Linux world stepping up their UX?
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@blakeyrat I gladly admit to that myself, because honestly, I probably have less experience with Word in any of its forms than anyone else here. I never really paid much attention except when I got annoyed by it (which is pretty much the default for me with word processors and, Eris help me, motherfucking spreadsheets).
My interest in this is purely theoretical, shall we say.
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@topspin said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
It's actually a class of bug general enough to have a name (like "SQL injection"), but I forgot what it's called.
Time of check to time of use.
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Recap of this entire thread: I used <x /> many years ago and didn't enjoy it, so I switched to something else. I didn't keep going back to try <x /> again over the years like an abused spouse because I actually value my time. However, this now means I have a flawed perception of <x />.
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You know what? Fuck you all. You already labeled me as crazy with zero credibility, so it's waste of time to write anything more on the topic.
For the record, I loved Office 2000 and never had any such problems with it. And I never messed with any settings in 2007 because I couldn't even find settings menu.
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@scholrlea said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
the options menu
Which one do you call the options menu? Because there is the giant Office button and then at the bottom of that the options button which brings up the options window/dialog.
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@gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
For the record, I loved Office 2000 and never had any such problems with it. And I never messed with any settings in 2007 because I couldn't even find settings menu.
I'm pretty sure I know exactly what you're talking about; someone mentioned it in the thread above. It's personalized menus and toolbars. It was a huge annoyance in Office 2000 all the way through 2007. I remember having to do this on every install:
However, I think you've conflated it with the Ribbon and having to find things in that new interface as well. After a decade, mixing those memories together doesn't seem "crazy" to me. However, the Ribbon was what actually phased out the "personalized" toolbars; when the Ribbon was introduced, only the apps that didn't use it (e.g. Outlook) still had personalized toolbars and I think in the next release they phased it out entirely.
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It occurs to me that I may need to explain two things to make it clear just how out-of-sync I am on this topic.
First off, when I said my experience with Office was anomalous, I really meant it. Most of my experience with Word and Excel has been with reading documents created by someone else - usually a piece of promotional material masquerading as a design document for the former, and something that in a sane world should have been a database to begin with the latter. I never paid attention to to ribbon because I almost never needed to edit them, and when I did it was usually because some idiot made a mistake that I I needed to fix quickly. My first impression of it was "fuck that's really ugly", but after that it just fell into the blind spot because I wasn't using it.
More crucially, I have not really explained just how fucked my experiential memory is, in part because I am only just starting to realize it myself. I have a pretty good memory for things I have read, but when it comes to things that have happened to me, its all a jumble of impressions mixing up things that happened years apart. I don't remember much about how using the ribbon felt to me because I literally can't remember it. I recall conversations in message boards that happened 20 years ago better than I recall what I personally did last week.
Which is part of why I trust other people's impressions and memories - and often, judgment - over my own.
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@gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
You know what? Fuck you all. You already labeled me as crazy with zero credibility, so it's waste of time to write anything more on the topic.
Glad we're all on the same page now.
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@heterodox said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
I'm pretty sure I know exactly what you're talking about; someone mentioned it in the thread above. It's personalized menus and toolbars. It was a huge annoyance in Office 2000 all the way through 2007.
Yes; but again it never co-existed with the Ribbon. (So no, it was not in Office 2007.)
At this point I frankly have no clue what feature people are complaining about.
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@blakeyrat said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@heterodox said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
I'm pretty sure I know exactly what you're talking about; someone mentioned it in the thread above. It's personalized menus and toolbars. It was a huge annoyance in Office 2000 all the way through 2007.
Yes; but again it never co-existed with the Ribbon. (So no, it was not in Office 2007.)
At this point I frankly have no clue what feature people are complaining about.
Pendantically, Visio 2007 wasn't converted to the Ribbon and still maintained personalized menus and shit.
But yeah. Office 2007 is fucking fine. I use it every day at WtfCorp.
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I like Google Docs and Google Sheets and etc.
