A site with ranked feed has somehow decided that I want to see viral UX/designer content.
In every viral UX comparison I've seen so far, the "good" version looks more "modern" but is also less legible / usable. E.g., below, the contrast is lower and legibility is sacrificed for cleanness.
When designers have free reign to do things how they want, the result is often quite unusable: https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1211782987664113664, https://twitter.com/danluu/status/919423128895442944, etc.
Reminds me of this story where automotive engineers had to fight designers to get headlights that illuminated the road. They were actually losing the fight until Consumer Reports started testing headlights for function, which created enough of a stink that engineers were able to push for headlights that actually work over headlights that follow modern design principles: https://danluu.com/why-benchmark/
And sure, #notalldesigners, but this is a problem that goes back decades across multiple industries.
Long-time Microsoft employees explain changes in Windows:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307
Designers were handed full control over UX. Engineers who fought for usability over a slick-looking interface burned out and left after repeatedly being overruled.
@danluu This post is well-timed as I spent many hours driving at night over the holiday weekend and could not get over how terrible so many headlights were for the comfort and safety of other drivers. They were distracting and, in some cases, interfered with night vision. Many were also very blue, which interferes with proper sleep. This is place where I think regulation is in order (for color temperature and intensity in a field of illumination) because the consumers and designers of the vehicles make the choice but everyone else suffers the consequences.
@tsrams @danluu there is another notable headlights/rear lights area that needs regulatory attention: bicycles. Outside Germany where StVZO applies to bicycles, you get people with floodlight tier stuff that outputs insane amounts of lux and blinds every oncoming motorist or cyclists, and sometimes it also flashes…
@tsrams @danluu (typo: cyclist* singular)
To elaborate on Germany, StVZO requires all bicycles to have headlights and rear lights that adhere to a set of standards, and one of the requirements is the reflector has to cut the light flow off: the headlights should be visible to oncoming traffic, but must not shine directly at it, like with car headlights when not on high beam. This means that with a properly designed reflector, you are not wasting your lux on illuminating the sky, it gets spread out ahead of you instead.
Interestingly enough, Chinese manufacturers recently started making good headlights with proper beam patterns, but these are not road legal in Germany because they lack the StVZO markings.
@tsrams I worked in Russia for about two decades and people there love sticking high powered Chinese floodlights (3000+ lumen) on mountain bikes, often in strobe mode. Imagine something like that coming up in front on a forest road, on a January afternoon just past sunset, with pure white snowpack on the road reflecting it all as a bonus.
@kalleboo @danluu
True, :-) I'm just concerned about the subsequent effects on sleep quality and efficacy. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9424753/
@danluu DeWitt clauses prevent this exact kind of thing by stopping third parties from benchmarking publicly.
@danluu I'm super out of touch with MS at this point, but who even is their customer base these days? now that many people do without a home PC, is it like 96% corporate and government?
@dascandy42 @regehr @danluu java development on Linux has been really good since a few versions ago and with modern tooling, so that may be lost pretty soon.
Proton gets better and better by the day, Linux may be closer than it’s ever been to be a stable platform for gamers.
Soon enough it will be just people who depend on Office or Teams (the latter being bad on Win/Mac, but basically unusable under Linux) and cannot for some reason get a Mac.
@danluu I love the image of Mac-using pseudo-consultants sabotaging Windows UX from inside.
@danluu Reverse engineering Windows is my job, and I feel this on such a deep level, I feel like somebody actually hears me, my friends and my colleagues, this has become deeper than merely the UI, it feels that, architecturally, there is a disconnect between the ideas and the ground for it. It really feels like the new userspace is not developed by people who understand Windows. It's such a shame when some great ideas get mushed in with horrible ideas.
@danluu phew, that explains a lot.
@danluu any so-called designer who hasn't intensively studied human factors, time/motion analyses, ergonomics, etc., needs to have their computer access revoked
@danluu Why is it they try so hard to make the filesystem obscure?
@foolishowl @danluu Could you elaborate?
@cristei @danluu There's an increasing use of abstractions and transient symbolic links. In Windows 11, for instance, when I open File Explorer, the visible sidebar shows several OneDrive overlay directories and an odd assortment of directories I've used at some time, including directories on a flash drive that isn't currently attached. The main window shows a list of recently used files. I have to scroll down quite a bit on the sidebar to find a tree of directories related to physical storage.
@foolishowl @danluu Now that you mention it, I think I see the majority of your points. *Especially* the first one. Thanks for clarifying.
@cristei @danluu Full paths are often ugly and hard to remember, symbolic links have been around for decades, and odds are pretty good that the file I want is a file I used recently.
