After reading some UX stuff on Medium
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My impression is that UX essentially boils down to "hey, what if we make sure the software actually works well when people use it", which to most people seems too "common sense" to be considered an academic discipline.
In fact that's pretty much the definition of a buzzword: a term that to engineers is rarely necessary (because it's implicitly assumed, or ambiguous, or better described with other terms) but that marketing people paint as some kind of revelation that will change the world as we know it.
However, I think UX is definitely a useful term to have, if only to explain to management why some programs can be better to other ones despite both technically having the same features. So if you need to explain to your boss why your program can't have a 15GB downloadable installer, you can say "it's bad UX!".
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@fbmac said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
@Lorne-Kates what about the toilet paper?
You put it in your pocket to use side two at a later date.
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@Yamikuronue said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
@Medinoc said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
if your bathroom door has a knob that must be pulled by hand from the inside, it's already bad UX
To bring the analogy back: Xaade says all you need are more attractive doorknobs, and the very idea of redesigning the door is "marketing bullshit".
In that case you end up with a gigantic, ornate doornob. It is too high for most people to reach (though it's just fine for the manager's height). It was installed in the middle of the door, so that it would more prominently feature-- even though physics says a handle in the middle of a door is retarded. Because it's in the middle of the door, the engineers haven't been able to get a way to hook up a latch system yet-- no one can drill a hole that deep, or find a latch that long. So the door is just propped closed, making the handle useless. Also, because there's no latch, the door will randomly either jam or swing open.
The manager then re-allocates the latch budget to marketing so they can sell branded versions of the doorknob to third parties.
For your security, there is a camera on the door. Funnily enough, it also has facial recognition software that records the time and date of each of your visits, and shares this data with interested "branding partners".
The handle is also way too heavy for the door, so the hinges keep popping out of their socket. Twice a day someone from maintenance has to come around and hammer it back into place.
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@Lorne-Kates said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
you end up with a gigantic, ornate doornob. It is too high for most people to reach (though it's just fine for the manager's height). It was installed in the middle of the door, so that it would more prominently feature-- even though physics says a handle in the middle of a door is retarded. Because it's in the middle of the door, the engineers haven't been able to get a way to hook up a latch system yet-- no one can drill a hole that deep, or find a latch that long. So the door is just propped closed, making the handle useless. Also, because there's no latch, the door will randomly either jam or swing open.
Well, that's clearly fucked. So what we need to do now is flatten the doorknob into a clean, minimalist icon of itself. It will be much more intuitive that way.
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@Lorne-Kates said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
Twice a day someone from maintenance has to come around and hammer it back into place.
Filed under: Ideas for porn intro dialog
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@asdf said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
porn intro dialog
TIL there exists something like porn intro dialog ...
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@Jaloopa That was actually kinda good. I expected something cringe-worthy, like the German classic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z69I04fDmwE
(Translation: "That's the fuse panel we always have problems with, can you take a look?" - "No problem, but why is there hay lying around here?" - "And why are you wearing a mask?" - "Hmm, give me a blowjob, then.")
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Too much dialogue, not enough stats. 3/10
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@flabdablet said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
Well, that's clearly fucked. So what we need to do now is flatten the doorknob into a clean, minimalist icon of itself. It will be much more intuitive that way.
We'll just hide the doorknob into a recess in the door and cover it with a flat, seamless panel. People will intuitively know to open the panel to reach the handle to open the door. If not, then they're always welcome to pick up the help phone (also behind a featureless, seamless panel) to listen to a pre-recorded message explaining the operation of the door.
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@Medinoc said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
Problem is, if your bathroom door has a knob that must be pulled by hand from the inside, it's already bad UX. A good bathroom door can be opened with your elbows.
Yeah... None of the bathroom doors I currently use open outward.
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@kt_ said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
I hate this hating on UX people.
I don't hate on UX people.
I'm annoyed by trendy hipster marketers that think they're doing UI with their UX, but entirely screwing up pragmatic use and making it really fucking hard to use the internet.
@flabdablet said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
Anybody who cannot detect the overpowering stench of marketing that wafts from the very term "User Experience" has a defective sense of code smell.
Do not have enough like points.
@blakeyrat said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
They had a terrible user experience.
But, your reasons for the terrible user experience were all functional ones. You're thinking of UX in the right terms. Most of the UX BS I've seen doesn't worry about that.
