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OP is ... This poll is closed. |
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5 | 9.26% |
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12 | 22.22% |
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37 | 68.52% |
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Party Plane Jones posted:Flickr in general is loving awful but that's intentional to prevent people from 'stealing' your pictures. Sure, but isn't the whole point of a photo sharing website to, I don't know, share the photos? At least be able to let others have a look at them?
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Jan 14, 2017 20:14
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:Word having a billion nonsense features seems like a late 90s thing. Does word even have any weird features anymore? It's all pretty straightforward at this point. Microsoft's UI designers DID seem to realize that having a billion similar obscure features hidden everywhere was bad design and moved everything into a pretty small number of buttons and menus. Word still has most of those features, but they've done a lot of UI work around simplifying things, and they've amped up their data collection a lot as well, so they're a lot better at keeping what's widely used and hiding the features that only a few people use. There was a chunk of time (2007-2011 or so) when Microsoft was kind of pushing blogging as something for their employees to do, so there's actually a lot of info about what went into UI decisions in the Windows 7 era and how it differed from how it'd been done before. Jensen Harris, for example, has a lot of posts about what went into the Office 2007 UI, particularly Word - these two posts cover the mess of features and what was done to optimize around that pretty well, I think.
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Jan 14, 2017 20:30
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Want to guess how often anybody had use cases? Ya, this here rings very true. The core of the bad UI I see coming out of Japan is engineers designing features that they would like, as engineers, and what they would like to see, as engineers, as opposed to what the end user would like, or like to see. This however, isn't just a Japan issue, it's an issue in any organization that starts looking inward instead of outward. But as mentioned with Word, that pendulum can swing too far the other way as well. I've found asking "Who gives a poo poo?" to be a somewhat effective strategy for combating either side, specifically on trying to narrow down the scope of who the true end user is, but it's no silver bullet either. I wouldn't be surprised if composing a list of UI/UX smells is useful for at least catching the worst cases. Much like coding, there are plenty of things that have legit use cases, but when overused, or used poorly, ultimately result in a weaker product.
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Jan 14, 2017 20:37
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Main Paineframe posted:Word still has most of those features, but they've done a lot of UI work around simplifying things, and they've amped up their data collection a lot as well, so they're a lot better at keeping what's widely used and hiding the features that only a few people use. There was a chunk of time (2007-2011 or so) when Microsoft was kind of pushing blogging as something for their employees to do, so there's actually a lot of info about what went into UI decisions in the Windows 7 era and how it differed from how it'd been done before. Jensen Harris, for example, has a lot of posts about what went into the Office 2007 UI, particularly Word - these two posts cover the mess of features and what was done to optimize around that pretty well, I think. Nah, auto summarize and stuff are just gone. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc179199.aspx#BKMK_Remmoved It's actually hard to name any really weird features in word now.they do cut things if they stray too far from word processing now. And from things the Internet made obsolete. Word doesn't even really even have clip art anymore just a Bing image search tab.
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Jan 14, 2017 22:37
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I can't believe someone started a UI thread without bringing up the notoriously awful Lotus Notes UI.
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Jan 15, 2017 02:30
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Curvature of Earth posted:I can't believe someone started a UI thread without bringing up the notoriously awful Lotus Notes UI. Oh god, Lotus Notes... I think the only people in the entire world that actually liked Notes were the consultants/"system integrators" that sold Notes poo poo to companies.
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Jan 15, 2017 03:28
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Curvature of Earth posted:I can't believe someone started a UI thread without bringing up the notoriously awful Lotus Notes UI. I can agree there, that was the designated platform for email and meeting scheduling for the office. and how can anyone bring up U/I design without this wonderfully accurate parody
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Jan 15, 2017 03:57
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Switzerland posted:Oh god, Lotus Notes... I think the only people in the entire world that actually liked Notes were the consultants/"system integrators" that sold Notes poo poo to companies. IBM is still using this for their corporate mail client (or was in TYOOL 2014 when I quit). Jesus wept.
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Jan 15, 2017 04:34
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The Oldest Man posted:IBM is still using this for their corporate mail client (or was in TYOOL 2014 when I quit). Jesus wept. Yup.
