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Author Topic: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design  (Read 25831 times)

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Thad

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #220 on: September 15, 2013, 05:10:17 AM »

My recollection is that some -- not all -- of the programs in 2007 or 2010 had the option buried somewhere in their bowels to disable formatting on paste as default instead of as something you had to right-click and specifically request.  I haven't even checked in 2013.

There are a limited number of cases where you might want to carry over SOME elements of formatting -- headings, bolds, italics, basdically anything that had a tag in HTML1.  Copying links has some obvious utility; there've been any number of times where I've quoted an article here from off-site and had to paste the links back in.

But yes, by and large these are exceptions, not rules, and that's how they should be treated.  One more example of MS ramming UI design down everybody's throats regardless of what users actually want or need.
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Mongrel

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #221 on: September 15, 2013, 05:36:59 AM »

What I found truly weird were the hadnful of times I CUT and pasted into notepad, then CUT and pasted from notepad into Word, only for the formatting to be preserved. I don't know how the hell that even happens.
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Thad

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #222 on: October 12, 2013, 12:57:53 PM »

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Dooly

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #223 on: October 12, 2013, 01:18:09 PM »

Is there no longer a way to get to Google Translate from Google's homepage without searching for "Google Translate" or memorizing its URL?
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TA

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #224 on: October 12, 2013, 01:23:46 PM »

Go to google.com.  Click the little 3x3 Apps block in the upper right.  Click More.  Translate is the first option.

Alternately ... it's just translate.google.com.  Not exactly a strain on the memory.
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Mongrel

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #225 on: October 12, 2013, 01:41:06 PM »

Yeah, I'm not really a fan of the recent google change. Translate and Maps are each an extra click away and Images is much further from where my hand/mouse would normally be now.
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MarsDragon

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #226 on: October 13, 2013, 04:53:55 AM »



It's a hedge against various screen resolutions that hasn't caught up to the fact we've figured out reactionary design and variable-width layouts by now.

The site I work on uses that sort of idea, but less blatantly.
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Zaratustra

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #227 on: October 13, 2013, 06:28:11 AM »

Also, reading very wide text blocks is a pain in the ass. Why do we have widescreen monitors, then?



We just don't know.

R^2

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #228 on: October 13, 2013, 06:53:15 AM »

I don't even have a very good monitor and I rarely if ever maximize my browser window.
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TA

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #229 on: October 13, 2013, 07:01:53 AM »

Man, the problem isn't that there's white space on the sides.  The problem is that because of the arbitrary width of the content column, there is a horizontal scrollbar for that chunk of logging.
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Mongrel

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #230 on: October 13, 2013, 07:18:30 AM »

Not knowing anything about the code/coding displayed, would wrapping the text have been problematic?
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Brentai

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #231 on: October 13, 2013, 08:34:52 AM »

It'd be understandable if that column was wide enough or if the text in that paste widget was small enough to accommodate 80 characters.  That's a standard terminal size and you can argue that any scrolling/line breaks there would happen on a default TTY window or some other anachronistic thing.  But no, the text width there seems to be a little over 50 characters.

This would seem like an edge case until you realize that we're talking about a site about asking development questions, and specifically a subweb for asking questions that will pretty commonly involve terminal output, so why they acted like the target width in characters was big unknown is agh fuck it.
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Thad

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #232 on: October 14, 2013, 05:01:39 PM »

It's a hedge against various screen resolutions that hasn't caught up to the fact we've figured out reactionary design and variable-width layouts by now.

You don't need anything nearly as complicated as responsive CSS to define a reasonable relative width for a block that uses a FIXED-WIDTH FONT.

Also, reading very wide text blocks is a pain in the ass.

Sure is.  But if that content area were 50% wider, it would be 1476px -- which would only take up about 78% of the width of a 1920x1080 monitor, which is a pretty standard resolution for desktops and laptops in 2013.  4/5 of the width of a 16:9 screen's not bad, right?

Sometime around the turn of the century, everybody decided that website boundaries should be defined in absolute instead of relative values, because they are much much easier to code that way and look much more consistent across browsers.

Which is fine and fucking dandy, but 984px wide was ALREADY a pretty damn low width for a screen back then.  Can you even buy a 1280x1024 monitor anymore?

It's stupid.  It's too wide for a phone and too narrow for a tablet.

Man, the problem isn't that there's white space on the sides.  The problem is that because of the arbitrary width of the content column, there is a horizontal scrollbar for that chunk of logging.

The horizontal scrollbar is the injury.  The majority of the window being used for absolutely fucking nothing is the insult.

Not knowing anything about the code/coding displayed, would wrapping the text have been problematic?

It's hypothetically easier to read code if it preserves whitespace -- linebreaks and tab placement are important.

But in practice, (1) code you can't read is not fucking useful, (2) wrapping does not affect linebreaks and you can paste wrapped text into a terminal just fine, and (3) given that we're just looking at console output, no, the whitespace is not terribly important in this instance or the vast majority of code tags on the site.

It'd be understandable if that column was wide enough or if the text in that paste widget was small enough to accommodate 80 characters.  That's a standard terminal size and you can argue that any scrolling/line breaks there would happen on a default TTY window or some other anachronistic thing.  But no, the text width there seems to be a little over 50 characters.

