Older UIs were built on solid research. They had a ton of subtle UX behaviors that users didn't notice were there, but helped in minor ways. Modern UIs have a tendency to throw out previous learning and to be fashion-first. I've seen this talked about on HN a fair bit lately.
Using an old-fashioned interface, with 3D buttons to make interactive elements clear, and with instant feedback, can be a nicer experience than having to work with the lack of clarity, and relative laggyness, of some of today's interfaces.
> Older UIs were built on solid research. They had a ton of subtle UX behaviors that users didn't notice were there, but helped in minor ways. Modern UIs have a tendency to throw out previous learning and to be fashion-first.
Yes. For example, Chrome literally just broke middle-click paste in this box when I was responding. It sets the primary selection to copy, but fails to use it when pasting.
Middle click to open in new tab is also reliably flaky.
I really miss the UI consistency of the 90s and early 2000s.
VW's head of design announced this months ago, and spun it as listening to customer feedback, choosing to return to features people "love". I remember at the time being a bit annoyed by the level of spin.
In reality, for Europe at least, their hand was forced by Euro NCAP via their safety tests. They announced it a couple of years ago but it starts now. No car that has just a touchscreen, instead of physical controls, will be awarded a 5-star rating. I don't really know to what extent people take note of the NCAP ratings these days, but they certainly used to be a very big deal to car buyers (for example, in the late 90s, the rating given to the Rover 100 effectively killed it overnight).
The NCAP ratings make physical controls essential for the most basic functions (e.g. indicators) and strongly encouraged for others (e.g. climate control).
So obviously the same goes for other manufacturers shouting about doing the same thing - don't swallow their hype about how much they love your feedback.
> physical controls essential for the most basic functions (e.g. indicators) and strongly encouraged for others (e.g. climate control).
In what cars are indicators not a physical control?
Question aside, I definitely agree with the shift back to physical buttons. My new car has a touch screen for climate control and I loved it, for about a week. And now I hate it because it just adds confusion and distraction when driving
Indeed, the ellipsis means some kind of dialog box will open. Regarding the wording "the user must provide more information", that's what that dialog box is for, while also providing a "cancel" option so that as you say, the user can back out. Surely "Attach Files..." brings up a file requestor, so it's exactly the correct use. I can't see why the blogger thinks otherwise.
It's just a small nitpick though. The article generally seems to do a good job of highlighting some frankly shocking (and worrying amateurish) problems in these menus.
Hah, that's a blast from the past! You've reminded me of "Ameko", which added a little cat to the Amiga Workbench, walking around over the windows. I think I had it from a magazine coverdisk.
Without knowing the meaning of that level of mathematical jargon, it feels like a "reticulating splines" sort of line. Makes me want to copy it and use it somewhere.
You seem to have filled this thread with a huge number of posts that try to justify SO's actions. Over and over, these justifications are along the lines of "this is our mission", "read our policy", "understand us".
Often, doing what your users want leads to success. Stamping authority over your users, and giving out a constant air of "we know better than all of you", drives them away. And when it's continually emphasized publicly (rather than just inside a marketing department) that the "mission" and the "policy" are infinitely more important than what your users are asking for, that's a pretty quick route to failure.
When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't have the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority on the outside. I would suggest that some of your replies here - trying to deny the toxicity and condescension - are clearly showing this.
> Often, doing what your users want leads to success.
You misunderstand.
People with accounts on Stack Overflow are not "our users".
Stack Exchange, Inc. does not pay the moderators, nor high-rep community members (who do the bulk of the work, since it is simply far too much for a handful of moderators) a dime to do any of this.
Building that resource was never going to keep the lights on with good will and free user accounts (hence "Stack Overflow for Teams" and of course all the ads). Even the company is against us, because the new owners paid a lot of money for this. That doesn't change what we want to accomplish, or why.
> When you're completely embedded in a culture, you don't have the ability to see it through the eyes of the majority on the outside.
I am not "embedded in" the culture. I simply understand it and have put a lot of time into its project. I hear the complaints constantly. I just don't care. Because you are trying to say that I shouldn't help make the thing I want to see made.
> trying to deny the toxicity and condescension
I consider the term "toxicity" more or less meaningless in general, and especially in this context.
As for "condescension", who are you to tell me what I should seek to accomplish?
Yes exactly. The fact that the "XY problem" exists, and that users sometimes ask the wrong question, isn't being argued. The problem is that SO appears to operate at the extreme, taking the default assumption that the asker is always wrong. That toxic level of arrogance (a) pushes users away and (b) ...what you said.
Which is why LLMs are so much more useful than SO and likely always will be. LLMs do this even. Like trying to write my own queue by scratch and I ask an LLM for feedback I think it’s Gemini that often tells me Python’s deque is better. duh! That’s not the point. So I’ve gotten into the habit of prefacing a lot of my prompts with “this is just for practice” or things of that nature. It actually gets annoying but it’s 1,000x more annoying finding a question on SO that is exactly what you want to know but it’s closed and the replies are like “this isn’t the correct way to do this” or “what you actually want to do is Y”
Every so often, local news websites in the UK publish articles highlighting behaviours that are supposedly uniquely characteristic of the area they're writing about, with headlines such as "Only in $city!" or "You'll know all about this if you come from $city!". Across the publications, they're all substantially the same normal human behaviours, just with $city and any mention of local landmarks changed, and photos replaced with local ones. People swallow it up and believe their group is unique.
This article seems to be doing the same sort of thing. Just one of the many forms of modern clickbait - it works.
Yes, absolutely. The top answer on that Reddit link starts with: "MPV is the ultimate video player on planet earth, all the others are junk in comparison" and doesn't mention VLC at all. That's not a helpful answer, it's just signalling that they're a huge fan of MPV, with nothing to suggest they've ever even tried anything else.
Indeed, part of me wants to not use imgur because we can't access it, but a bigger part of me fully supports imgur's decision to give the middle finger to the UK after our government's censorship overreach.
It was a really clever move on Imgur's part. Their blocking the UK has nothing to do with the Online Safety Act: it's a response to potential prosecution under the Data Protection Act, for Imgur's (alleged) unlawful use of children's personal data. By blocking the UK and not clearly stating why, people assume they're taking a principled stand about a different issue entirely, so what should be a scandal is transmuted into positive press.
It blocks many more countries than just the UK because it's the lowest effort way of fighting "AI" scrapers.
imgur was created as a sort of protest against how terrible most image hosting platforms were back then, went down the drain several years later, and it's now just like they were.
It turns out that running free common internet infrastructure at scale is both hard and expensive, unfortunately. What we really need is a non-profit to run something like imgur.
I'd wager it's more likely to be the opposite.
Older UIs were built on solid research. They had a ton of subtle UX behaviors that users didn't notice were there, but helped in minor ways. Modern UIs have a tendency to throw out previous learning and to be fashion-first. I've seen this talked about on HN a fair bit lately.
Using an old-fashioned interface, with 3D buttons to make interactive elements clear, and with instant feedback, can be a nicer experience than having to work with the lack of clarity, and relative laggyness, of some of today's interfaces.
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