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Jan 15, 2017 04:39
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Curvature of Earth posted:I can't believe someone started a UI thread without bringing up the notoriously awful Lotus Notes UI. triggered That's what the company I worked for before the UX job used for their mail and company-resource needs. What a pile of poo poo. On a more positive note, but still related to trains for some reason, the JR East ticket gates are A Good Thing.  They have three requirements: 1. Collect money from people passing through them. 2. Stop people who don't have enough money from passing through them. 3. Deal with #1 and #2 for huge numbers of people in short amounts of time. They do these things well and can handle both paper (mag-backed) tickets and RFID passes. They're not significantly different than similar ticket gates in other countries, but I like them because they are very well designed for what they have to do (especially point #3 above). The gates themselves don't open and close for every individual person. Once someone swipes through, the doors stay open for about 10 seconds. As long as the following person also has a valid ticket, it just beeps and flashes up your balance (on the far-side screen, so you can see it even when you've taken a step through). If someone has insufficient credit, or their pass is dead, or they've tried to ride someone's coattails through, it makes a loud ding-dong sound, flashes red, and shuts the gates on them. Takes about three seconds to clear before the person after that can swipe through. I imagine that a large part of their success depends on people here's willingness to actually pay for the train ride and not (on any significant scale) evade fares, since the gates can be waist-high like you see in the picture, but even if you scaled them up to full-height and put blades on the gates or something, they would be better than the lovely, bulky, "where the gently caress is the readout" machines I've seen in other cities. These gates are a good example of something being designed from the consideration of what they need to do rather than "Taro just got certified in Paint Shop Pro and wants to give them anime-lolita curves".
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Jan 15, 2017 06:28
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I think it's rather telling that my Computer Science & Software Engineering program doesn't at all have a UI course, nor is there anything about Affordances for the games specialization.
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Jan 15, 2017 07:13
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Raenir Salazar posted:I think it's rather telling that my Computer Science & Software Engineering program doesn't at all have a UI course, nor is there anything about Affordances for the games specialization. As for comp sci, I'd say that academia could argue that it doesn't belong there, since "computer science" really is just a logic/math curriculum in its strictest sense. Honestly most schools should just rename CS to Software Engineering since that's really the only widely applied use. Sort of like how you could break down the studies of the English language, English literature, and general linguistics into different disciplines. Since we're dumping on Japanese software, is there a reason that everything I see localized from Japan has loving serifed fonts?
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Jan 15, 2017 07:28
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Regular Nintendo posted:As for comp sci, I'd say that academia could argue that it doesn't belong there, since "computer science" really is just a logic/math curriculum in its strictest sense. Honestly most schools should just rename CS to Software Engineering since that's really the only widely applied use. Sort of like how you could break down the studies of the English language, English literature, and general linguistics into different disciplines. This just gets into the political weeds about whether Universities exist to prepare people for work or to advance, maintain, and spread knowledge. Historically they did the latter, but people now expect the former. I still think there is a lot of value in thinking about information, data structures, etc from a strictly academic perspective, but I can understand why people who are attending as a part of a resume for wage-slavery prefer a jobs focused approach.
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Jan 15, 2017 16:21
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Mr. Belding posted:This just gets into the political weeds about whether Universities exist to prepare people for work or to advance, maintain, and spread knowledge. Historically they did the latter, but people now expect the former. I still think there is a lot of value in thinking about information, data structures, etc from a strictly academic perspective, but I can understand why people who are attending as a part of a resume for wage-slavery prefer a jobs focused approach. Yeah. Comp sci seems to more strictly describe the academic study while software engineering is the application of it to solve real problems. The problem is when you slide too far from academia and too far into "get me a job" you get garbage frontend code camps with graduates who know one way to solve one problem
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Jan 15, 2017 17:19
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Curvature of Earth posted:I can't believe someone started a UI thread without bringing up the notoriously awful Lotus Notes UI. holy poo poo. how did this get made? and why on earth would any organization in the world have picked this over an outlook solution? I mean look at this quote:You can set up Notes to automatically display an alert when a mail comes in. Choosing "OK" will clear the alert and do nothing else (well, you wanted to be notified, so, notified you are). However, if you choose "OK," complete what you were doing, and then switch to Notes a few minutes later you'll find - no mail. The new mail is only actually collected if you choose "Open Mail". On the other hand, if you've got the "drafts" folder of your inbox open at the time you choose "Open Mail," nothing will happen and the new mail will not be retrieved.  Regular Nintendo posted:Yeah. Comp sci seems to more strictly describe the academic study while software engineering is the application of it to solve real problems. The problem is when you slide too far from academia and too far into "get me a job" you get garbage frontend code camps with graduates who know one way to solve one problem yeah this is a great point. i was a math student by degree and we had to take a programming course to graduate. everyone thought it would be really difficult, but after taking formal logic and other high level math courses it was a real breeze. if you understand why recursion works or how if/then conditions function, etc. then programming is just a matter of learning a language's specific syntax and quirks. i might not know how exactly c++ works but if you put me in front of a c++ compiler with a reference guide i could spit out usable (but messy) code fairly quickly. if you take a CS student who never was taught all the whys of how code works and just the syntax they'd never be able to figure it out. it's why i think good CS programs should start out without anyone coding anything at all, just to teach them the logic behind why everything works. axeil fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Jan 15, 2017 |
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Jan 15, 2017 18:02
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axeil posted:yeah this is a great point. i was a math student by degree and we had to take a programming course to graduate. everyone thought it would be really difficult, but after taking formal logic and other high level math courses it was a real breeze. if you understand why recursion works or how if/then conditions function, etc. then programming is just a matter of learning a language's specific syntax and quirks. I agree with this, but I don't think it precludes including human-computer interaction as a subfield of computer science rather than viewing it as solely a software engineering issue.