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@pie_flavor said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
Right, since I'm not actually looking at literally any table-related operations when, you guessed it, I'm not using tables. There is fundamentally no difference between an always-present menu labeled Tables and a menu which only appears when you select a table named Table Tools, except for the fact that other more important things could be taking up that space when you don't have a table selected.
Except for what I already said: if it’s greyed out you can see it’s there for when you do need it. This way, you don’t have to go looking for new things that appear but can go to something you’ve already spotted.
What’s more, things appearing and disappearing depending on context means you have to look through pretty much everything every time you do something if you’re not familiar with the interface, because something might have just appeared as a result of an action you took.
Obviously, things you can't do at that very moment but that are still pertinent, such as removing a row from a one-row table, should remain grayed out and not just disappear.
So where do you draw the line?
But top-level categorization? It's like Chrome having 'view source' on a direct JPEG file (producing HTML that it pulled out of its ass!).
Why would “View source” on a JPEG produce HTML rather than a hex dump or something of the JPEG file? No, wait, don’t answer that, it’ll only distract us further :)
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@gurth said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@pie_flavor said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
Right, since I'm not actually looking at literally any table-related operations when, you guessed it, I'm not using tables. There is fundamentally no difference between an always-present menu labeled Tables and a menu which only appears when you select a table named Table Tools, except for the fact that other more important things could be taking up that space when you don't have a table selected.
Except for what I already said: if it’s greyed out you can see it’s there for when you do need it. This way, you don’t have to go looking for new things that appear but can go to something you’ve already spotted.
What I'm saying is that you don't see it. If I'm looking for formatting options, I'm not bothering to look through the Table menu, because I know the design of the menus and I know that the Table menu only contains table-related items, and not formatting options. However, if I'm already looking for a table-related option, at that point I'm browsing table-related options, and as such it makes sense to show me all of them.
What’s more, things appearing and disappearing depending on context means you have to look through pretty much everything every time you do something if you’re not familiar with the interface, because something might have just appeared as a result of an action you took.
Depends on how it's designed. In Word, I know that anything I want to do with an image is present in the Image Tools tab, and not anywhere else (except for the image creation tool, which can be used in any context so should appear in a global tab). Some controls are even duplicated from other areas, such as resizing, because it's relevant. I would support only this very basic control of context sensitivity, as in hiding things that there is no way to use, or even a reason why you would think to look for them. If I want to know whether I can do X to an image, it's pointless to ask if I don't actually have an image to do X to.
Obviously, things you can't do at that very moment but that are still pertinent, such as removing a row from a one-row table, should remain grayed out and not just disappear.
So where do you draw the line?
Categories should be able to disappear and appear, but not individual options within them. And non-global categories should simply group options that you can only do in a particular context.
But top-level categorization? It's like Chrome having 'view source' on a direct JPEG file (producing HTML that it pulled out of its ass!).
Why would “View source” on a JPEG produce HTML rather than a hex dump or something of the JPEG file?
Why would it even have a 'view source' button? What the hell is to be gained?
No, wait, don’t answer that, it’ll only distract us further :)
heh
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@pie_flavor said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
I like Google Docs and Google Sheets and etc.
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@gurth said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
Why would “View source” on a JPEG produce HTML rather than a hex dump or something of the JPEG file? No, wait, don’t answer that, it’ll only distract us further
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@tsaukpaetra said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
Wifi is losing signal randomly every hour or two.
My experience on Windows with Intel Wi-Fi.
Toby faire, Intel Wifi shit delivers that experience on any platform.
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@kt_ said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
Instead of hundreds of menus and dozens greyed-out buttons, you get only that what you might need. Beautiful thing.
Beautiful if your goal is to defeat motor memory.
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@blakeyrat said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
At this point I frankly have no clue what feature people are complaining about.
MS Office.
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@jaloopa said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
behavioral analysis in real time, by the application itself, while you're using it, and adapting based on results.
Isn't that what office 2003 tried and it was not only unpopular but also measurably worse for usability?
Yet when Office2007 comes out, people at forums cry "Who moved my menus? Ribbon is difficult to use. I'm going back to Office2003."
