Experts Say Gestural Interfaces Are a Step Backwards In Usability 254
smitty777 writes "Veteran usability experts Donald A. Norman and Jakob Nielsen wrote an interesting article lamenting the current state of the art in gesture interfaces. According to them, the lack of standards for interacting with these devices puts us on par with the '94 vintage in web design, when designers discovered they could make the buttons and UI look like anything they wanted."
This is giving me ideas... (Score:4, Funny)
puts us on par with the '94 vintage in web design, when designers discovered they could make the buttons and UI look like anything they wanted.
Hmm... this has given me some good ideas for an iOS app I'm farting around with. However, I can't find how to add faux-BLINK tagged text and Geocities-type spinning, flaming skulls in Interface Builder...
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Ah, but with scanning gesture interfaces like Kinect, it's only a matter of time before we have the BLINK control!
Re:This is giving me ideas... (Score:5, Funny)
Don't blink! Blink and you're dead. This control is fast,faster than you can imagine. Good luck.
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Too much Dr Who ;-)
Re:This is giving me ideas... (Score:4, Informative)
You forgot the roadblock with the "Under Construction" sign.
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Here some reference material: Under Construction [textfiles.com]
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in Interface Builder
Thank GNU for that! You actually have to write some code to fart, blink and spin flaming skulls. Otherwise any 'tard could.
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Aren't there enough fart apps for IOS already.
patents (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:patents (Score:5, Funny)
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There's actually a particular gesture that's widely standardized to address this type of thing. At least in the US.
I'm pretty sure there's an i18n localization for a semantically equivalent gesture in each locale.
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Semantics? (Score:2)
Some years ago I was blocked in traffic by an idiot and when he eventually moved, I mouthed "thank you" at him. He proceeded to follow me home, knocked on my door, and screamed at me that I had called him a "wanker". Well, I might have thought it...a universal gesture for "thank you" is surely needed.
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a universal gesture for "thank you" is surely needed.
How about a thumbs up?
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What with all the OS companies trademarking the various gestures, there's no way they'll become standardized. Unfortunately.
Are they patenting them or trademarking them? Any copyrights?
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Are they patenting them or trademarking them? Any copyrights?
All three, probably.
I know that doesn't make any sense, but did these systems ever really?
It has been a generation since 1994. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not surprising that this has come about again. It has been roughly one full generation of developers since 1994. During that time, those developers who actually learned proper usability techniques either retired or moved on to other endeavors. They knowledge they acquired and the methods they developed have basically been lost to the sands of time.
Today, we have a whole new generation of developers creating this shitty software. They'll spend the next 10 to 15 years learning what the previous generation had learned. There'll be a few years of good UI design before these developers move on, at which time the cycle will repeat.
Re:It has been a generation since 1994. (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not as if generations move through the industry in a block, like tribal age-group initiates.
Re:It has been a generation since 1994. (Score:4, Funny)
Its not as if generations move through the industry in a block, like tribal age-group initiates.
Why do you tell me this now?
Does this mean that my initiation rite was all bogus?
Is the tribal tattoo made with the old IBM dot matrix printer and the piercings made with the hole card puncher just a way to make fun of me?
Re:It has been a generation since 1994. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It has been a generation since 1994. (Score:4, Insightful)
younger programmers, or programmers in India/China/Shanghai etc.
And there's the key to this entire mess. Never leave UI design to programmers. They are fundamentally different jobs requiring different skill-sets and methodologies. Now if you will excuse me, I need to see how well my landscape designer is doing with the gardening,
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It always flabbergasted me that devs are in charge of interfaces. I once worked on a casual gaming web site, and convinvcing them that the overarching principle was "my mom should be able to use it", and that this subsumed knowing what's happening, how to get back one step, actually knowing where I am, underlining clickable things or putting them in buttons.... was a big fight.
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Now get off his lawn.
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A generation of developers maybe, but not all information is lost I'm sure. With accumulated knowledge, now there exist proper UI design guidelines for most platforms. 17 years ago not, as it really all had to be invented. Also I expect that schools/universities now teach user interface design based on this experience, something that this previous generation of developers never had. Those courses didn't exist back then.
What did happen though, is that a totally new way of interacting with a computer appeare
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It's not getting your head around a new way of doing a new thing. It's getting it around a dozen new inconsistent ways of doing the same thing on different devices (or even different OS versions on the same device) and switching as you go.
You may be 3-lingual, but I assure you if you meet 3 people speaking the 3 languages you know and try to converse with all of them you WILL mess up. I have enough headaches working with cygwin at work, with mark-middleclick vs ^C-^V (esp. that ^C does something completely
Mixed bag (Score:2)
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I prefer interfaces augmented with gestures like Opera with mouse gestures. I don't use all the gestures but new tabs, closing the current tab, moving forward or backward in history, those get used a lot.
'course, I tend to dislike touchscreens but the thought of touchscreen PCs or Kinect interfaces for PCs are even more annoying.
