Y’know, my mom studied human factors psychology back around 2000. I remember all kinds of stuff she’d talk about that could make UIs easier to use, understand, and learn from.
I remember around the time Windows 7 came out, all that type of thinking started being ignored. It seemed like at first it was because it was trendy to look different, and then because the next generation of designers forgot that there was actual science on how to make your stuff usable.
A lot of people making decisions are idiots, or are following the whims of idiots above them.
Back in like 2017 a company I worked for made a mouse tunnel on their web UI. That’s where like you mouse over a menu, and that opens a sub menu. You mouse into that sub menu, and another menu opens. If at any point your mouse leaves this area, the whole thing closes. It’s shit. It’s been a known bad pattern since like the 90s.
Product guy wouldn’t listen. Not sure if he didn’t care or didn’t understand. Either is bad.
This happens all over. People don’t care. They don’t understand. They don’t listen to people that do. They have their own metrics and goals that are disjoint from actual value.
Pretty much spot on. Late 90s and early 2000s was there height of platforms being very careful and strict about things like HIG (or on the other extreme, “skins”).
Now UI is barely constrained by those sensibilities and it’s about marketing and showing novelty more than usable.
Not much anymore, sorry to say - this was a few decades ago! I remember her showing us some mockups on index cards and other paper-based models, showing what different user actions might display (I was studying computer science at the same time, so it was a bit of a common interest). I also remember her talking about watching groups of users trying to use a piece of software, and using eye tracking along with mouse tracking and other devices to see where their focus tended to be drawn, where they spent their time, etc. as they tried to accomplish certain tasks; studying different aspects of discoverability.
I also remember she was a big fan of Saturn’s cars - apparently they were big into usability, and as a consequence were easy to maintain and tended to avoid things like problematic blind spots. I do remember changing the headlight was extremely easy - you pulled two pins and the whole headlight assembly popped out!
Y’know, my mom studied human factors psychology back around 2000. I remember all kinds of stuff she’d talk about that could make UIs easier to use, understand, and learn from.
I remember around the time Windows 7 came out, all that type of thinking started being ignored. It seemed like at first it was because it was trendy to look different, and then because the next generation of designers forgot that there was actual science on how to make your stuff usable.
A lot of people making decisions are idiots, or are following the whims of idiots above them.
Back in like 2017 a company I worked for made a mouse tunnel on their web UI. That’s where like you mouse over a menu, and that opens a sub menu. You mouse into that sub menu, and another menu opens. If at any point your mouse leaves this area, the whole thing closes. It’s shit. It’s been a known bad pattern since like the 90s.
Product guy wouldn’t listen. Not sure if he didn’t care or didn’t understand. Either is bad.
This happens all over. People don’t care. They don’t understand. They don’t listen to people that do. They have their own metrics and goals that are disjoint from actual value.
Pretty much spot on. Late 90s and early 2000s was there height of platforms being very careful and strict about things like HIG (or on the other extreme, “skins”).
Now UI is barely constrained by those sensibilities and it’s about marketing and showing novelty more than usable.
Got any details on the type of stuff your mom shared for improved UIs?
Not much anymore, sorry to say - this was a few decades ago! I remember her showing us some mockups on index cards and other paper-based models, showing what different user actions might display (I was studying computer science at the same time, so it was a bit of a common interest). I also remember her talking about watching groups of users trying to use a piece of software, and using eye tracking along with mouse tracking and other devices to see where their focus tended to be drawn, where they spent their time, etc. as they tried to accomplish certain tasks; studying different aspects of discoverability.
I also remember she was a big fan of Saturn’s cars - apparently they were big into usability, and as a consequence were easy to maintain and tended to avoid things like problematic blind spots. I do remember changing the headlight was extremely easy - you pulled two pins and the whole headlight assembly popped out!