Dragan Espenschied @despens@mastodon.social

Das Fax: Ausdruck von Rückständigkeit

Sorry wrong window

Alexa, play music by Bruno Mars

@raphaelbastide

@raphaelbastide another round of community designs, this time it's the logo for Mediawiki: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Proposal_for_changing_logo_of_MediaWiki,_2020

I made a mistake :(

https://mastodon.social/@despens/105549214140975561

Wikidata entering the crypto currency space?

The paradox of hardcore individualism is that every achievement becomes personal and every failure institutional; similar to privatizing profits and socializing losses.

While I'm sure these designs are supported by the usual telemetry and user research data by Apple, Google, and Microsoft, I'm also sure they were even considered because they match the overall drive towards branding basic activities and design for The Third User (Tognazzini).

Prompted by the new "tab grouping" feature in Chrome. It's a fix on top of a fix on top of a hostile design principle that started with MacOS 10.0, introducing "app" as the main unit of organization of user activity.

4/4

Additionally, tabs have taken over space in the title area of windows that was once reserved to drag windows around so users could construct a workspace that fits their needs.

The draggable surfaces left have become smaller and sometimes require a modifier key to activate.

3/4

This is a result of conflating "apps" and "activities", combined with heavy branding. Browsing the web with Chrome is not a task, but collecting info from one web site and summarizing it on another, for example, is.

The tab model focuses on easy switching in between "branded tasks" (write documents with Word, read PDFs with Acrobat, browse web with Chrome) instead of presenting facets of a task. The task hierarchy tabs suggest hardly ever matches what users need to do.

2/4

Browser Tabs: They are weird because users tend to place tabs that "belong together" in close proximity on the 1-dimensional tab row, like 2 web pages they want to switch quickly in between. However, tabs are exactly the tool that _prevent_ seeing both pages at the same time.

So users sit in front of a 27" 4k screen with one fully maximized browser window and switch tabs of web pages that display type at 5cm character height. (Exagerating but you get the idea.)

1/4

Car metaphors, like what year is it

By Angelica Blevins for Compost magazine