Shareable design


  • ♿ (Parody)

    This thing looks like it has a lot of WTF to unpack...

    Snapchat’s interface baffles a lot of people. Not to pick on older folks, but people over a certain age tend to have a hard time figuring out how to do the most basic things with Snapchat, like finding its face swap feature.

    Hah! I haven't even figured out how to install it! (Not that I've tried. But since Android hasn't figured out how SD cards work, I'm sure the answer would be: "You don't have enough space to install that.")

    OK, OK, but his point is apparently:

    I’m here to tell you that the obscurity of Snapchat’s design is not a bug, it’s a feature.

    Now he makes me feel like @blakeyrat:

    The shift to mobile has created two complementary new trends in interface design. One is the move toward more physical gestures. Because you’re touching the software with your fingers instead of manipulating it with a mouse or a keyboard, it feels immediately much more human.

    What is this gibberish? It's a phone, not a human!

    The second shift, and this is what many interface designers don’t yet understand, is that people learn how to do things in the real world by watching others. The way most 18 year olds learn how to use a new app is by watching their friends. It’s right there, on their friend’s phone, so they just pull the phone out and show them something.

    So...we've open sourced user training?

    Sharing like this doesn’t have to happen in person either. Musical.ly first grew in 2015 as a cool app for making fun music videos. When people shared their Musical.ly videos on Instagram or Facebook, you would often see their friends asking how they made that. That gives people the opportunity to say, “Oh, I used Musical.ly” And as it spread from person to person, and through influencers, Musical.ly grew rapidly.

    What? That's sharing something totally different you retard!


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    @boomzilla That guy's full of shit. People will always share things; especially things that take skill or practice to achieve. The interface should not be something that takes skill or practice to use. The task you're trying to achieve is the thing that should take skill.

    There's a world of difference between "Hey, I discovered you can use face-swap on dolls and it looks really neat!" and "Hey, did you know you can face swap in this thing? Just swipe up, down, up, down, left, right, left, right, then hit B, A, start."


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Yamikuronue said in Shareable design:

    That guy's full of shit.

    Well...he did write an article on LinkedIn.


  • kills Dumbledore

    Sharing like this doesn’t have to happen in person either. Musical.ly first grew in 2015 as a cool app for making fun music videos. When people shared their Musical.ly videos on Instagram or Facebook, you would often see their friends asking how they made that. That gives people the opportunity to say, “Oh, I used Musical.ly” And as it spread from person to person, and through influencers, Musical.ly grew rapidly.

    Yeah, that's just an app that can share to social media. It's nothing to do with watching people do stuff and learning from them.

    The whole thing seems like a desperate attempt to justify Snapchat hiding most of its features. I know several people who only installed it for the filters. If a significant number of those people can't work out how to get to the feature they were sold on, you immediately lose users whose first impression of your software is that it's confusing and doesn't do what they want.


  • area_can

    Occam's razor says: Snapchat's design isn't shit because of some genius shareability plan

    it's because they're shit at design



  • Nintendo actually did that. They made stuff in their games intentionally hard to find so they'd have to ask other people/buy their Nintendo Power magazine.



  • @Jaloopa said in Shareable design:

    The whole thing seems like a desperate attempt to justify Snapchat hiding most of its features.

    That was my takeaway. "No, no... we made our UI horrible on purpose so people could go looking for help with it."

    But this isn't just Snapchat (I guess, never used it), it's something I think is inherent to the smartphone interface. There's little room for traditional menus and it's hard to offer hints like tooltips. So making an intuitive UI becomes very difficult past the tap/swipe inputs.

    It sounds like they've just given up.



  • @boomzilla said in Shareable design:

    Not to pick on older folks, but people over a certain age tend to have a hard time figuring out how to do the most basic things with Snapchat

    Fuck that noise. Everybody has a hard time figuring out how to do the most basic things with Snapchat, and phone-a-friend is the least painful method for olds to pick it up as well.

    Not to pick on younger UX designers, but... no, fuck it, I will pick on younger UX designers. The whole useless shower are fucking ridiculous fad-tragics without a shadow of a clue what the fuck they're doing.

    Young designers have yet to be beaten up by the consequences of their shit designs often enough to have learned that the totally cool solution they've just worked out to whatever has been niggling at them for the last week is not, in general, likely to be a net benefit if major changes need to be made elsewhere to incorporate it. They just don't grok the idea of starting at -100 points, and they think that anyone who does is just a stick-in-the-mud and a fuddy-duddy.

    And I know this because I used to be a young embedded systems programmer. Fuck knows how much of my employers' time and money I wasted on redesigning shit that really didn't need it for no better reason than that some aspect of the new design was tidier than the old one, while utterly failing to consider the cost of the breakage I left strewn in my wake as a consequence.



