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I am not a designer nor a software engineer, nor a business person. I am just a (heavy) user of all sorts of software for a very long time. I am a competent cod

I am not a designer nor a software engineer, nor a business person. I am just a (heavy) user of all sorts of software for a very long time. I am a competent coder, and I code for research and pleasure. I don't have a dog in this, let's say, professional race. Every time I spot "UX" in relation to something I use, I cringe. Not because I have anything against the idea of design, or good interfaces, or designing good interfaces. That is all great. The problem is that 99% of the time that the term "UX" shows up in connection with something I use, two things are going to happen: 1) I will have to relearn how to do something that I already was used to doing without even thinking; 2) Some feature or option is going to be removed. The human brain is incredibly plastic and adaptable. Unless the interface is truly absurd, most people can get used to it and never give it a second thought again. My number one (by far) request as a user: DON'T FUCKING CHANGE THE INTERFACE Unless there is a very good reason, and I bet there isn't. I bought my first MacBook in 2007. Thankfully, Apple is one of the best behaved companies when it comes to not changing things for the sake of it, and part of the reason why I stick with them. I don't mention this out of some sort of fanboy-ism (I have no loyalty to corporations, I just buy shit I like). I mention it to make a more important point: The UX of 2007 was absolutely fine, and if they would have made zero changes since then I would be perfectly happy. UX for laptops/desktops was solved in the early 2000. Everything else since then is just irrelevant bullshit.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sys_64738 7y ago
>My number one (by far) request as a user: >DON'T FUCKING CHANGE THE INTERFACE >Unless there is a very good reason, and I bet there isn't. This x100.
dkarbayev 7y ago
> iOS 7 > Touchbar
- 1023bytes 7y ago
  Or the courageous removal of the 3.5mm jack
zoul 7y ago
UX for laptops/desktops was solved in the early 2000. In the early 2000, my music library was a few dozens GBs played back using mpeg123 or something. Nowadays it’s a Google Play Music subscription. Things have moved to the cloud, a lot. That’s a huge change in how computers work, requiring some serious UX changes. I too hate gratuitous UI changes, but things need to keep evolving.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Spotify and Google Play Music are a kind of worse version of UI of Foobar2000, with much limited features. There was a huge UX regression coming with the move to the cloud. I'm all for things evolving, but it's better if they don't devolve.
  - agersant 7y ago
    Foobar is still working fine though <3
  - crummy 7y ago
    For power users, maybe. When I open a music player the first thing I'll do is search for something, and there's no search box at all here: https://www.foobar2000.org/images/img/main.png https://www.foobar2000.org/images/img/main.png I'm sure there is a way to search, but I think Foobar is maybe built for a different kind of user than Spotify, etc.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      They shown the wrong tab. Below is the same thing, but with "Album List" tab selected: https://www.foobar2000.org/images/img/main-black.png https://www.foobar2000.org/images/img/main-black.png (ignore the white-on-black, that's orthogonal style change). See that Filter box? That's a search that, within the scope of your music library, works better than Google's or Spotify's. It's an incremental search box (I believe web kids call that "Instant" nowadays?), that filters the album list by your search about as fast as you type. I don't think it's built for "a different kind of user" - Spotify UI is pretty complex, because everything from search to managing playlists presents you with a pretty noisy UI that makes you click around a lot to find what you want and not click on what you don't want (Foobar never "suggests" you music it fully knows is not what you're searching for). Being a user of both - having switched to Spotify when it became easier than bringing an external drive full of MP3s to work - I can tell the basic UI interactions are of similar complexity, except Spotify is a bit more confusing at times. Foobar's incremental search is such a useful feature I ditched Winamp for it back in the old days, and I still use it as a go-to example in product/UI development sessions.
iheartpotatoes 7y ago
As a like-/counter-anecdote, I developed semiconductor CAD tools for 10 years, after spending 10 years using them. When they first started being developed with GUIs, GUI meant UI, and its oft-maligned sibling, UX, wasn't a term. In my learnings, Xt (XToolKit) started putting words and code behind the abstract patterns in the late 80's, but our tool usability suffered horribly as more and more (usually nonresizing) Athena widgets were crammed into every goddamn corner of the screen with microscopic b&w pixmaps. Because of the lack of distinction between UI & UX in the tool design process, tools were extremely challenging to navigate with each new feature-rich release. One of my first tasks as a project manager in 2004 was to introduce the web concepts of UI/UX into what had become essentially commandlines converted to Tcl/Tk (after Xt we went to Tcl/Tk.. ugh). First challenge was to convince the old timer CAD devs. Once I was able to explain there the difference between UX and UI, it waslike a light went on over everyone's head: how you use it is different from what it looks like. I know, obvious now, but not 15 years ago. We spent 10 