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Jan 15, 2017 18:30
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axeil posted:yeah this is a great point. i was a math student by degree and we had to take a programming course to graduate. everyone thought it would be really difficult, but after taking formal logic and other high level math courses it was a real breeze. if you understand why recursion works or how if/then conditions function, etc. then programming is just a matter of learning a language's specific syntax and quirks. Exactly. Your c++ analogy works perfectly - you can write code. The SWE side of it involves the c++ compiler, the toolchain used to turn that c++ (and other resources like whatever ui builder you used!) into a product that isn't lotus fuckin notes
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Jan 15, 2017 18:42
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Mr. Belding posted:This just gets into the political weeds about whether Universities exist to prepare people for work or to advance, maintain, and spread knowledge. Historically they did the latter, but people now expect the former. I still think there is a lot of value in thinking about information, data structures, etc from a strictly academic perspective, but I can understand why people who are attending as a part of a resume for wage-slavery prefer a jobs focused approach. User interface and design has a lot of theory to it, as well. It's silly to silo off computational systems from the fact that people interact with them, and academic purity is no excuse.
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Jan 15, 2017 18:43
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Curvature of Earth posted:I can't believe someone started a UI thread without bringing up the notoriously awful Lotus Notes UI. We use IBM notes at work for mainly legacy reasons. (it's bad)
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Jan 15, 2017 19:51
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Bip Roberts posted:We use IBM notes at work for mainly legacy reasons. (it's bad) Lotus Notes is so bad I had half a day of training to learn how to use it. Not because I'm a mouth-breathing moron - I hope - but just because of how unintuitive everything is. To this day I still don't understand who could have looked at the e-mail and calendar behavior and UIs then said "yep, that's good, ship it". Then again, the problems were clearly deeper than just the end-user side since the instructor taught us how to use a small program that was pre-installed on every PC in the company which only served to terminate the run-time of a local Lotus Notes session... I don't like some of Outlook's features, since it's not the first mail client I used extensively, but using Notes was torture. No matter what, I felt compelled to check that it had actually done what I asked it do to. Send a mail? Check that it's been sent. Looking at your inbox? Check if it's properly fetched mail recently. Creating an appointment? Check that it actually sent the request to the invitees. It's like it's actively working against you half the time, between hanging for no obvious reason, unintuitive behaviour, local settings that are just randomly overwritten/reset by the network administrator or corrupted, and ridiculously obtuse settings and menus... I am still baffled why anybody would actually pay IBM for Notes given how much frustration and wasted effort it leads to.
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Jan 15, 2017 22:20
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Absurd Alhazred posted:User interface and design has a lot of theory to it, as well. It's silly to silo off computational systems from the fact that people interact with them, and academic purity is no excuse. Yes, UX design has a lot of theory to it (as if anyone argued otherwise). That doesn't mean that it's a computer science subject. It's not related to the science of computing. It's related to the art/craft/engineering project of creating a user facing application. Someone who designs databases does not necessarily need to know about end user interfaces, and the sorts of interfaces they design (APIs) have their own sets of requirements, and frankly are far more forgiving. Even that has little to do with actual computer science. To draw an analogy, there could potentially be reasons to require people majoring in math to study applications of math (such as engineering). That said their degree is not and perhaps should not be focused on those applications, but rather on the study of mathematics.
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Jan 16, 2017 00:18
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Regular Nintendo posted:Since we're dumping on Japanese software, is there a reason that everything I see localized from Japan has loving serifed fonts?
