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Author Topic: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design  (Read 25822 times)

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JDigital

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #180 on: December 13, 2012, 11:55:27 PM »

Zara's current work password is HHHhhh888
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Brentai

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #181 on: December 14, 2012, 01:20:48 AM »

Vriska approves.
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Mongrel

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #182 on: December 23, 2012, 08:59:46 PM »

It would be nice if you could get Google Drive to display filesizes or metadata. Or more accurately, if you could get them to display this in any way other than using the sort function to re-sort all your folders by size.
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Royal☭

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #183 on: January 11, 2013, 11:53:19 AM »

"If you'd like to cancel your account, please call this number xxx-xxx-xxxx and we'll send a cancellation email"

That shit should be illegal.

Thad

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #184 on: January 11, 2013, 11:57:09 AM »

I'm still trying to get off the MSDN mailing list.  But I can't remember my fucking username and password and they won't unsubscribe you without a login.
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Zaratustra

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #185 on: January 11, 2013, 12:05:14 PM »

When that happens I just set a gmail filter to forward everything to the spam folder.

Beat Bandit

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #186 on: February 11, 2013, 09:42:47 AM »

If you're a company that only accepts online applications and requires an account to apply for any position, why can't you save any of that information for another position?
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Brentai

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #187 on: February 11, 2013, 10:51:30 AM »

HRIS seems to be at the bottom of the pecking order for CS/SE talent.  All those systems are uniformly terrible.
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Thad

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #188 on: February 11, 2013, 10:44:04 PM »

If you're a company that only accepts online applications and requires an account to apply for any position, why can't you save any of that information for another position?

This is pretty much why I eventually instituted a "no submitting resumes to places that don't accept a simple E-Mail/Careerbuilder/etc. submission" policy (with the occasional exception for the occasional job that looks like a really good fit).

Granted, I'm still unemployed, so I'm not really in much of a position to offer advice to anybody.  But I don't think I'd raise my likelihood of employment any by spending half an hour setting up an account every time I wanted to apply for a job.
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Thad

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #189 on: February 16, 2013, 10:42:43 PM »

Doing a large filecopy on OSX.

Did not realize how balls-out terrible OSX's filecopy is.

Sure, it's not quite as bad as Windows's (pre-Win8), but it's up there.

If you hit a filename conflict, you get a popup that gives you 3 options: you can overwrite the file in the destination, you can keep both files (there is no option to choose how the second file is renamed), or you can cancel.

Now, this list of options makes sense if you are trying to copy EXACTLY ONE FILE (in which case "Cancel" and "Keep the destination file, don't copy the source file" are the same thing).

If you are trying to copy MORE than one file, then there is NO WAY TO CHOOSE "Keep the destination file, don't copy the source file."

So let's say you're copying, oh, I don't know, the entire contents of a 200GB hard drive.  Let's say it's got thousands, or maybe tens of thousands, of files on it.  And THREE of those files have the same name as files on the destination drive.

You hit a file with a redundant name.  It doesn't give you any fucking information on the relative file sizes or modification dates; it just tells you that two of them have the same name.  You can overwrite, you can keep both, or you can CANCEL THE ENTIRE 200GB FILECOPY.

Now, if it's one of the first few files being copied, then it's probably fine to go ahead and cancel and then go compare the files manually before you start again.  If it's one somewhere in the middle?  Well, you don't want to start the whole damn transfer over, and you don't want to risk overwriting, so that pretty much leaves Keep Both Files, just to be on the safe side, and check later if you wound up with two copies of the same file.

But oh hey what if, for the sake of argument, the three files out of thousands that have redundant names also happen to come out to about 70GB out of the entire 200?

It really is mind-boggling to me how fucking simple and fundamental an operation a copy is, how obvious its various warning conditions are, and the possible resolutions to each -- and how fucking horribly and utterly the GUI designers for the two biggest desktop OS's have failed at this very simple task.  (Again, MS finally fixed it in Win8.  For all I know Apple may have fixed it in Mountain Lion, but Apple doesn't want me running Mountain Lion on my computer so I haven't checked.)

I get that KDE is intimidating to people -- even Linux users -- with its customizability and its crazy number of options.