And btw, most clerks and other Office users have withstood the pain to "muscle memory" all the frequently used function's "Alt-Something,Something" sequence. The change to ribbon broke their productivity horribly.
If you have doubt about how annoying it would be, ask a die-hard vi user. :P
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@cheong said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
Yet when Office2007 comes out, people at forums cry "Who moved my menus? Ribbon is difficult to use. I'm going back to Office2003."
Yeah, people are idiots.
@cheong said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
frequently used function's "Alt-Something,Something" sequence
Pretty sure most of them were unchanged.
@cheong said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
If you have doubt about how annoying it would be, ask a die-hard vi user
Don't wirry, I'm fully aware how annoying die hard vi users are
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@jaloopa said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
Don't wirry, I'm fully aware how annoying die hard vi users are
o/
hello!
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@cheong said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
And btw, most clerks and other Office users have withstood the pain to "muscle memory" all the frequently used function's "Alt-Something,Something" sequence. The change to ribbon broke their productivity horribly.
I have keyboard shortcuts memorized that I learned in Office 2000 and they still work. I'm pretty sure you're full of shit.
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@jaloopa said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@cheong said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
frequently used function's "Alt-Something,Something" sequence
Pretty sure most of them were unchanged.
Say, at Word2003, the Insert menu was invoked by Alt-I, instead of Alt-N in Word2007+, the View menu is broken down into View tab and Layout tab, the Tools menu is broken down into multiple tabs, etc.
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@gurth said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
if it’s greyed out you can see it’s there for when you do need it
Greyed out items annoy me immensely if they do not specify the reason for being unavailable (and they almost never give the reason).
It is often the case that the greyed out item is exactly the action I want to do now.
What to do to use this action? The program will not tell you - no message, no tooltip. It is as if the program showed the option just to mock me.
The only solution is to google"$program $action greyed out"
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If you'd like to learn a little about the reasoning behind the Ribbon and the path the Office UI has taken, I highly recommend watching "The Story of the Ribbon" from MIX08. It's one of the Office UI/UX managers showing the history of Office's UI and the development of the Office 2007 Ribbon with many WIP versions and ideas they threw away. At one point he brings up a spreadsheet showing which commands get used the most according to their telemetry data.
You may want to download the Medium Quality MP4 version to view it properly, as the player on the website is not so great and the "High Quality" option that is there only has the slides.
Unfortunately I don't have a Ribbony Office on this device, but I thought they'd left the old menu keystrokes available in some way (so you could still Alt-F, S to Save even though the Ribbon doesn't have a File menu).
Personally, the change to the Ribbon didn't affect me that much. What did was the changes to documents with VBA attached, as my personal projects are (not surprisingly) not signed and thus wouldn't work initially without providing instructions on how to turn off the safeguards. Arg.
ObTopic:
@marczellm said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:Discuss. Have you used these distros? Were they any good? Is 2017 The Year Of Linux On The Desktop? (It sure is for my mom.) Etc.
I've been trying some lightweight distros in VMs to see if I want to try to use them on an old netbook that came with Windows XP. While I think I can use it for things I don't think it's a good choice for non-techies; I'd want to either put Windows 10 on it or recommend they get a modern tablet.
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@cheong said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
I do hope MS is full of shit here and they don't actually change the shortcuts depending on keyboard layout on top of the changes depending on the language version of Office. My wife runs MS Office in Spanish and it's awful enough to use even though I know only the most basic of shortcuts. I'm not going to try what happens if I change the keyboard layout
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@parody said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
I've been trying some lightweight distros in VMs to see if I want to try to use them on an old netbook that came with Windows XP. While I think I can use it for things I don't think it's a good choice for non-techies; I'd want to either put Windows 10 on it or recommend they get a modern tablet.
My mom is as computer-illiterate as it gets and she's been using Ubuntu with XFCE for years. I've removed everything that could look confusing including window buttons like "minimize" (HUH? Where'd that window go? It was here just a moment ago, I didn't do anything (but try to click on "delete email" which happens to be just below)!), most of the crap in the start menu and easy access to settings. Works fine for her.