@blakeyrat said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
Go to your local old folks' home and ask them to perform a task on your software.
That's not what UX people do.
Where were you when we had that big thread about hamburgers.
@Lorne-Kates said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
Good UX is the difference between having a garbage can in a bathroom.... and having a garbage can in the bathroom, right by the exit door, so that it's positioned directly underneath the knob when the door is open-- because people will wash their hands, grab a paper towel, use that towel to open the door, and at the apex of opening the door, let go of the paper towel.
Well, can you PLEASE explain that to UX?
@Yamikuronue said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
To bring the analogy back: Xaade says all you need are more attractive doorknobs, and the very idea of redesigning the door is "marketing bullshit".
You've got that in reverse.
Xaade says you need to redesign the door, and all the UX guys want more attractive doorknobs because of marketing bullshit.
@flabdablet said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
Well, that's clearly fucked. So what we need to do now is flatten the doorknob into a clean, minimalist icon of itself. It will be much more intuitive that way.
At least someone gets why I'm frustrated by "UX".
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@xaade said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
...
At least someone gets why I'm frustrated by "UX".I never took UX to mean "the (hand wave) experience the user has with the system", like a hippie feelz focus group.
UX is using INTERACTION with the system. UI is the interface-- what they see, how data is presented. UX is the user actually interacting with the system-- their ability to enter data, manipulate the interface, navigate, etc.
They are highly coupled, of course. A dropdown list is both UI and UX-- but the user's ability to interact will depend on how that dropdown is used. A state/province selector is okay as a dropdown list. The UI is good-- it presents a list of items to select. The UX is good since it's a small, alphabetical list. The user can use the mouse, or even type one or two letters to get their selection.
A dropdown list isn't good for, say, a phone number. (I'll let you google that). The UX is horrible.
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@xaade said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
@kt_ said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
I hate this hating on UX people.
I don't hate on UX people.
I'm annoyed by trendy hipster marketers that think they're doing UI with their UX, but entirely screwing up pragmatic use and making it really fucking hard to use the internet.
I didn't mean you, sorry you got that impression. ;)
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@flabdablet said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
@Lorne-Kates said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
you end up with a gigantic, ornate doornob. It is too high for most people to reach (though it's just fine for the manager's height). It was installed in the middle of the door, so that it would more prominently feature-- even though physics says a handle in the middle of a door is retarded. Because it's in the middle of the door, the engineers haven't been able to get a way to hook up a latch system yet-- no one can drill a hole that deep, or find a latch that long. So the door is just propped closed, making the handle useless. Also, because there's no latch, the door will randomly either jam or swing open.
Well, that's clearly fucked. So what we need to do now is flatten the doorknob into a clean, minimalist icon of itself. It will be much more intuitive that way.
I have lately been able to see how flat design works: my father installed iOS google drive app. Fuckin' 'ell, he didn't know where to click, cause buttons look like tips/headers. Cause there's no buttons, there's only differently styled labels, and not even consistently, for fuck's sake.
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@Lorne-Kates said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
@flabdablet said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
Well, that's clearly fucked. So what we need to do now is flatten the doorknob into a clean, minimalist icon of itself. It will be much more intuitive that way.
We'll just hide the doorknob into a recess in the door and cover it with a flat, seamless panel. People will intuitively know to open the panel to reach the handle to open the door. If not, then they're always welcome to pick up the help phone (also behind a featureless, seamless panel) to listen to a pre-recorded message explaining the operation of the door.
I think you're really onto something there.
We could paint a little circle on the flat, seamless panel so folks will know there's a doorknob back there, because doorknobs are circular so a circle has to mean "doorknob". And we'd need to work out what color to make the circle. I like light grey. Do you like light grey?
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@flabdablet said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
And we'd need to work out what color to make the circle. I like light grey. Do you like light grey?
We could do A/B testing on different shades of light grey.
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@Yamikuronue said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
@Medinoc said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
if your bathroom door has a knob that must be pulled by hand from the inside, it's already bad UX
To bring the analogy back: Xaade says all you need are more attractive doorknobs, and the very idea of redesigning the door is "marketing bullshit".
I got pretty much the opposite of that from what he said.
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@flabdablet I tend to call UX/UI experts like that artists, because they care more about it looking nice than being nice to use.
It doesn't matter how many times you point at the most popular sites on the internet which most of them are lets face it quite basic in terms of layout, they won't bother listening because it being artistic is more important.
