Topic: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design (Read 22858 times)

Thad · « **Reply #100 on:** October 12, 2011, 03:12:26 PM »

GOD. I haven't had many issues with #1, but yes yes yes on the other two.

I still haven't entered the smartphone age, but I've got a computer hooked up to my TV; it runs at 720p resolution with large fonts and icons and it is absolutely fucking infuriating when this results in buttons appearing offscreen in a window with no scrollbars.

Hell, let's add programs that don't render their damn windows correctly if you're using large fonts and icons to the list. Like, text gets clipped off and shit.

Thad · « **Reply #101 on:** October 28, 2011, 10:29:38 AM »

Pretty much every MMC snap-in is a mess from the perspective of UI standards and continuity. Presumably that's because people who actually use MMC are by definition power users and therefore more concerned with functionality than appearance.

I've been working a lot with SCCM, and it's charmingly arbitrary in about a million ways. I'm not sure if setting up a computer to image by going to Computer Association -> Import Computer Information is an MS thing or an in-house thing, but I'm pretty sure the constant arbitrary Update Collection nonsense is MS's fault.

Also, why is "%" the wildcard character instead of "*" like it is everywhere else?

And then there's AD, arguably the most important MS program for day-to-day IT shit, which is full of millions of little annoyances that have inexplicably not been fixed in the decade that it has remained essentially the same. (Okay, I understand clearing out my search results if I switch from searching for users to searching for computers. Do you have to clear out the Name field, too? What if I typed in the name of a computer before I remembered to switch to the Computers search? Or what if I have a group that matches the same wildcard as a computer?) Never mind that the search isn't that damn reliable in the first place. And why is it such an INTENSE hassle to find the OU that any given user/group/computer is under?

TA · « **Reply #102 on:** October 28, 2011, 11:39:29 AM »

The latest Minecraft prerelease adds keybinds to change your field of view and rotate your perspective in every which way. It does not, however, include a key that resets you to normal. You have to close and relaunch it to do that.

This is not okay.

Brentai · « **Reply #103 on:** October 28, 2011, 12:10:39 PM »

You might have a problem when your enterprise-grade OS doesn't have a better control scheme than Super Mario 64.

Thad · « **Reply #104 on:** October 28, 2011, 12:42:51 PM »

Damn C buttons!

But seriously, not quite sure what you mean.

Anyway. I'm sure I've mentioned this before, but handle positions with no memory.

AD again: I click on the Member Of tab to see what groups a user is in. The "Name" column is roughly 15 characters wide. Now, it is perfectly reasonable for it to be narrower than the AD Domain Services Folder column (because even the damn NAME of that column is more than 15 characters wide), but this company's got lots of groups with names that are too long to fit in that narrow a space. So EVERY SINGLE TIME I OPEN THE WINDOW I have to widen the Name column, because it has no memory of me doing it 30 seconds ago.

Of course, this would all be unnecessary if not for another one of my serious UI pet peeves: windows that can't fucking be resized.

I am viewing this on a 1680x1050 monitor; there is NO FUCKING REASON my window should be stuck at 575x605 (including decoration). If your window has more than two sentences and an OK/Cancel on it, it should be fucking resizable, and that includes minimize/maximize buttons.

(Also, even if a window IS nothing but two sentences and an OK/Cancel, I should goddamn-well be able to highlight those two sentences and Ctrl-C them. Or, better yet, have a way of copying the text to the clipboard without having to select it manually. There's no good damn reason why I should have to TYPE an error message into my search box when it is CURRENTLY ON THE SAME SCREEN AS THE SEARCH BOX I AM TYPING IT INTO.)

Thad · « **Reply #105 on:** October 31, 2011, 11:40:12 AM »

Why the fuck can't I move a parent window?

I can understand not being able to interact with it (SOMETIMES), but if it's in the goddamn way why can't I just move it without having to close its child window?

I'm currently trying to copy data from an Excel spreadsheet into a dialog box in a different program. As it turns out, the dialog box's parent is sitting smack dab the fuck in front of the data I need to copy. The dialog is not in the way, but its parent is. Why the hell should I have to Alt-Tab over to Excel to read those boxes instead of just being able to move the window I'm not using out of the way?

Also: If anyone can give me a single case where it's appropriate for a window to spawn on a different screen than the active parent window that just spawned it, I'd love to hear it.

Ziiro · « **Reply #106 on:** October 31, 2011, 03:20:42 PM »

Using Ctrl+A in a field doesn't select the whole field. It doesn't do anything, in fact. In the program I was just using, it just gives a fucking error beep. From the motherboard.

I feel this warrants a post by itself because this is actually a huge issue with several programs/websites I've been using recently.

sei · « **Reply #107 on:** November 04, 2011, 10:42:24 AM »

The Google Docs Equation Editor is mostly okay, but Docs acts stupidly around the formulas.

Suppose you put the cursor OUTSIDE of the formula, adjacent to the formula, like so:
[formula]|

(The pipe is the cursor.)

If you hit home, you should be taken to the beginning of the line, like in every other fucking thing you work with, right?

Docs takes the home keypress and puts you at the very top of the god damned document. This is lots of fun when you're on page 23 of a 40 page document.