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@laoc said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@parody said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
I've been trying some lightweight distros in VMs to see if I want to try to use them on an old netbook that came with Windows XP. While I think I can use it for things I don't think it's a good choice for non-techies; I'd want to either put Windows 10 on it or recommend they get a modern tablet.
I've removed everything that could look confusing including window buttons like "minimize"...most of the crap in the start menu and easy access to settings. Works fine for her.
Yeah, no. Maybe if the distro did that itself I'd trust others with it. Not only do I not want to do all of that work, but I'd want them to keep it updated and (having gone through those updates myself with the distros I've tried) the first time they let it update I'd have to come over and redo all of the work. There's also having to support something I don't know well remotely, which is an added concern.
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@parody said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
I've removed everything that could look confusing including window buttons like "minimize"...most of the crap in the start menu and easy access to settings. Works fine for her.
Yeah, no. Maybe if the distro did that itself I'd trust others with it. Not only do I not want to do all of that work, but I'd want them to keep it updated and (having gone through those updates myself) the first time it updated itself I'd have to come over and redo all of the work. There's also having to support something I don't know well remotely, which is an added concern.
In that case paper and pencil is the UI of choice. Everything else is bound to fuck up something with an update. Although XFCE4 has been one of the more stable environments in that respect over the past decade or so.
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@gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
The result is blurry fonts everywhere
I'm probably
d by now but...That's because those apps "tell" windows "I don't know anything about DPI. Please take care of it for me." And Windows, in it's infinite wisdom, assumes that if the apps doesn't say yes or no, it must mean yes. I've had to override that with various programs and tell windows "no, this app is fucking stupid. Please keep scaling." Because that app looks way better blurry than it does is ridiculously small icons. (I'm scaled at 200 or 250%, depending on the machine I'm on.)
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@dcon said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
The result is blurry fonts everywhere
I'm probably
d by now but...That's because those apps "tell" windows "I don't know anything about DPI. Please take care of it for me." And Windows, in it's infinite wisdom, assumes that if the apps doesn't say yes or no, it must mean yes. I've had to override that with various programs and tell windows "no, this app is fucking stupid. Please keep scaling." Because that app looks way better blurry than it does is ridiculously small icons. (I'm scaled at 200 or 250%, depending on the machine I'm on.)
That's exact opposite of my experience. All apps that weren't programmed to scale, are upscaled by system and get blurry.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@blakeyrat said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@tsaukpaetra said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
Oh no, that would be terrible!
Gmail does that right now with mail labels. Fucking shit UI.
Oh yeah, forgot about that, since I instinctively click the "More " thing whenever I refresh the gmail page.
That thing is a piece of shit. I have enough labels, it scrolls. Click more, scroll. Scroll bar vanishes. To get back to the top I have click more again, scroll up. And scroll bar vanishes. FUCKING STUPID UI !!!
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@marczellm said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
Eh people, Office 2007 support just ended. It's still installed on my laptop. I could put an end to myths if they were refutable (which they aren't).
Heh. One of my machines still has 2003. It does what I need, so I'm not going to pay to update that machine.
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@jaloopa said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
Don't wirry, I'm fully aware how annoying die hard vi users are
I am?
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@gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@dcon said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@gąska said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
The result is blurry fonts everywhere
I'm probably
d by now but...That's because those apps "tell" windows "I don't know anything about DPI. Please take care of it for me." And Windows, in it's infinite wisdom, assumes that if the apps doesn't say yes or no, it must mean yes. I've had to override that with various programs and tell windows "no, this app is fucking stupid. Please keep scaling." Because that app looks way better blurry than it does is ridiculously small icons. (I'm scaled at 200 or 250%, depending on the machine I'm on.)
That's exact opposite of my experience. All apps that weren't programmed to scale, are upscaled by system and get blurry.
Those apps have dpi=no in the manifest. Some, like hh have no setting in the manifest. And don't scale. And at 200 or 250% scaling, work like crap. Some of that has changed in the recent w10 release - I haven't looked into it too deeply - except to note the upgrade killed
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\SideBySide] "PreferExternalManifest"=dword:00000001which is how I overrode those apps. And it doesn't seem to work - but the dpi settings in the exe properties actually did what I wanted in that case (where they didn't in the past)
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@parody man, that presentation is awesomesauce!