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There was a time when a gesture plugin was the first thing I installed when installing a copy of Firefox. Now, I really rarely use them, and would really favor chording and additional buttons. Traditionally, your left button is for clicking, and right button is to initiate a gesture. Lets say you want to go forward or backward, a right click followed by dragging the mouse is a very deliberate action and takes time. Less time than going up to the forward/back button, but considerably more effort than a c
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this really depends on screen size. I've got a 26", so it's much slower to go back to the extreme upper left than to right click and move to go back, forward, close, duplicate...
also, Opera does not need an addon to do that, which helps. I find firefox's addons very cumbersome
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You do have to be careful with the functions you put on extra buttons, though, because people who are used to a two-button mouse might click them accidentally. I know I've had some embarrassing moments like that.
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well... indeed. Interfaces should be self-evident. If we have to break out the manual to use them, we might as well go back to CLI.
YES!!! This is why the android bugs me so much! (Score:3)
This has been bugging me for the past few months with the android, and now i know why it just doesn't feel up to snuff. The android phone is the first phone i've ever owned that had mystery behavior.
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It's a hangover habit from the desktop world where you need to close applications when your finished with them. You don't need to even think of it on Android and how it works is rather a refreshing piece of OS design (to the point Apple somewhat copied it for iOS).
There is a lot of misunderstand about how Android multitasks, which is really rather innovative that we could have used in operating systems a long time ag
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You DO NOT need to close applications in Android. It's handled automagically by the OS.
Unless the app crashes, locks up, goes into an infinite loop, decides to be designed badly so that the only way you can get back to a certain stage in the program is to fully restart it (not just go home and then back), etc, etc. Agreed though, Android does a really good job of removing the need to close applications and have task killers etc, but they cannot protect you from crappy programmers in general..
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You don't need to close apps in Android. Hit the home button to return to the home screen.
The people that wrote Task Killer for Android think otherwise. I hear random recommendations from people talking to each other on the street using Android phones, to install and use it...
What you say is true for iOS because of the more draconian multi-tasking policy.
Re:YES!!! This is why the android bugs me so much! (Score:4, Informative)
People who suggest Task Killer don't know how Android works. [geekfor.me]
Android applications do not run in the background unless they go out of their way to do so. When they *do* go out of their way to do so, they can be killed at any time by the operating system. This design makes tools such as "Advanced Task Killer" not only unnecessary, but counterproductive; read the link above for a detailed description of why auto-killing background tasks actually makes Android *slower*.
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You must not be reading the comments.
Regardless of how "android works" I still use it simply to kill "useless" "tasks" because I'd rather not have my camera / sprintzone / mint / etc running unless I specifically say it should be running. Considering some of these applications have access to coarse or fine grained GPS information, I would rather that I _KNOW_ it is running instead of just letting it start / stop / pause whenever the app feels like it.
I think most people use ATK and such for CONTROL, more t
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Unless the comments describe how Android's implementation ends up in a result contrary to what's been explicitly documented behavior since before 1.0 (and, beyond that, elementary behavior every Android application developer has to know), I don't really see the value. This is one of those places where croudsourced touchy-feely impressions are just as likely to be misleading as useful... perhaps moreso, given the self-selected nature.
So -- here's the thing. Unless you go
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The problems start to crop up when you are multitasking between a few apps and you definitely do not want some of them reloaded. Android unloading works in a completely unpredictable way, so if I want to paste 3 different texts from 3 different apps into a forum post I'm making in the browser, I prefer the browser stay on the forum post page and not unload halfway through my writing. So I'd better unload the app I just finished using before switching to the next one if I want the browser to stay in memory.
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There's also nothing to stop an application from registering itself to eve
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I think the OP's point is that, in the n900, there are actions which are consistent across applications; but with Android, actions will be different depending on the application.
I rarely use Android, and I've never used the n900, so I can't really comment on either. But as an iOS user, I can say that there are a few applications which behave differently.
For example, in iOS, most apps place a "back" button in the top left of the screen. Also, most apps will autosave a text field as soon as it is modified. So
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Long-press the physical "back" button on your Android device, and you're out of the application. Press the physical "home" button, and you're back at your home screen. Long-press the physical "home" button and you're at a menu of recently-used applications. Etc.
There is, in fact, a consistent interface. If it's insufficiently discoverable, that's a different issue.
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For in-app options:
- long-press some screen icon
- tap a small icon next to the screen gadget
- press the physical menu button
- long-press the physical menu button
- press the trackball
- long-press the trackball
- slide up the tab by the bottn
- slide down the menu bar from top
- press menu on the qwerty keyboard
- swipe left
- go to desktop, open all apps tab and select the separate menu app.
It's not about the few things that are consistent, it's about things that are entirely inconsistent. I'm not making up the l
Best interface ever developed was... (Score:5, Insightful)
...the slashdot April fools ohmigodponies interface. It was the pinnacle of web design and nothing has come close since.
