Stop coding and clean up your UI, devs, it's World Usability Day

November 13th is World Usability Day, the annual event that urges all and sundry “to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use.” The day's raison d'être is promoting good design, so that products and services are easy to use, rather than useless. Physical objects are the …

[Anonymous Coward]

Would someone please tell MS about this!

Their Windows 8/8.1 UI clearly fails the obviousness test.

{hint, the charms crappy thingy}

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Would someone please tell MS about this!

Charms are brilliant.

[Al fazed]

re: Charms are brilliant.

If I remember rightly charms are some sort of magic trick whiich is used by witches and others to con someone.

[Adam 1]

Re: Would someone please tell MS about this!

Charms may be OK** but they totally ruined the network connection status popup that used to be there.

** providing you only have one monitor.

[big_D]

W3C Validation != Usability

You didn't mention what the errors were. But do they negatively affect usability or are they sops to non-standard and older browsers, so that it is usable on them?

I used to code my sites error free, then go back and "break" the 100% error free state by throwing in browser specific hacks, so that the site still displayed correctly on compliant browsers, but would also display correctly on older or non-standard browsers.

Safari for Windows used to be a pain, it would render things slightly differently to the OS X version and differently to Chrome, Firefox and IE on Windows...

[James 51]

UI design is one of those potato/potaato situations. 'You're hiding info from the users/You've reduced screen clutter and information overload.' 'We should expect a certain level of ability in users/new users log a lot of support calls' etc etc

[John Brown (no body)]

Yes, that always reminds me of the days when I used to buy paper maps. A road atlas sold as "Voted Britains Clearest Mapping". It was great. Lovely clear maps. Easy to use. Excellent UI. Except when you needed to find small out of the way places. You make a map "clear" by leaving stuff out. Suddenly it's no longer useful.

Computer UIs are being dumbed down in the the same way and that's unforgivable because it's piss easy to make all those other functions available to those who want them while keeping them hidden from those who don't. But so often the advanced function are missing altogether or hidden so well as to be almost unusable.

Personally, I think a lot of the problem is caused by designers who have no idea what users actually do. As with many self-selected groups of people, they have little concept of how other people outside the group think and that what they think is obvious is not so for other people not in the group.

[monkeyfish]

Case in point: Honeywell make lots of products for the high reliabilty sectors (think missiles, medical equipment, space, oil wells etc.). They recently revamped their website. It is now very pretty. Much prettier than before. Unfortunately they have made it nigh on impossible to find useful information on their products. Data-sheets and application notes have been shoved in a pretty-but-useless scrolling thing, so you have to wait for the right one to come round to be able to click on it. It used to be a boring but functional drop-down menu. grr.

[Anonymous Coward]

UI guys must talk to engineers

Too often the UI design comes down from the Mac users on high, and they haven't bothered discussing their whacky ideas with the developers who have to implement them.

[P. Lee]

Am I the only one

who read it as "Word Usability Day"?

Yes please!

No really, there's never a time when I want to build a table of figures and have the figures themselves included in the index.

Its XML gone mad!

[Dan 55]

FTFY

Stop needlessly changing your UI when it was fine before and start coding, devs.

[Khaptain]

End of the line - Need new requirements

I think that there are only so many ways that one can create a UI before it simply becomes are re-mash of the existant..

We are after all limited to a 2d surface and regardless of which pointing device is implemeted, be it physical mouse, touchscreen or finger placement sensor the actions always resolve to the same end function -ie that of moving the cursor. Same goes for the keybaord and character entry.

Until such times as the needs arise for a new kind of entry, ie not a pointing device or character entry device, things will continue to remain kinda much the same.

Windows 8 tried to add something new but in the end it was just a mashup between borderless windows + active icons that were arranged in a new manner. It wasn't so much an improvement as a different way of seeing things.

Maybe what we we need next is a mood detector : ie the screen changes according to our moods.... Or an anger level management system, whereby the UI/OS automatically injects us with morphine or something pleasant whilst we fly of the handle...

In any event as long as we remain with the same material nothing much is likely to "truly" change.

[monkeyfish]

Re: End of the line - Need new requirements

Excellent idea, when it hears you cursing under your breath, or indeed quite loudly rebuking said electronic equipment; then it could undo what it has just done, and try something else.

[Al fazed]

Re: End of the line - Need new requirements

What I need is an interface that stays the same long enough to teach someone else how to use it.

[jake]

Whatever.

Slackware-current on the desktops & BSD on the servers have been working for me & mine for over two decades.

I've tried alternatives (it's my job), but no alternate option has ever been successful.

[sawatts]

Different skill set...

Too often (and almost everywhere I've worked) the GUI/HCI has been an afterthought and left up to the engineers to "design" and implement.

Really though, it requires a quite different skill set - one which bridges psychology, graphic design, and includes workflow analysis.

And in the worst case, the user interface is produced in isolation, without input from its intended end users.

[ilmari]

Usability is different things to different people.

For the nongeek non nerd, you want a flat menu structurd, because hierarchies are confusing and scary, and the nongeek gives up, because the choices on screen are all interpreted as verbs/commands. i.e. "Why press file, i dont want to file, i want to print".

Additionally, on touchscreens, the touchscreen illiterate needs to be given buttons atleast the size of a thumbprint, because that's how they try to interface with it. Say 3x3 cm buttons. This also helps with the computer illiterate's typical eyeglass scantup, which gives them a reading distance that is further away than their arms can reach. The lack of tactile feedback makes the read first, then push button blind strategy unreliable at best. As there's typically no clear feedback whether a command has been accepted either, the user will try pressing harder and harder, or move to alternative approaches such as punching and stabbing, sometimes with implements..

Everyone who claims something is easy to use should be forced to spend a week with these users. :)

[Anonymous Coward]

It took a lot of effort for the devs to implement those shinny (n=>t), non-functional, UIs that your designers insisted on having, don't complain to the devs about how bad they are.

[Al fazed]

typical

is the Microshaft 8 thingy. For decades if you want to close down your machine you use the START button. So instead of correcting this semantics error, they remove the fucking button altogether and force you to adopt top right of screen instead of bottom left you have used and taught others to use, for years.

Instead of fixing the bugs in XP and beyond, they expire all that energy in a new interface in an effor to hide the tradgedies at work or not under the bonnet/hood.

But I suspect their motive is the same as the supermarkets fun loving hide and seek tactic which is employed so you'll discover something else to buy in the spot where the milk used to be. That's why when I decide to play a media file with my favourite software/app, I get an in your fucking face advert telling me I can forget what I was trying to do and go off on a tangent to their wonderful shop where I can buy another app that will do the same thing as the software I asked my fucking computer to open in the first place !!!!!

Do Icome across as a very angry disabled and ancient computer user who has been stiffed into upgrades where none was really necessary............... ?

ALF