months really driving the new buzzword UX/UI in order to get buy-in for profiling how the top 3 existing CAD tools (formal verification, layout, and timing) were being used via instrumentation and interviews. We then proceeded to completely redesign the GUIs in Qt using a consistent set patterns, icons, and workflows. Then we had to convince the old timer engineer users. We put a lot of effort into classes to explain how to migrate, and holy shit did we get yelled at. So much "It worked fine before, why did you change it?!?!?!?" Uhh... because a feature you use 80% of the time required 5x more clicks to get to than a feature you used 20% of the time? FML. It got better, people liked it more on our follow ups months later. [The first product to use the new suite completed in 12 instead of 18 months and I personally believe it was due to the new tools being faster, but I'm biased, and it could have been a variety of factors.] I agree with your point that it is frustrating as fuck when a UI/UX pattern changes, and it should not be done glibly. But I have also found myself getting angry at having to adapt to a new change that ultimately made me more productive, just because of my own inertia. /shrugs/ PS. Ironically, as a sad end to this story: the GUI's my team made in the early/mid-2000's eventually bloated after 10 years in almost the same way the original AIX/Sparc GUI's I used in the early 90's did. New coders came on board, and new managers, and they just crammed new buttons into to the tools without thinking about the UX. That was ca 2010 when I left, so I don't know where they at today, but I did have a "the more the things change, the more they stay the same" moment!!
pwthornton 7y ago
This is not true: "The human brain is incredibly plastic and adaptable. Unless the interface is truly absurd, most people can get used to it and never give it a second thought again." I've interviewed and observed enough users to know this is not true. There are a lot of interfaces that are suffer from issues with discoverability and understanding, and even when a user figures this stuff out one time (or is showed it), the interface is not memorable. I put together a list of guidelines for thoughtful product design. Most products don't meet all of these. Really good design is hard work: https://uxdesign.cc/guidelines-for-thoughtful-product-design-4a1c6e19c125 https://uxdesign.cc/guidelines-for-thoughtful-product-design... One huge mistake you are making is that you are a power user. You probably use computers more than most people and understand interfaces and paradigms better than most people. I implore you to actually observe real users using real products.
- bsder 7y ago
  > There are a lot of interfaces that are suffer from issues with discoverability and understanding, and even when a user figures this stuff out one time (or is showed it), the interface is not memorable. Oh, dear, God, yes. The "hamburger menu" is one of the worst travesties of the modern age.
  - flukus 7y ago
    What's wrong with the hamburger menu? It seems like a good compromise of quickly accessible functionality for little screen real estate. For desktop apps with plenty of screen real estate it's crazy (looking at you gnome) but on mobiles it's fine, especially when the alternatives seem to be some sort of hidden and undiscovered slide out menu or long button press.
    - graphememes 7y ago
      It's been proven to be misunderstood globally. Just the word "menu" is more beneficial.
      - 7y ago
granshaw 7y ago
There are a few reasons - The move to webapps meant that each app had to decide how their buttons would look like, what colors, fonts, and contrasts they’d use, how their workflows to do very similar things would be structured; when things were on the desktop the OS UI elements made all the decisions for you - it was the same gray buttons with black text in the same font on every app - the only difference would be whether the buttons were above or below the textbox... Another reason is that apps need to look and behave roughly like what’s currently “in trend”, as users spend the majority of their time on the big players’ apps, and not “keeping up” will make your app seem outdated and untrustworthy; ie skeuomorphism was the thing when iOS first caught on, and then everyone had to make everything flat when material design caught on...
bobbyi_settv 7y ago
> DON'T FUCKING CHANGE THE INTERFACE That's why it's important to have good UX people to help you get it mostly right the first time
- graphememes 7y ago
  Or make it so bad that people want it to change. :)
zoom6628 7y ago
> UX for laptops/desktops was solved in the early 2000. Everything else since then is just irrelevant bullshit. Couldnt agree more. And yes this is part of also why i like using macOS. Things get changed for a reason - I may not agree but at least it is 'reason-able' changes. had a good chuckle reading the OP article - some parts read like it was an article in TheOnion or a weekly read from The Register they were so funny.
D-Coder 7y ago
> DON'T FUCKING CHANGE THE INTERFACE > > Unless there is a very good reason, and I bet there isn't. > > I bought my first MacBook in 2007. Apple changed one of the most common operations: double-clicking a folder to open it now (a) opens in the parent folder's window, and (b) rearranges the folder contents which I have carefully arranged for my own particular use of that particular folder ARRRRGGGGG. They could at least have put an option somewhere for "Open folders the old way," but didn't. Cmd-double-click does it the old way... unlike double-clicking on any other thing in the UI.
igornadj 7y ago
You are literally change averse, target users aren't.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sys_64738 7y ago