90% of my non-outside-world-facing work e.g. intranet tools I have just used the basic bootstrap theme and used the brand colours as used on their main website. The result is consistent and neat and usually looks 2 or 3 times as good as most other internal tools which looks like something from the 80s stuck on a webpage.
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@lucas1 said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
something from the 80s stuck on a webpage
Now you've really done it. You've summoned Ling's Cars!
heh... discretion is the better part of valour for the oneboxer, it seems.
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@flabdablet said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
Ling's Cars!
The website that time
forgottook one look at and went “NOPE!”
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@lucas1 said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
90% of my non-outside-world-facing work e.g. intranet tools I have just used the basic bootstrap theme and used the brand colours as used on their main website.
I do the same to our internal webapps. It's easy to do and users seem to like it.
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@flabdablet Brilliant:
Ling's EU referendum manifesto: I am a Chinese immigrant into the UK. I am now British. I urge to vote "LEAVE". Why? For DEMOCRACY - the a
and then the scroller restarts :)
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@Lorne-Kates said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
UX is using INTERACTION with the system
When people start drivelling on about UX rather than UI in terms of their system, the eXperience you can eXpect from the interface is pretty much summed up by "Frustration and anger".
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@Lorne-Kates said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
A dropdown list isn't good for, say, a phone number.
DO NOT WANT!
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@dkf said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
different shades of light grey
Real question is: will you be testing more or less then 50 shades?
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@Luhmann The beatings will continue until morale improves.
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@flabdablet said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
So 50 shades of black and blue it is!
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@tufty said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
@Lorne-Kates said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
UX is using INTERACTION with the system
When people start drivelling on about UX rather than UI in terms of their system, the eXperience you can eXpect from the interface is pretty much summed up by "Frustration and anger".
XTREME!
The experience is how they're able to get their fucking work done, not how they feelz about it.
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@Dragnslcr said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
@Lorne-Kates said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
A dropdown list isn't good for, say, a phone number.
DO NOT WANT!
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@Lorne-Kates I know (from painful experience this week) that Chrome isn't very happy with 10k elements in a drop-down…
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@Lorne-Kates said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
I wonder who they got to click Edit → Paste 11,999 times.
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@Gurth said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
Edit → Paste
nah, man. Put it in an Excel document and drag it down
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@kt_ said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
I didn't mean you, sorry you got that impression.
I didn't think so. I just felt the need to clarify.
@Lorne-Kates said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
UI is the interface-- what they see, how data is presented. UX is the user actually interacting with the system
The distinction is really only necessary if you're dealing with someone who doesn't understand how, just because all the functionality is present, that the UI isn't terrible.
@Lorne-Kates said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
A dropdown list isn't good for, say, a phone number. (I'll let you google that). The UX is horrible.
I do not see why I need a new term to say that the UI is terrible.
Again, this isn't to say that there aren't people in UX that know what they're doing.
My main frustration was with the author saying.
- Wah, people think they can learn design in a one week course. Then they come in here talking about patterns. My profession isn't taken seriously.
- People really don't need any technical knowledge of how software works in order to create UX.
By not requiring technical knowledge, you've LOWERED the bar. If all it is, is a bunch of photoshopped screens based on patterns of good design, then yeah, you can learn that in one week. In fact, the article says that there was a case where someone new complained in a meeting that their professor says, "this design pattern is wrong, we shouldn't use it", while the author disagreed and thought that the pattern worked for them. Why did it work then? Were there any technical reasons that they hashed out with the programmers? Any technical limitations? I'm willing to bet that there were.
It was UX that took away my "clunky" grid control and replaced it with a bootstrap grid that isn't sortable, and takes 10 different functions just to dynamically edit/update, when before there was only a single submit button.
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@Jaloopa said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
Put it in an Excel document and drag it down
Clicking menus repeatedly seems more in line with the mentality that produced that implementation of a field to enter a phone number.
Also, I’d like to see the code these people would produce for European phone numbers — you know, consisting of only two fields but with the same number of digits as American ones, if not more.
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@Gurth
Here ya go:
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@xaade said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
It was UX that took away my "clunky" grid control and replaced it with a bootstrap grid that isn't sortable, and takes 10 different functions just to dynamically edit/update, when before there was only a single submit button.