  • @boomzilla said in Shareable design:

    What is this gibberish? It's a phone, not a human!

    Don't you manipulate humans with your fingers?

    @boomzilla said in Shareable design:

    So...we've open sourced user training?

    Yeah, this is not an argument for "it's a feature".

    I have yet to see the feature argument. Unless he means to say that Snapchat wants it's users to "Share and Enjoy", and look where that got us.

    @boomzilla said in Shareable design:

    What? That's sharing something totally different you retard!

    Logical leap from "How did you make that" "With this software" to "How did you get the software to do that" "There's an obscure uncolored square in the corner that you bump into randomly with your finger."



  • @flabdablet said in Shareable design:

    Young designers have yet to be beaten up by the consequences of their shit designs often enough to have learned that the totally cool solution they've just worked out to whatever has been niggling at them for the last week is not, in general, likely to be a net benefit if major changes need to be made elsewhere to incorporate it. They just don't grok the idea of starting at -100 points, and they think that anyone who does is just a stick-in-the-mud and a fuddy-duddy.

    Translation.

    Rule of Cool trope invaded UX from Hollywood, and totally ruined the point of software (to make tasks easier).


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @xaade said in Shareable design:

    Don't you manipulate humans with your fingers?

    Usually just the knuckes. 👊🏼



  • @xaade said in Shareable design:

    Rule of Cool trope invaded UX from Hollywood

    Yep. Leaked out via skins for media players, then got on everything.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @Bort We're still in the "throw shit and see what sticks" phase of touchscreen UI. Eventually, gestures and UI hints will become standardised enough that you'll be able to mess around and see what an app has to offer without having used it before.

    Some stuff is already standardised (pinch to zoom, tapping vs tap-and-hold etc.), but things like left and right swipes do completely different things between apps, and Android and iOS have different enough paradigms that it's massively infuriating when an app tries to use the same gestures across both (Facebook, I'm looking at you)


  • FoxDev

    @boomzilla said in Shareable design:

    @xaade said in Shareable design:

    Don't you manipulate humans with your fingers?

    Usually just the knuckes. 👊🏼

    Do you chuckle?


  • kills Dumbledore

    @RaceProUK I'm now imagining a fight between the Chuckle Brothers.

    👊 to me. 👊 To you



  • @Bort said in Shareable design:

    So making an intuitive UI becomes very difficult past the tap/swipe inputs

    Honestly, I like the pattern "hide everything that's not considered the main content behind a single button".

    It effectively doubles your screen space, is much less painful than trying to achieve everything with obscure combinations of swipes and taps and various menus next to everything, and it can actually be implemented consistently in pretty much every app, at the cost of at most one extra tap per task.

    You should NOT, however, use this pattern on big screens where you actually have enough space to fit everything. That would be stupid.



  • @anonymous234 said in Shareable design:

    You should NOT, however, use this pattern on big screens where you actually have enough space to fit everything. That would be stupid GNOME 3 stupid.

    RTFT



  • @anonymous234 said in Shareable design:

    Honestly, I like the pattern "hide everything that's not considered the main content behind a single button".

    Even for the "main content" you might need more than a couple different inputs.

    • Tap - fairly straightforward, although it can be hard to tell what something will do when tapped or if it is tappable
    • Swipe - not bad but can be highly contextual. very clear on a web page or map but other than that... also sucks when there's a menu right of the screen that gets pulled in by swiping from the edge without any indication that it is there because there's no room for it
    • Long Press - can provide contextual info, but again, user can't be sure it will do that
    • Pinch - not always clear this can be done but also fairly intuitive
    • Two-finger rotate - can get confused with Pinch, always happens to me when using Google Maps
    • 2/3/4 finger swipe in various directions - how was I supposed to know that?!


  • @flabdablet said in Shareable design:

    @xaade said in Shareable design:

    Rule of Cool trope invaded UX from Hollywood

    Yep. Leaked out via skins for media players, then got on everything.

    Rule of Cool and intuitive design don't have to be mutually exclusive.

    Quite a few skins I had increased the intuitiveness.

    But then people started making designs just to market their product (the beginnings of UX) and then it all went to hell.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @Bort said in Shareable design:

    it can be hard to tell what something will do when tapped or if it is tappable

    If only there were some way to give affordance to things like buttons, but unfortunately computers are incapable of displaying anything other than a flat interface



  • @xaade said in Shareable design:

    @boomzilla said in Shareable design:

    What is this gibberish? It's a phone, not a human!

    Don't you manipulate humans with your fingers?