But when I get a filename conflict on a copy in Dolphin (and this is Dolphin, the simpler file manager that they added because people thought Konqueror was too complicated), I get:

The name, size, and last-modified timestamp of both files
The option to replace, rename (to a name of my choosing!), skip, or cancel
A checkbox for "Do this for all conflicts"

That doesn't seem complicated to me.  It seems really fucking simple.  It seems a lot the fuck simpler than having to dick around with "This file in the middle of your 200GB transfer has the same name as another file and that is all the information you get; do you want to copy the new file over the old one, copy the new file and keep the old one, or cancel the entire operation?"  Give me all the relevant information, no more and no less, and all the possible responses, nothing less.
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Thad

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #190 on: March 11, 2013, 07:39:40 PM »

Have I mentioned that KDE is completely FUCKING broken in its handling of SMB?

I mean, you can open up an SMB share in Dolphin trivially; you can browse to it under Network, or use the smb:// prefix.

But if you actually click on any of those files?  It makes a local temp copy and opens THAT.

Want to edit a text file on a remote computer?  Well guess what, you're not; you're editing a temp file sitting somewhere on the local machine that's going to get fucking deleted as soon as you close it.

Want to watch a movie on a remote computer?  Hope it's not too big, because you might have to wait awhile for the entire thing to copy.  (And then mplayer has an unfortunate tendency to crap out trying to play them.  I don't know why that's a problem specifically with large remote movies copied to the tmp folder, but it seems to be in my case, at least.)

Of course, you can get around all this by just mounting the smb share as a local directory.  Which works great.  Unless your router reboots at some point, in which case the next time you open any kind of fucking filebrowser dialog the entire KDE UI is going to lock right the fuck up.

Beginning to see why people use GNOME.
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Brentai

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #191 on: March 11, 2013, 07:42:04 PM »

Android seems to want to do this a lot too.  Third-party file browsers and such quickly become the du jour, but I guess that's intentional.
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Thad

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #192 on: March 12, 2013, 06:51:39 AM »

Well, and that brings up a point: the root of the problem's not with KDE, it's with SMB/CIFS mounting itself.  It's not just a KDE filebrowser that'll hang; if you do an ls /media/htpc/movies or whatever it'll hang indefinitely too (and have to be killed with a -9).  Difference is that it'll only happen on the command line if you're actually trying to interact with the mounted directory; it'll happen in a KDE filebrowser no matter what the fuck directory you're actually looking at.
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Büge

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Thad

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #194 on: March 18, 2013, 08:21:13 PM »

Kinda old hat, and really only scratches the surface of the problem that desktop computers are not phones or TV's.  The Kinect interface IS a great idea -- for choosing between large tiles on a screen ten feet away.  It's generally inferior to a keyboard and mouse for simple day-to-day use.

Which really was the stupidest damn thing about Minority Report: try waving your fucking arms for eight hours a day while you're sitting at a desk.  It is NOT PRACTICAL.  RSI's bad enough just resting your hands like claws all day; try holding them up in the air and see how long you can keep THAT going.

Gesture-based controls work fine on phones and tablets, because you are very deliberately trading a fast and sophisticated interface for one that is light and mobile.  I can write the occasional E-Mail on them -- it's usually a short couple of sentences and it takes a damn sight longer than it would with a keyboard, but it's perfectly doable.

But an actual, day-to-day workload?  I wouldn't do it without adding a keyboard, and even then it'd be inconvenient.

The other big problem that's only briefly mentioned in the piece is discoverability.  While pinch-to-zoom and swipe-to-switch-desktops are straightforward enough, other gestures are a lot more opaque.  It took me ages to figure out I had to hold to paste, and selection/copying still works for shit in most programs.  (K9 in particular; I probably spent ten minutes today just trying to highlight and copy an address to paste it into my calendar.  It kept either launching it in Google Maps or giving me those stupid swipe-to-select grabbers that never quite work right; eventually I gave up, let it launch in Google Maps, and then copied it from there.)

And that just starts to get into the problem of fragmentation.

Have you ever USED Windows?  Even MS can't keep its fucking UI straight across its various programs.  Third-party developers are less consistent, and the smaller and nichier the product the less likely it is to behave consistently with everything else on your damn computer.

Linux is worse.  Android is worse still.  I haven't used iOS extensively; I'm guessing it's a little more consistent than Android but still not nearly as consistent as Apple would like it to be.

Ever use PerfectViewer?  It's a great little reader.  But good fucking luck remembering which part of the screen you're supposed to touch for any given command.  Is there a way to make it list all of them after the first time you open it?  Probably, but it's one more damn thing that is totally opaque and indecipherable.  And the reason I couldn't figure out hold-to-paste on my tablet?  Because on my phone I use Swype, which uses good ol' Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for copy and paste.

