so I can save the PDF on my drive. Completely frustrating.
You don't even have to be elderly.
The 20-somethings in the office (pre-pandemic) had no idea that on an inconsistent smattering of Apple apps, if you pull down, a hidden search bar magically appears.
How did that conversation go?
Dev: Where do you want the search bar to go?
Designer: Put it somewhere that no one will ever see it, or ever think to look for it.
Who thought that was a good idea?
I think people in the SV/HN bubble play the "what about the elderly?" card too often, because we're afraid to admit that we, too, don't know how stuff works anymore.