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Jan 16, 2017 07:21
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FilthyImp posted:I'd like to know this as well. There's a "Japanese" look to text that's just really grating for some reason. Well not growing up using Latin letters natively they probably have a different feel for them.
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Jan 16, 2017 08:22
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Absurd Alhazred posted:User interface and design has a lot of theory to it, as well. It's silly to silo off computational systems from the fact that people interact with them, and academic purity is no excuse. "Real" computer science is a math class and doesn't even really have a computer involved, You could do a whole computer science degree and never learn a programming language except the fact people also want jobs beyond thinking about algorithms abstractly. It's not being too hoity toity to learn UIs, it's like saying that a biochemist should learn bedside manner like a doctor, it's someone interacting with medicine at a different level.
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Jan 16, 2017 15:18
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Curvature of Earth posted:I can't believe someone started a UI thread without bringing up the notoriously awful Lotus Notes UI. Lotus Notes is godawful garbage. After a while Stockholm syndrome sets in and you get used to the idiosyncrasies, but as someone who had used Thunderbird or Outlook in the past it was horrible. If I want to reply to a message, let me hit "Reply". Don't give me options to reply with history or no history. Let me drag and drop a file and append it at the end or whatever. Don't make me carefully position it so or doesn't gently caress up text. My company just ditched it for Outlook recently to handle emails and meetings. Unfortunately there are still a couple of product/document management systems tied into Lotus Notes including one important document number generator which means it still sits on my computer. (And yes it's just a number generator. We have to copy and paste the number into another system where we handle product data)
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Jan 16, 2017 16:09
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Regular Nintendo posted:Since we're dumping on Japanese software, is there a reason that everything I see localized from Japan has loving serifed fonts? Why do people hate on serif fonts? Is this the new comic sans or something?
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Jan 16, 2017 16:27
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Sans serifs render better on computers, serifs are a hold over from printed text where they aided reading.
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Jan 16, 2017 16:38
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:"Real" computer science is a math class and doesn't even really have a computer involved, You could do a whole computer science degree and never learn a programming language except the fact people also want jobs beyond thinking about algorithms abstractly. It's not being too hoity toity to learn UIs, it's like saying that a biochemist should learn bedside manner like a doctor, it's someone interacting with medicine at a different level. That's not true at all. A computer science degree that doesn't talk about computer design and organization, compiler design, etc, is not worth taking. It would be of benefit to have some talk of human interfaces because that's a substantial form of input that these computational systems get these days, pretty much since we got away from punch cards. Much like a biochemist's training should start them on the rudiments of physical chemistry and quantum mechanics, even if they personally will barely use it in grad school if they really focus on biochemistry.
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Jan 16, 2017 17:18
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I'm a senior ux lead and my degree was in econ. This field only started getting proper recognition around 5 or so years ago, and there weren't any courses in it. You just kinda learned through experience and reading a lot of the platform guidelines + product usability examples from 50 years ago
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Jan 16, 2017 17:20
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awesome-express posted:I'm a senior ux lead and my degree was in econ. This field only started getting proper recognition around 5 or so years ago, and there weren't any courses in it. You just kinda learned through experience and reading a lot of the platform guidelines + product usability examples from 50 years ago This is one of the things that defines it to me as a very "new" field, especially in the computer realm. This article is a bit old (2014), but if you go down part way under background, the diversity of UX professionals I have run into tells me that there isn't a defined path for getting there yet: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-career-advice/ The Article posted:
There are courses being offered now that focus on it in both gaming degrees and digital media. Quick poking around didn't find any explicit degrees focused solely on UI/UX from names I recognized, but that doesn't mean that isn't changing, or isn't already a thing. As overall complexity of systems increases, being able to get the information into a format that is easy to understand and as universal as possible will become more and more important. This is especially true in mobile where competition is fierce and lock-in is hard.
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Jan 16, 2017 18:11
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Cicero posted:What? Has it ever moved from the bottom-left corner of the desktop? I skipped Windows 8, but even then if you were in desktop mode I thought it was still in the bottom-left corner.
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Jan 16, 2017 18:29
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Arsenic Lupin posted:Sorry, major major brain fart. I am pretty sure I meant that the shutdown option kept changing, but my brain ain't what it was. This is your brain on Windows. 