There's an excuse for behavior like this on phones and tablets -- because again, space is at a premium.

But, as I've often lamented, this UI philosophy has infected desktops, and it's terrible.

It's one thing to autohide the taskbar -- hell, it was damn near a necessity in the 800x600 days.  But it's pretty fucking unnecessary when your resolution is 1920x1200.

Ubuntu, at least, has the good sense to recognize that it doesn't need to autohide its taskbar.  But it's got the damn-fool idea that it needs to hide every-fucking-thing else.  Menubars don't appear unless you mouse over them; hit Alt and instead of toggling the menubar you get an inexplicable search box.  The box is so you can type in the menu item you're looking for -- which is actually a perfectly good idea for power users who are comfortable with the command line in the first place, which probably describes a typical Linux user, even an Ubuntu user -- but it's jarring as fuck when you expect the Alt key to behave in a certain way, and UTTERLY FUCKING USELESS if you don't already know what you're looking for.  (And, you know, if I already know what I'm looking for, I'm probably going to use a keyboard shortcut anyway, not type in the fucking name of it.  Why in the hell would I hit Alt and type Print instead of just hitting Ctrl-P?  The ideal use is for commands that don't have keyboard shortcuts.  Why don't they have keyboard shortcuts?  Because they're probably not the most common or frequently-used menu items.  Meaning, hey, maybe it would be a good idea to give the user a LIST of menu items instead of expecting him to remember the specific phrase he's looking for.)

There's shit like that all over.  GNOME 3 manages to somehow combine an unnecessary lack of discoverability WITH a huge amount of wasted screen space,

through the magic of COMPLETELY SEPARATING the part of the interface where you interact with programs from the part of the interface where you switch between them, like it's fucking vi or something.

(In fairness that screenshot is several versions old at this point.  Hopefully they have improved it by this point.)

There's this trend toward hiding scrollbars, hiding menubars, hiding every fucking thing you need to actually make your computer work.  I still don't know how to get Windows 8 to shut down in fewer than five keypresses.

And again, all this behavior is acceptable on a phone because you really DO need every damn pixel on that little screen -- but on a full-size monitor it's completely goddamn insane.

Like touch controls.
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JDigital

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #195 on: March 19, 2013, 01:51:25 AM »

I quite like Unity, Ubuntu's interface. It's got a Windows 7 style taskbar, but an Amiga-style title bar that holds the current application's menu on mouseover. It also puts the quit button in the top left like Amiga.

These are good design choices. According to AskTog, it makes more sense to put things at the edge of the screen, because it's the easiest target (no matter how far you move the mouse up, you can't overshoot the edge of the screen). AskTog also believes that the top-left is slightly easier to hit than top-right.

Unity's not perfect, though. The alt-tab is slower than Windows 7 and doesn't have any border on its font so if your text colour is the same as the background you can't see the application's name, just its icon. You also have the Linux problem that apps are designed for different windowing systems and they don't all take advantage of things like Unity's system tray.
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Thad

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #196 on: March 19, 2013, 12:08:15 PM »

Yeah, that's a biggie.

I've never used Unity as my primary but I've had it on a laptop since whenever-the-hell-it-was Ubuntu made it the default.  It looks to me like they've done a better job over the past couple of years at getting the various API's to integrate properly with, for example, the menubar system, but it's still not 100%.  And I imagine Mir will break everything all over again.

(Hell, you'll still see problems getting Qt and GTK programs to look and behave similarly even if you're using KDE or GNOME, which are much better-established and less radical departures than Unity.)

Last I checked Unity is also vastly inferior to other DE's in its customization options -- including some pretty fucking basic ones.  Just the other day I had to install some obscure package just to let me create a launcher on the desktop.

Course, given that (again, last I checked) GNOME doesn't even allow you to PUT shit on the desktop anymore by default, maybe that's NOT much of a limitation compared to its contemporaries.
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Smiler

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #197 on: March 19, 2013, 12:11:11 PM »

There's a lot of letter's being thrown around that I don't understand, so I guess it is time to hit the Stallman alarm.

STALLMANQUEST
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Thad

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #198 on: March 20, 2013, 09:40:27 PM »

Any fucking dialog that tells you the computer has to reboot and has an "OK" button but no "Cancel".
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Royal☭

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #199 on: March 21, 2013, 06:58:18 AM »

Enjoying Windows 8, then?
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