But TABLES ARE BAD! It says so on the side of this cargo crate that we religiously follow. This way the div grid will reflow to the size of the screen, making the datagrid unusable on ALL devices.
Sorting? Well, if you file a ticket, we'll get to that eventually. We won't be able to do the "click the header to sort by that column", since we've changed how headers work. All icons are 16x16, which is too small to add a "sort by" button. Plus it might caused a column header to line break, which will make the entire grid unusable because the column headers are fixed height.
Instead will put a sort option behind a hamburger menu. It will says "Sort By" and have two options. We won't use checkmarks to determine which of the two options are checked, so I hope you're good at guessing by color. The option won't persist between page visits, because the front-end designers don't know how to do default options or read cookies.
You won't be able to sort ascending or descending. We aren't sure how to do that in Javascript.
Yes, Javascript. Why waste valuable resources doing a postback to REQUERY a database? That's slow. Instead, we'll just sort the div rows based on the content.
I mean-- we'll have to treat everything as a string, so you won't be able to sort by numbers (1, 100, 2, 25, 3), we aren't sure how to do type conversion or type checking.
Also, please keep all the data in English, or the sorting will break.
Also also, we noticed that some of your columns already contain markup with <b>. It turns out it is sorting by <, so you'll have to scrub that data and use a post-sorting callback via AJAX to get the "baked" version of that cell after sorting.
So aside from re-inventing something that was working, losing free-form sorting, hiding sorting UI, increasing browser workload, still requiring AJAX postbacks, and only having a fraction of the sorting ability you used to have, it's an upgrade!
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@Dreikin said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
@Gurth
Here ya go:
this exists somewhere. I know it does. Because textboxes wats that
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@Dreikin Needs an option to remove a digit. Make it remove the one on the left so that you get a nice balanced “UX” between adding and removal.
And if anyone ever deploys my suggestion for real, let me assure you right now that I'll hate your evil bones forever…
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@dkf said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
@Dreikin Needs an option to remove a digit. Make it remove the one on the left so that you get a nice balanced “UX” between adding and removal.
@dkf said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
And if anyone ever deploys my suggestion for real, let me assure you right now that I'll hate your evil bones forever…
Hey, if you didn't want it to be used, why did you suggest it?
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Quick, we must repost this on Teh Mediumzzzzz immedietly!
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@Lorne-Kates said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
I mean-- we'll have to treat everything as a string, so you won't be able to sort by numbers (1, 100, 2, 25, 3), we aren't sure how to do type conversion or type checking.
Who would do something like that?
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@Dreikin said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
@Gurth
Here ya go:No, that betrays a fairly rational approach so it can’t have been made by the same people.
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@dkf said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
Make it remove the one on the left so that you get a nice balanced “UX” between adding and removal.
No need. Just refresh the page, and all the UI will
lose it's state because AJAX developers don't understand state maintenancereset to just one number.
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@Lorne-Kates said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
@dkf said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
Make it remove the one on the left so that you get a nice balanced “UX” between adding and removal.
No need. Just refresh the page, and all the UI will
lose it's state because AJAX developers don't understand state maintenancereset to just one number.Nah, the spec I got was:
@Gurth said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
the same number of digits as American ones, if not more.
So this is the first bugfix.
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@Jaloopa The number of adhoc SQL insert scripts I have written using that method is terrifying.
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@xaade heck, I tried, I really, honestly tried like hell to read this article to be able to take part in the discussion, but it's so fucking dull I can't. I think this guy somehow got this fucking stupid idea that the most basic ideas about professionalism are not believed in anymore (and that it's this way in UX only, somehow), so he has to taaaaaaalk about them and about other people who taaaaaaaaalk about them and all he does is fucking spout truism after truism in a so fucking dull maner that this article must be a hit on Medium, where this kind of demagoguery-filled whiney articles are obviously respected and popular.
Fuck you, Generation X. You were already pretty low, but stooping down the level of Millenials, enabling them and taking part in their shitshow is just too fucking much!
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@dkf said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
@flabdablet said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
And we'd need to work out what color to make the circle. I like light grey. Do you like light grey?
We could do A/B testing on different shades of light grey.
Ocean grey or military grey?
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@Lorne-Kates said in After reading some UX stuff on Medium:
We'll just hide the doorknob into a recess in the door and cover it with a flat, seamless panel. People will intuitively know to open the panel to reach the handle to open the door.