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Jan 16, 2017 18:30
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Don't get me wrong, I think that UI design is important--a large reason why Apple, Inc. is where it is now is due to them paying more attention to UI design than its competitors--but is there really that much theory to it? It seems to me that studying the subject in school would be like taking business classes, where maybe there are a few principles to learn, but mostly you spend time on case studies of successful products and successful design philosophies of companies who pay more attention to UI design. Like other important skills like management, it seems like a subject where you actually learn by doing, rather than by being lectured at, and being kind of a matter of taste, there is more than one way to do it well. Also, it is no wonder that UI designers tend to not make bad UI design decisions like programmers due to programmers treating UI as an afterthought or making bad UI decisions because it is easier to implement the bad UI than the good one. It is UI designers' entire job!
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Jan 16, 2017 18:42
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silence_kit posted:Also, it is no wonder that UI designers tend to not make bad UI design decisions like programmers due to programmers treating UI as an afterthought or making bad UI decisions because it is easier to implement the bad UI than the good one. It is UI designers' entire job! I work on the android client for Google Photos and it's pretty interesting seeing metrics on how stuff gets used. Maybe five years from now I can tell you guys about it! 
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Jan 16, 2017 18:49
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Also, intuitive designs don't get invented by magic. Apple isn't staffed with some sort of group of super geniuses that can poo poo out amazing user interfaces effortlessly -- there's a huge amount of testing and research and optimization that goes into developing an interface that seems intuitive and easy to use. There are probably a lot of proposed interfaces or interface elements that get developed and turn out to be a complete dead end. So, yes, there's a lot of theory and research methodology to UI design.
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Jan 16, 2017 19:03
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PT6A posted:Also, intuitive designs don't get invented by magic. Apple isn't staffed with some sort of group of super geniuses that can poo poo out amazing user interfaces effortlessly -- there's a huge amount of testing and research and optimization that goes into developing an interface that seems intuitive and easy to use. There are probably a lot of proposed interfaces or interface elements that get developed and turn out to be a complete dead end. So, yes, there's a lot of theory and research methodology to UI design. Well yea, no one was disputing that. We do so much testing at tiny granular levels. Sometimes you think you know what's best and then user testing reveals a lot of faults. Psychology is also very closely tied to UI
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Jan 16, 2017 19:49
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awesome-express posted:Well yea, no one was disputing that. We do so much testing at tiny granular levels. Sometimes you think you know what's best and then user testing reveals a lot of faults. Psychology is also very closely tied to UI Yeah. Much of the theory in UX design is rooted in cognitive psychology (though there are all sorts of perspectives there--I think the interplay between HCI and anthropology is really neat). UX design as a career field isn't especially mature, and there's no one true path to it. I think this can manifest in wildly different attitudes toward design research from org to org, or even team to team in the pursuit of a 'good' user experience.
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Jan 16, 2017 20:07
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Absurd Alhazred posted:That's not true at all. A computer science degree that doesn't talk about computer design and organization, compiler design, etc, is not worth taking. It would be of benefit to have some talk of human interfaces because that's a substantial form of input that these computational systems get these days, pretty much since we got away from punch cards. Much like a biochemist's training should start them on the rudiments of physical chemistry and quantum mechanics, even if they personally will barely use it in grad school if they really focus on biochemistry. You just do not understand what is being talked about. We are talking about the science of information and you are talking about microprocessors and the tools that talk to them which interact with that information. Meditate on that until you genuinely understand it.
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Jan 16, 2017 20:29
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Mr. Belding posted:You just do not understand what is being talked about. We are talking about the science of information and you are talking about microprocessors and the tools that talk to them which interact with that information. There's a reason the originators of Information Science like Shannon were working very closely with really existing hardware and circuits. The constraints you put on the theoretical models for computation are informed by real problems encountered in information processing in the real world of reality, any kind of "science of information" you're doing that is completely divorced from that belongs in a subspecialization of mathematics with an occasional LNM issue. Not to devalue that kind of research, but it's not what I would use to guide the curriculum of someone doing a Bachelor's in Computer Science.
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Jan 16, 2017 20:36
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Absurd Alhazred posted:That's not true at all. A computer science degree that doesn't talk about computer design and organization, compiler design, etc, is not worth taking. It would be of benefit to have some talk of human interfaces because that's a substantial form of input that these computational systems get these days, pretty much since we got away from punch cards. Much like a biochemist's training should start them on the rudiments of physical chemistry and quantum mechanics, even if they personally will barely use it in grad school if they really focus on biochemistry. In real life people generally want to get jobs so they bother to stick in some actual practical training in computer science towards being an actual programmer but at least conceptually that isn't what computer science is. It's a branch of mathematics.
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Jan 16, 2017 20:40
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