This would seem like an edge case until you realize that we're talking about a site about asking development questions, and specifically a subweb for asking questions that will pretty commonly involve terminal output, so why they acted like the target width in characters was big unknown is agh fuck it.

Right, pretty much this.  It would have been pretty fucking trivial to define the width of the code block as 80 characters using em's or ex's (because when you are using a fixed-width font, 80em = 80ex = 80 times the width of any damn character because they are ALL THE SAME WIDTH).  Failing that, I'm pretty strongly of the opinion that if there is a scrollbar INSIDE your webpage, it had better be on (1) a large textarea like the one I am currently typing in or (2) the index on an API (the single case where frames are still an acceptable form of design).  Having to scroll around the interior of a webpage to read content is just fucking awful.

Indeed, that's the major reason why websites ARE designed to be so narrow -- so that you don't have to scroll around them horizontally on a low-res screen.  But again, this design fails on low-res, hi-res, and medium-res levels.  It's just terrible.
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Mongrel

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #233 on: October 15, 2013, 02:35:00 AM »

a 1920x1080 monitor, which is a pretty standard resolution for desktops and laptops in 2013

I just want to point out that this is broadly true if you're buying new monitors. However, the business world is YEARS behind.

I mean only THIS WEEK, did our department finish upgrading from sub-1000 pixel width, 90's-era monitors (you know the ones with the really huge borders around the screen? First gen LCD stuff). And we upgraded to 1280x1024 (though I've had a slightly bigger one for like two years because of my shitty eyesight and my old one died). And the only reason we got THOSE is because a guy in my dept heard another department was throwing out their old 1280x1024s and ragged on our managers to try and grab them instead of their just going to the dumpster.

And I work for a TECHNOLOGY COMPANY.

I think maybe this is worse up here because [endless jokes about Canadians' satisfaction with mediocrity], but I'm sure there's no shortage of US companies in a similar state. So the intended audience of that website might be worth considering. It PROBABLY doesn't justify the scrollbar mess, but maybe?
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Zaratustra

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #234 on: October 15, 2013, 06:22:25 AM »

yeah, first world problems: my screen's resolution is so massive most websites have text too small to read comfortably without zooming in and breaking the layout.

Let's not even get into flash games.

Thad

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #235 on: October 15, 2013, 04:38:44 PM »

So the intended audience of that website might be worth considering.

Well, for starters, 100% of all people trying to get graphics acceleration working on their Samsung Chromebooks have access to a monitor with 1366x768 resolution or better.

Speaking for the site in general?  It's Ask Ubuntu.  Which is part of Stack Exchange.  It's for computer users who are more technically savvy than typical.  While there are plenty of users running Ubuntu on older hardware, I can't imagine many of them like having to scroll horizontally to read console output.  For fuck's sake, preventing users from having to scroll horizontally is the ENTIRE PURPOSE for MAKING a website's content area that small.

And something else about the audience: they're not looking for flashy graphics.  Take a look at that site layout.  Is there any reason why its dimensions need to be defined in pixels instead of em's or percents?

I can see exactly one spot: the height of the secondary navbar needs to be the same as the height of the Ask Ubuntu graphic.  Absolutely everything else could -- and, precisely BECAUSE of the audience, SHOULD -- be defined with relative units instead of pixels.  (With some possible max-width hedging if you're really worried about the content area getting too wide, but in this case I think it's better to rely on the user to resize his window if the display is not to his liking.)

I think maybe this is worse up here because [endless jokes about Canadians' satisfaction with mediocrity], but I'm sure there's no shortage of US companies in a similar state.

I'm sure they're out there but I have never worked at one.  Even as the lowest man on the totem pole, I've always had at least a 1280x1024 monitor (and frequently two of them).  I've never even SEEN an LCD monitor with a width of less than 1024 pixels.

It PROBABLY doesn't justify the scrollbar mess, but maybe?

Nothing will ever justify the scrollbar mess.
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Thad

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #236 on: November 10, 2013, 03:23:02 PM »

The installer for the latest GeForce drivers runs in a window that is too big to fit on a screen at 800x600.
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Mongrel

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #237 on: November 10, 2013, 03:32:28 PM »

Here's something about the work system that just drives me nuts: When you type in a file number, account number, etc. - anything at all really - in our system's search fields, it recognizes spaces as distinct characters in their own right.

So when I copy-paste an account number from another system, I have to go in and delete the the file number, because if I don't it gets a not found error.

For bonus points, when you run an account search and the item isn't found, the number you typed in is erased/not carried over (I have developed the habit of ctrl+c-ing all account/file numbers before searching for them).

And that's our NEWER system. I wonder how many man-hours that bit of stupidity has lost the company?
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Dooly

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #238 on: November 10, 2013, 04:58:33 PM »

The installer for the latest GeForce drivers runs in a window that is too big to fit on a screen at 800x600.

If you have an nVidia card new enough to not just need the legacy driver, why the hell are you only running at 800x600?
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Thad

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of UI Design
« Reply #239 on: November 10, 2013, 05:11:21 PM »

Er, because I haven't installed the drivers yet...?
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