Shitty workaround: put a space after every formula, to lower the chance your cursor is adjacent to the document.

Also, GDEE won't let you resize/highlight the equations unless you also select some non-formula test.
Also, having a GDEE equation on a line makes the cursor shift in unpredictable fucking ways, on both axes.
Also, GDEE has no default keyboard shortcut. You need a user script or to use a macro program.

It's almost worth just using the codecogs online latex editor to make images and then just paste them into GDocs, but that's a huge fucking pain in the ass in itself. It would be slightly less of a pain in the ass if you could right click a web image in GDocs and change the URL, since then I could change the codecogs equations in-line, but as is, having to do the whole alt tab, [do stuff], copy url, new image, paste url thing is a huge amount of workload overhead.

Thad · « **Reply #108 on:** November 04, 2011, 10:45:31 AM »

Yeah, that's what the Home button does on Macs.

I hate it.

Why would you want that?

Caithness · « **Reply #109 on:** November 04, 2011, 10:48:08 AM »

Because there's a different command to go to the beginning of a line. ctrl-left and cmd-left both seem to work.

Thad · « **Reply #110 on:** November 04, 2011, 11:02:43 AM »

Yes, but I expect that to move by word, not line. And then I have to use the Option key to do that.

You can't even really make the argument that it's so you keep both hands on the home row, because the Home key is roughly the same distance from the home row as the left arrow. (And anyway if users were more concerned about keeping their hands on the home row than having clearly-labeled keys, we'd be using vi/emacs/wasd navigation.)

Bongo Bill · « **Reply #111 on:** November 05, 2011, 11:10:33 PM »

Ctrl-home is for going to the top of the document anyway.

Thad · « **Reply #112 on:** November 10, 2011, 07:16:17 AM »

I hate pretty much everything about how Excel behaves when multiple documents are open.

They're treated as multiple docs within the same window, but they're not tabbed. You can Alt-Tab between them, but for some goddamn reason one of them will show up multiple times (once for the program and once for the document, I expect), making it possible to Alt-Tab from the Excel doc you're currently in to...the same doc you were already in. (As you might expect, the thumbnails do very little to distinguish between Excel windows, because MANY EXCEL SPREADSHEETS LOOK SIMILAR.)

Running dual monitors? Want to put one spreadsheet on one monitor and another on the other? Well, you'll just have to open two separate instances of the program. Or manually stretch the window and tile them, I guess, if you hate yourself or something.

But hey, you know, MS was busy throwing out 20 years of UI design. They didn't have time for things like learning how to design a fucking tabbed interface.

Brentai · « **Reply #113 on:** November 10, 2011, 07:30:34 AM »

Extremely simple and well-documented method for making Excel documents open in their own window.

I had to track that one down because I almost always have two Excel spreadsheets open at my job. Turns out some people use Office in their workplace? I'm not sure if MS gets that.

Thad · « **Reply #114 on:** November 10, 2011, 08:17:33 AM »

Yeah, I know about that. I'm not sure I'd describe it as "extremely simple" -- it's easy enough to implement but frankly it strikes me as needlessly complicated.

Any time you require a command line solution for a GUI problem, you've fucked up.

Brentai · « **Reply #115 on:** November 10, 2011, 08:27:11 AM »

I may have been a tad sarcastic about that part.

Zaratustra · « **Reply #116 on:** November 10, 2011, 09:09:39 AM »

Funny that a system called Windows has all but abandoned them.

Thad · « **Reply #117 on:** November 10, 2011, 11:02:47 AM »

While my disdain for the "everything has to be fullscreen" approach is well-documented, in my experience most users (myself included) work in maximized windows and switch between them. (This is the chief reason I haven't tried my hand at a tiling WM -- there are very few occasions where I need a browser, a text editor, and a console all onscreen at once. Also, most of them are butt-ugly.)

Office is one of those things where you MIGHT very well want to have two documents onscreen at the same time, in separate windows -- and one on each monitor, if you're doing dual monitors. I'd say it's an exception, but it's a pretty fucking huge one as it's a piece of software damn-near everybody uses.

Course, just now I'm working on retiring old computers, so I've got an Excel spreadsheet, AD, SCCM, and inventory software open and spread across two screens. This is pretty much the exact situation tiling WM's are made for.

Thad · « **Reply #118 on:** November 10, 2011, 12:32:20 PM »

Delete one object from SCCM: It disappears from the list.

Delete multiple objects from SCCM: They disappear from the list, which is then reset to the default sort order and scrolls back to the beginning.

Thad · « **Reply #119 on:** November 11, 2011, 11:51:44 AM »

There is no FUCKING reason why a BIOS should EVER be set, by default, to halt on a keyboard error.

What the hell century is this? Hot-swappable keyboards have been the norm since what, 1999?

If my computer boots and I suddenly find that my keyboard wasn't plugged in, I'll plug the goddamn thing in. And it will work. Without needing to reboot. Because this is two thousand and goddamn eleven.

If, on the other hand, I have a couple of hundred computers that I want to be able to run headless, I'd very much prefer not to have to change a BIOS setting on every single one of them!

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Author Topic: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design (Read 22858 times)