>My number one (by far) request as a user: >DON'T FUCKING CHANGE THE INTERFACE >Unless there is a very good reason, and I bet there isn't. This x100.

dkarbayev 7y ago

> iOS 7 > Touchbar

1023bytes 7y ago
Or the courageous removal of the 3.5mm jack

zoul 7y ago

UX for laptops/desktops was solved in the early 2000. In the early 2000, my music library was a few dozens GBs played back using mpeg123 or something. Nowadays it’s a Google Play Music subscription. Things have moved to the cloud, a lot. That’s a huge change in how computers work, requiring some serious UX changes. I too hate gratuitous UI changes, but things need to keep evolving.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Spotify and Google Play Music are a kind of worse version of UI of Foobar2000, with much limited features. There was a huge UX regression coming with the move to the cloud. I'm all for things evolving, but it's better if they don't devolve.
- agersant 7y ago
  Foobar is still working fine though <3
- crummy 7y ago
  For power users, maybe. When I open a music player the first thing I'll do is search for something, and there's no search box at all here: https://www.foobar2000.org/images/img/main.png https://www.foobar2000.org/images/img/main.png I'm sure there is a way to search, but I think Foobar is maybe built for a different kind of user than Spotify, etc.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    They shown the wrong tab. Below is the same thing, but with "Album List" tab selected: https://www.foobar2000.org/images/img/main-black.png https://www.foobar2000.org/images/img/main-black.png (ignore the white-on-black, that's orthogonal style change). See that Filter box? That's a search that, within the scope of your music library, works better than Google's or Spotify's. It's an incremental search box (I believe web kids call that "Instant" nowadays?), that filters the album list by your search about as fast as you type. I don't think it's built for "a different kind of user" - Spotify UI is pretty complex, because everything from search to managing playlists presents you with a pretty noisy UI that makes you click around a lot to find what you want and not click on what you don't want (Foobar never "suggests" you music it fully knows is not what you're searching for). Being a user of both - having switched to Spotify when it became easier than bringing an external drive full of MP3s to work - I can tell the basic UI interactions are of similar complexity, except Spotify is a bit more confusing at times. Foobar's incremental search is such a useful feature I ditched Winamp for it back in the old days, and I still use it as a go-to example in product/UI development sessions.

iheartpotatoes 7y ago

As a like-/counter-anecdote, I developed semiconductor CAD tools for 10 years, after spending 10 years using them. When they first started being developed with GUIs, GUI meant UI, and its oft-maligned sibling, UX, wasn't a term. In my learnings, Xt (XToolKit) started putting words and code behind the abstract patterns in the late 80's, but our tool usability suffered horribly as more and more (usually nonresizing) Athena widgets were crammed into every goddamn corner of the screen with microscopic b&w pixmaps. Because of the lack of distinction between UI & UX in the tool design process, tools were extremely challenging to navigate with each new feature-rich release. One of my first tasks as a project manager in 2004 was to introduce the web concepts of UI/UX into what had become essentially commandlines converted to Tcl/Tk (after Xt we went to Tcl/Tk.. ugh). First challenge was to convince the old timer CAD devs. Once I was able to explain there the difference between UX and UI, it waslike a light went on over everyone's head: how you use it is different from what it looks like. I know, obvious now, but not 15 years ago. We spent 10 months really driving the new buzzword UX/UI in order to get buy-in for profiling how the top 3 existing CAD tools (formal verification, layout, and timing) were being used via instrumentation and interviews. We then proceeded to completely redesign the GUIs in Qt using a consistent set patterns, icons, and workflows. Then we had to convince the old timer engineer users. We put a lot of effort into classes to explain how to migrate, and holy shit did we get yelled at. So much "It worked fine before, why did you change it?!?!?!?" Uhh... because a feature you use 80% of the time required 5x more clicks to get to than a feature you used 20% of the time? FML. It got better, people liked it more on our follow ups months later. [The first product to use the new suite completed in 12 instead of 18 months and I personally believe it was due to the new tools being faster, but I'm biased, and it could have been a variety of factors.] I agree with your point that it is frustrating as fuck when a UI/UX pattern changes, and it should not be done glibly. But I have also found myself getting angry at having to adapt to a new change that ultimately made me more productive, just because of my own inertia. /shrugs/ PS. Ironically, as a sad end to this story: the GUI's my team made in the early/mid-2000's eventually bloated after 10 years in almost the same way the original AIX/Sparc GUI's I used in the early 90's did. New coders came on board, and new managers, and they just crammed new buttons into to the tools without thinking about the UX. That was ca 2010 when I left, so I don't know where they at today, but I did have a "the more the things change, the more they stay the same" moment!!