    Maybe only a few. Using your voice to induce emotional responses is usually much more effective and gives you the ability to reach a much broader audience.



  • @Bort said in Shareable design:

    • Two-finger rotate

    I've found (in the few contexts I've had to interact with a touchscreen in this way) that holding one finger in place and moving the other usually results in the intended action.

    @Bort said in Shareable design:

    • 2/3/4 finger swipe in various directions - how was I supposed to know that?!

    QFT * 2/3/4


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @djls45 said in Shareable design:

    @xaade said in Shareable design:

    @boomzilla said in Shareable design:

    What is this gibberish? It's a phone, not a human!

    Don't you manipulate humans with your fingers?

    Maybe only a few.

    A hunter and a pecker, eh?

    :giggity:



  • @Bort said in Shareable design:

    Tap - fairly straightforward, although it can be hard to tell what something will do when tapped or if it is tappable

    ...then your device starts running a little slow, because you've got All The Things running at once because nobody ever showed you that quitting them was even possible, so it doesn't respond instantly to taps any more and the natural tendency is to PRESS HARDER... and what you think of as taps start registering sometimes as taps and sometimes as long presses? Yeah, fairly straightforward.

    Fuck I hate touch screens.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @flabdablet said in Shareable design:

    then your device starts running a little slow, because you've got All The Things running at once

    Not on modern phones. Things in the background get suspended and/or killed



  • @flabdablet said in Shareable design:

    because you've got All The Things running at once because nobody ever showed you that quitting them was even possible

    Android is specifically designed to not have the concept of quitting apps though.


  • kills Dumbledore

    @anonymous234 It's easy. Multi tasking button, swipe away.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    @flabdablet said in Shareable design:

    @anonymous234 said in Shareable design:

    You should NOT, however, use this pattern on big screens where you actually have enough space to fit everything. That would be stupid GNOME 3 stupid.

    RTFT

    Right the second time as well.



  • @anonymous234 said in Shareable design:

    @Bort said in Shareable design:

    So making an intuitive UI becomes very difficult past the tap/swipe inputs

    Honestly, I like the pattern "hide everything that's not considered the main content behind a single button".

    It effectively doubles your screen space, is much less painful than trying to achieve everything with obscure combinations of swipes and taps and various menus next to everything, and it can actually be implemented consistently in pretty much every app, at the cost of at most one extra tap per task.

    You should NOT, however, use this pattern on big screens where you actually have enough space to fit everything. That would be stupid.

    But since only the olds use things like laptops or (Cthulhu forbid) towers anymore, who cares about them?



  • @slavdude said in Shareable design:

    But since only the olds use things like laptops or (Cthulhu forbid) towers anymore, who cares about them?

    The hardcore gamers still dig towers and tend to be young. Hard to fit multiple SLI/Crossfire'd GPUs in a laptop, let alone a tablet.


  • FoxDev

    @Bort said in Shareable design:

    multiple SLI/Crossfire'd GPUs in a tablet.

    0_1481308894201_giphy.gif


  • :belt_onion:

    @flabdablet said in Shareable design:

    young embedded systems programmer

    ERROR



  • @anonymous234 said in Shareable design:

    @flabdablet said in Shareable design:

    because you've got All The Things running at once because nobody ever showed you that quitting them was even possible

    Android is specifically designed to not have the concept of quitting apps though.

    Until recently.

    Now I have a button specifically to show me which apps are running, in a drawer animation, and to be able to close one or all of them at once.


  • :belt_onion:

    @anonymous234 said in Shareable design:

    @flabdablet said in Shareable design:

    because you've got All The Things running at once because nobody ever showed you that quitting them was even possible

    Android is specifically designed to not have the concept of quitting apps though.

    It's there, but it's not obvious, because it shouldn't have an effect on performance, because

    @Jaloopa said in Shareable design:

    Things in the background get suspended and/or killed

    Also, yes, you can

    @Jaloopa said in Shareable design:

    Multi tasking button, swipe away.

    if you really need to kill an app. I only do that when something's misbehaving or I need to restart it for some reason though. Otherwise just let the OS suspend it.

    Also, as of 6.0 (I think), you can

    @xaade said in Shareable design:

    show me which apps are running, in a drawer animation, and to be able to close one or all of them at once.

    from the multitask button



  • @Bort said in Shareable design:

    Hard to fit multiple SLI/Crossfire'd GPUs in a laptop

    Is there really a point to that? If GPUs are inherently parallel, then you can always place one chip twice as powerful instead of two chips.

    Unless you already at the best chip that Nvidia makes and you still want more.



