I’m 28, and I don’t know how to use most apps and websites anymore, and I’m a web developer. My intro to computers was when I was 6 years old, and I was trying to install games on Windows 95 in a language I didn’t understand(English). The consistency of the layouts was the only thing that made that work. So many of my childhood experiences with computers relied on consistent spatial representations. Kids seem to do just fine learning all these unique UI’s, but I can’t help but feel like there’s a loss of “general computing capability”, for lack of a better term?
A while ago I had a discussion about our UI with our designer, and when I mentioned that nothing seems to work as you’d expect, he said he wants people to learn a unique way of dealing with our interface.
It boggles my mind how that is something you could actively want.
As a designer, I'm ashamed of reading this. This is the opposite of what designers are supposed to do. UI is not art, you can't just do whatever you want. You need to abide by user patterns and conventions, because our job is to get people from A to B in the most efficient way possible. Period. Your designer is just bad.
But "designers" are surely understood to be engineers. This problem exists because the company creates positions for designers. If positions were created for usability engineers, we'd get a completely different outcome. (I wish repeating this over and over on social media would cause it to happen.)
Designers != Artists
Designers are supposed to create things that humans can relate to and use, the end-user should always be in mind. They do not just churn out art for its own sake and damn the beholder. So I don’t see the distinction here.
> They do not just churn out art for its own sake and damn the beholder.
But that's the point of this article. As a matter of empirical fact, they do. Visual appearance/attractiveness has dominated over usability since smart phones became our ordinary means of interaction.
(NB. artists never "churn out art for its own sake". They usually want to do something with that art. But to the extent that we allow usability to compete with visual appearance, it can be called "churning out art for its own sake".)
Unfortunately, our UX engineers are on the front-end team. And anyone working with React is just a code monkey, so if they suggest anything related to their area of expertise they cannot possibly be right.
Requiring users to learn the idiomatic way your software behaves in order to be productive may be warranted if your functionality is complex, heavily used and more or less unlike any existing software.
Or, your software is niche and its alternatives have such terrible UI that trying to do what the user expects is adding 3x clicks and actively hurting their productivity.
There can be legitimate cases for learning curve, especially if unlearning is involved. If so, the fact that your designer wants the user to learn is a very welcome position. If they make learning effortless and intuitive, you may end up with a solid piece of software.
I know what you mean. I had so many experiences as a young person figuring out my own and others computer problems but just sort of knowing where to click, and how many times, or how many seconds to hold the button.. resetting the screen resolution with just the keyboard when you couldn't see anything, getting out of crashed full screen windows with "alt+space down M move the mouse"..
> The consistency of the layouts was the only thing that made that work
This is something that we have lost completely with the web. Just having OK/Cancel buttons in the same place in the same order in evert dialog box was very important to developers at the time. Now it's all over the place
I remember helping a friend fix his Windows 98 setup. He had accidentally choosen and confirmed a resolution that his monitor would not accept. I told him the exact set of Tab and Down and Enter presses to get to the correct element in UI.
Actually, it didn't work because I told him to Shift-Tab to go from the starting Tab to the ending Tab in one go, except he had an extra Tab on his computer (I think due to a graphics card) at the end. If I had told him to Tab 5 times instead, it would have worked.
Learning something new requires more effort, because you have to unlearn other things. But it's not even clear what needs to be unlearned. So we founder.
Internally, we feel like we stopped learning. But I'm certain that if you were airdropped into a new domain, you'd be a voracious learner.
It's not learning new things that's necessarily bothersome to me. The problem is that it often feels arbitrary, and I can be sure that I'll have to re-learn all of that again in six months.
As @strogonoff pointed out elsewhere, there exist domains and niches where a complex and different UI is warranted. Scientific and creative software, for instance, falls into this category. Most software I use does not. I just want to change my account settings, or search for something without feeling lost. Personally, I'd like to see innovation in UX beyond hiding stuff, moving it around, or making it look a certain way. Whenever I see that some app I use has "revolutionized" their UI, the changes usually make me think of this:
That's a pretty good rant. Very Donald Norman. Know that I mostly hate rants about UI, ergonomics, design.
The follow up is pretty good too.
I've long had some notions about incorporating haptic and tactile stuff (I'm not saying "feedback") into the communication channels. Alas, I've never had the gumption to execute.
One very old notion was adding physical feedback into the mouse. A clicker/knocker, so the mouse would feel like it was passing over a bump. And one of those whirly things to make the mouse buzz.
Someone's actually done the physical part. But I don't think anyone has integrated it into the UI/UX.
Certainly nothing as sophisticated as Apple's trackpad.