But I'm also thinking about the palace of memory technique, how people map memory to physical space, and how it's grounding to know that the file you created physically exists on a specific electromechanical device.
When Microsoft or Google or Apple knows where our creations are, but we don't, we are unmoored.
@foolishowl @danluu People raised using mainly apps have been shown to have a very hard time using file/folder systems, interestingly enough.
@danluu You would think designers should know better, right?
@nikitonsky @danluu Nope, they're designers, not UX experts.
@jernej__s @danluu I mean, I’d expect from designers to know more about usability than programmers
@danluu
@KirillOsenkov
OMG. I just "updated" to Win11 today (just cos I wanted some of the developer functionality) - it's just absolutely horrible! I've just spent a few hours trying to get back what I can from Win10 (e.g. the original Notepad, get my Start folders back, put Start back on the left, etc.).
Why on Earth does (apparently) no-one at Microsoft understand "if it ain't broke then don't fix it"?
@SmartmanApps @danluu @KirillOsenkov
Because changing something means you did something and that leads to bonuses and promotions. Leaving something alone doesn't do anything for the employee. For another example see Google.
@dominikg @danluu @KirillOsenkov
They could be fixing bugs instead. From what I can see they introduced a whole new bunch of bugs into the new Notepad... which nobody wanted rewritten to begin with (all we wanted was dark mode)
@SmartmanApps @danluu
Yeah, programmers can fix bugs, but what do the designers do?
There's nothing for them to change when everything is working well so they have to do a redesign. Then just like with rewriting code you end up regressing in certain areas.
@SmartmanApps @danluu
That would not have saved Windows 11 UI/UX. It basically resembles Apple more than Windows. Should have been let go at least half a decade earlier.
I'm waiting to see if they realise their mistake and revert to Windows 10 UI in Windows 12, probably not but one can dream of a fuctional UI.
@SmartmanApps I know that the start menu isn't usable yet but hopefully you can at least have ungrouped taskbar items.
I'm sticking with Windows 10, don't need any advanced features, all my code is Win32 and other older APIs.
@dominikg
I managed to get the Start menu back to a semblance of what it used to be, and got the old Notepad back, but even then it's slightly broken from before because of they changed the corners and scroll bars which still applies even when you use the old Notepad.
@dominikg
BTW they recently did the same "let's completely break this" in Games too. I used to play Minesweeper Adventure version, and they wanted to add ads. Ok fair enough, but instead of JUST adding ads (like they could've JUST added dark mode to Notepad) they rewrote the whole thing and it's a complete mess with no way to roll-back. I don't play it anymore. Look in the reviews and you'll find I'm not alone. Adding ads has therefore backfired on you Microsoft. You just had to not break it...
@danluu The inmates are running the asylum.
@danluu "Having to boot to Linux for games" — how times change
@danluu The context is more interesting than good engineers vs superficial designers (favorite stereotype of stackoverflow for obvious reasons):
Apple had massive success at that time with a visually appealing UI at the cost of task oriented design; Apple under Jobs also eshewed the formerly strong user testing focus they have had. Many companies tried to copy their success. Thus, UIs got "better looking" but less usable. Not because of bad designers, but of different priorities.
@danluu I think that the same thing has been happening to Gnome since 3.0. Maybe only KDE Plasma is capable of keeping balance between designers and engineers
@danluu I've always been stymied as to why software utility changes every year now every few years and yet the underlying code that does the work stays the same.
'the spinning wheel we see in apple today was on a NeXT workstation i used in 1995 and it was old then'
Imagine if they changed the ux for a screwdriver every six months or a kettle for that matter :P
@roezone millions of disoriented British people wandering around bleary-eyed, the lack of tea leaving them unable to muster enough brain power to work the new kettle UX to make tea. Classic bootstrapping problem.
@danluu Interesting post. Explains a lot. Great comments, too. FWIW I have a Windows 10 box that I keep around only because some clients have their environments configured in such a way that Windows is required in order to work with them. I don't use it for my own day-to-day work. Comments about Java devs using Windows are puzzling. I find Windows the most cumbersome environment for Java development. All leading Java dev tools work well on other platforms. Even .NET Core doesn't require Windows.
Employer forced everyone onto Windows 11.
The right-click menu on files has clearly been optimized for performance over usability. And I do like that idea.
But they also somehow destroyed performance at the same time, in spite of that. The performance is substantially worse than any previous version of Windows.
@danluu
I usually don't advocate using windows, but I think the one place I'd say it's the right thing is when you are _making_ windows