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@cheong the keyboard shortcuts never changed. You're talking to idiots.
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@adynathos said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
Greyed out items annoy me immensely if they do not specify the reason for being unavailable (and they almost never give the reason).
Why — or even how — would a greyed-out item tell you why it’s greyed out? A tooltip saying, “This item is unavailable because you’re not working with a table at the moment”?
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@gurth said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@adynathos said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
Greyed out items annoy me immensely if they do not specify the reason for being unavailable (and they almost never give the reason).
Why — or even how — would a greyed-out item tell you why it’s greyed out? A tooltip saying, “This item is unavailable because you’re not working with a table at the moment”?
This item is unavailable because allowing a moron like you to use it would probably compromise company security, if not your boss's patience. Please call over someone qualified to use a computer.
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@gurth said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
Why — or even how — would a greyed-out item tell you why it’s greyed out? A tooltip saying, “This item is unavailable because you’re not working with a table at the moment”?
Actually, yes. I've done that in a couple of applications, generally by adding the reason that the control is disabled as a new paragraph after the normal tooltip text that explains what the control does.
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@adynathos said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
Greyed out items annoy me immensely if they do not specify the reason for being unavailable (and they almost never give the reason).
It is often the case that the greyed out item is exactly the action I want to do now.
What to do to use this action? The program will not tell you - no message, no tooltip. It is as if the program showed the option just to mock me.
The only solution is to google"$program $action greyed out"I guess they should have a helpful tooltip like “this action is greyed out because it is not currently available”.
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@dkf said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@adynathos said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
Greyed out items annoy me immensely if they do not specify the reason for being unavailable (and they almost never give the reason).
It is often the case that the greyed out item is exactly the action I want to do now.
What to do to use this action? The program will not tell you - no message, no tooltip. It is as if the program showed the option just to mock me.
The only solution is to google"$program $action greyed out"I guess they should have a helpful tooltip like “this action is greyed out because it is not currently available”.
"I'm sorry Dave, you can't do that."
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@blakeyrat said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@cheong the keyboard shortcuts never changed. You're talking to idiots.
See my next reply, from the official documentation of shortcut and the screen cap showing the menu accelerators, they DO change.
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@cheong said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@jaloopa said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@cheong said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
frequently used function's "Alt-Something,Something" sequence
Pretty sure most of them were unchanged.
Say, at Word2003, the Insert menu was invoked by Alt-I, instead of Alt-N in Word2007+, the View menu is broken down into View tab and Layout tab, the Tools menu is broken down into multiple tabs, etc.
Give me an Alt+I keybind and I'll show you it working
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@pie_flavor said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
This item is unavailable because allowing a moron like you to use it would probably compromise company security, if not your boss's patience. Please call over someone qualified to use a computer.
That’s approximately as useful as Windows’ (old?) habit when certain problems occurred, of saying you need to contact a system administrator to resolve the issue. Great, Windows, you do know you’re running on a computer I’m using at home and am administering myself, right?
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@sloosecannon said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@cheong said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@jaloopa said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@cheong said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
frequently used function's "Alt-Something,Something" sequence
Pretty sure most of them were unchanged.
Say, at Word2003, the Insert menu was invoked by Alt-I, instead of Alt-N in Word2007+, the View menu is broken down into View tab and Layout tab, the Tools menu is broken down into multiple tabs, etc.
Give me an Alt+I keybind and I'll show you it working
Interesting... So who can tell me what's the point of assigning both Alt-I and Alt-N to Insert Tab?
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This post is deleted!
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@pie_flavor said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@blakeyrat said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
@tsaukpaetra said in Linux world stepping up their UX?:
Oh no, that would be terrible!
Gmail does that right now with mail labels. Fucking shit UI.
Have you tried Google Inbox?
Ohno...unsolicited advice!
Keyboard shortcuts in Word - Microsoft Support
The Old New Thing