pwthornton 7y ago

This is not true: "The human brain is incredibly plastic and adaptable. Unless the interface is truly absurd, most people can get used to it and never give it a second thought again." I've interviewed and observed enough users to know this is not true. There are a lot of interfaces that are suffer from issues with discoverability and understanding, and even when a user figures this stuff out one time (or is showed it), the interface is not memorable. I put together a list of guidelines for thoughtful product design. Most products don't meet all of these. Really good design is hard work: https://uxdesign.cc/guidelines-for-thoughtful-product-design-4a1c6e19c125 https://uxdesign.cc/guidelines-for-thoughtful-product-design... One huge mistake you are making is that you are a power user. You probably use computers more than most people and understand interfaces and paradigms better than most people. I implore you to actually observe real users using real products.

bsder 7y ago
> There are a lot of interfaces that are suffer from issues with discoverability and understanding, and even when a user figures this stuff out one time (or is showed it), the interface is not memorable. Oh, dear, God, yes. The "hamburger menu" is one of the worst travesties of the modern age.
- flukus 7y ago
  What's wrong with the hamburger menu? It seems like a good compromise of quickly accessible functionality for little screen real estate. For desktop apps with plenty of screen real estate it's crazy (looking at you gnome) but on mobiles it's fine, especially when the alternatives seem to be some sort of hidden and undiscovered slide out menu or long button press.
  - graphememes 7y ago
    It's been proven to be misunderstood globally. Just the word "menu" is more beneficial.
    - 7y ago

granshaw 7y ago

There are a few reasons - The move to webapps meant that each app had to decide how their buttons would look like, what colors, fonts, and contrasts they’d use, how their workflows to do very similar things would be structured; when things were on the desktop the OS UI elements made all the decisions for you - it was the same gray buttons with black text in the same font on every app - the only difference would be whether the buttons were above or below the textbox... Another reason is that apps need to look and behave roughly like what’s currently “in trend”, as users spend the majority of their time on the big players’ apps, and not “keeping up” will make your app seem outdated and untrustworthy; ie skeuomorphism was the thing when iOS first caught on, and then everyone had to make everything flat when material design caught on...

bobbyi_settv 7y ago

> DON'T FUCKING CHANGE THE INTERFACE That's why it's important to have good UX people to help you get it mostly right the first time

graphememes 7y ago
Or make it so bad that people want it to change. :)

zoom6628 7y ago

> UX for laptops/desktops was solved in the early 2000. Everything else since then is just irrelevant bullshit. Couldnt agree more. And yes this is part of also why i like using macOS. Things get changed for a reason - I may not agree but at least it is 'reason-able' changes. had a good chuckle reading the OP article - some parts read like it was an article in TheOnion or a weekly read from The Register they were so funny.

D-Coder 7y ago

> DON'T FUCKING CHANGE THE INTERFACE > > Unless there is a very good reason, and I bet there isn't. > > I bought my first MacBook in 2007. Apple changed one of the most common operations: double-clicking a folder to open it now (a) opens in the parent folder's window, and (b) rearranges the folder contents which I have carefully arranged for my own particular use of that particular folder ARRRRGGGGG. They could at least have put an option somewhere for "Open folders the old way," but didn't. Cmd-double-click does it the old way... unlike double-clicking on any other thing in the UI.

igornadj 7y ago

You are literally change averse, target users aren't.