  • @anonymous234 said in Shareable design:

    @Bort said in Shareable design:

    Hard to fit multiple SLI/Crossfire'd GPUs in a laptop

    Is there really a point to that? If GPUs are inherently parallel, then you can always place one chip twice as powerful instead of two chips.

    Unless you already at the best chip that Nvidia makes and you still want more.

    Start off with a GPU.
    Need more power in 3 years? Buy a second of the same GPU.

    Start off with no GPU.
    Prices are exponential, cheaper to buy 2 1/2 GPU.



  • @anonymous234 said in Shareable design:

    Is there really a point to that?

    Ask people who people multiple people in their gaming people. I was never people to people out the ass for it.

    @anonymous234 said in Shareable design:

    Unless you already at the best chip that Nvidia makes and you still want more.

    I think people's the pope.



  • @Bort said in Shareable design:

    Ask people who people multiple cards in their gaming rigs.

    You @accalia'd some word there



  • @TimeBandit said in Shareable design:

    You @accalia'd some word there

    Oh, mess, spanks for pruning that owl two pee.

    I went slack band Brexit.


  • Java Dev

    @xaade said in Shareable design:

    Start off with a GPU.
    Need more power in 3 years? Buy a second of the same GPU.

    pretty sure you're better off buying a GPU of the latest generation if you wait more than a year.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @sloosecannon said in Shareable design:

    It's there, but it's not obvious

    It's been there since at least Jellybean, possibly well before, and with the same action all that time (unless you switch it to a separate button explicitly).


  • kills Dumbledore

    @dkf even back in the 2.x days you could do it by long pressing home. It's much more of a recent arrival in iOS



  • @Jaloopa said in Shareable design:

    It's much more of a recent arrival in iOS

    You mean, Apple just invented it


  • Banned

    @anonymous234 said in Shareable design:

    Android is specifically designed to not have the concept of quitting apps though.

    I've yet to see an application that implements this correctly.



  • @Jaloopa said in Shareable design:

    @dkf even back in the 2.x days you could do it by long pressing home. It's much more of a recent arrival in iOS

    “Recent” as in 2008?

    Force-Quit Applications on the iPhone – 03:12
    — Bwana


  • area_deu

    The current state of mobile UX is so terrible that I still long for the kind of functionality and awesomeness that I got from running a homebrew card on a Nintendo DS with Moonshell on it. There is literally no mediaplayer out there for android that is as intuitive and well working as Moonshell, a hombrew hobby project from some japanese hobby programmer uploaded on a bare html site in japanese.
    And from there on it just goes down hill with any other app, in my experience the fucking media players are still good when compared to most other apps.

    Now that my phone is breaking, I am seriously thinking about not getting another shitty touch smartphone but a good old mobile phone that can only do phone calls and build myself a media player/internet message sender thingy from a raspberry pi or a beagle board or whatever. The only thing stopping me is that everyone I know uses fucking whatsapp.



  • @flabdablet That's a problem with unresponsive device/software that queues up events, not touch screens themselves. Same kind of thing can happen with a keyboard or mouse.

    @flabdablet said in Shareable design:

    natural tendency is to PRESS HARDER

    This experience of yours would only say something about touchscreens specifically if you, like, pushed your finger through the screen or something.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @Quwertzuiopp said in Shareable design:

    running a homebrew card on a Nintendo DS with Moonshell on it.

    Way to bring out the nostalgia! I gotta find my shell-swapped DSi now...



  • That's actually an interesting article. Is this really how Snapchat became popular? By giving kids a cool toy, and then hiding advanced features, forcing them to talk about it with their friends?

    I decided to actually try Snapchat for the first time.

    Impressions - this strange swipe-oriented interface reminds me of Windows 8. The onboarding, though, is much better and kind of guides you through all the available features. Even though I haven't had any kids at hand to teach me (damn minimal distance laws), I pretty quickly figured out how to work the interface. It's not THAT hard.

    This app is designed like a toy. Unlike traditional applications that need to be discoverable and user-friendly, a toy needs to be mentally engaging and fun to manipulate. Tapping a burger menu and picking "Funny face overlays" option is discoverable, but boring. Figuring out you can tap the face on screen and make your friend look like a grumpy bulldog is fun and memorable. It's also like a "trick" you can reveal to that friend afterwards. The friend then installs the app on their phone and shows it to someone else. Thus, shareable design.

    The article is 100% right. Intentionally or not, Snapchat's interface IS (at least partly) the secret behind its success.

    You guys are just grumpy that kids are using Snapchat on your lawn.



  • @cartman82 said in Shareable design:

    It's also like a "trick" you can reveal to that friend afterwards.

    It's 2016. You don't have friends these days, you just Google that stuff.


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