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Pfft, all that eye candy is unnecessary and a waste of resources. Unixkcd [xkcd.com] is perfection. Simple, clean and delivers the content effectively.
I've got a gesture (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got a single gesture in mind for folks who think that gesture-based interfaces are where it's at...
Actually, I do like the intuitive "pinch, spin, slide" type gestures with iOS, but for PC-based stuff, I can't stand a lot of the new, shiny crap folks are pushing. Removing useful things like status bars, and replacing intuitive "I don't know what I'm looking for, but I'll know it when I see it" menus with those "trying to view the Grand Canyon through a toilet paper tube" restrictiveness of these ribbons and such... it just really gets annoying.
Re:I've got a gesture (Score:4, Interesting)
In Android, conversely, you long-press (stand-in for right-click) and bam, "New folder" is right there in the menu that comes up. Just like you're already used to.
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Ah, but how did you know that long-press mean is the stand-in for right click? That's not intuitive IMO. A two-finger touch would be more intuitive for me.
Intuition is conceived from experience, and not from thin air, and none of us share the exact same intuition.
Re:I've got a gesture (Score:5, Interesting)
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How does that bear any resemblance to a) how things are already done on Windows/OS X/Gnome/KDE/etc.
To be fair, how can we expect things to be done the same way? My phone suffers limitations that don't exist on my computer, such as no keyboard, no mouse with a right click, etc. I don't WANT things done the same way. Sure, I log into my computer with a 16 character password containing letters, numbers, and symbols. Typing this in on a keyboard is easy for me and contained in muscle memory, so I don't really even have to think about it. On my phone though, even on my old G1 which had, in my opinion, th
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I'm not used to 'long clicking' in a PC interface for anything except dragging items about. (A 'long click' may be a stand-in for right clicking, but it isn't right clicking.) In addition, to create an empty folder requires not only right clicking (not 'long clicking'), but also generally selecting from a menu.
So, no - the Android interf
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The point is that there's only one new concept to learn here - that "long tap" means "context menu" - and then you can use most of your pre-existing knowledge about such things from Windows/Mac/Linux.
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It is rather intuitive...
There is no standard way to create a new folder across the platforms you named btw.
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The issue isn't with gestures per se. It's whether the gestures and application responses to those gestures are consistent, and they're not. Without consistency, the user doesn't learn how to effectively use a platform, only a handful of applications.
If stroke-right deletes in one case, it should be the gesture for delete in all cases. Without consistency, a UI is non-intuitive and fails at it's primary goal of making a platform usable.
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"If stroke-right deletes in one case, it should be the gesture for delete in all cases."
Wrong, because you're not considering mode and context. Dragging your finger to the right is a drawing program is different that dragging your finger to the right in a list, which is different from dragging your finger to the right in a multi-view app like Weather.
It's like saying that clicking and dragging a mouse cursor to the right should always do the same thing, regardless of the type of program, mode, and what you
You'd think they'd mention webOS (Score:2)
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Other than iOS and Android, are there any serious touch-optimised options around, then?
Symbian maybe? No experience, doesn't seem to be exactly popular. Development seems stalled.
Windows Phone 7? From reviews I understand it's not bad at all, but still no contender.
Blackberry's OS? No experience - but my image of blackberries includes a complete (albeit tiny) keyboard. And a stylus.
No others that I can think of, really. So it's just iOS and Android that really deserve attention. Would be good to see one
Standards not Monkey Antics? (Score:2)
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How can people not realize that every new technology will go through a phase where everyone implements their own idea before the industry settles on a few good ideas?
So when TFA says, "We urgently need to return to our basics, developing usability guidelines for these systems that are based upon solid principles of interaction design, not on the whims of the company human interface guidelines and arbitrary ideas of developers," you see that as what? Whining? A bad thing?
Jakob Nielsen is one of the leading figures in human-computer interaction. His whole point is that companies and developers don't need to make it all up on the fly, because there have been decades of res
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How can people not realize that every new technology will go through a phase where everyone implements their own idea before the industry settles on a few good ideas?
So when TFA says, "We urgently need to return to our basics, developing usability guidelines for these systems that are based upon solid principles of interaction design, not on the whims of the company human interface guidelines and arbitrary ideas of developers," you see that as what? Whining? A bad thing?
Jakob Nielsen is one of the leading figures in human-computer interaction. His whole point is that companies and developers don't need to make it all up on the fly, because there have been decades of research conducted already into how people interact with machines and devices. There are plenty of experts, not just Nielsen, who can offer their expertise. The problem is that so far it seems like it's being ignored.
Perhaps -- just maybe -- the case is that the "expert" UI gurus charge too much for the average mobile app developer to employ, especially for a note-keeper or other one-off application.
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"... because there have been decades of research conducted already into how people interact with machines and devices..."
I''m sure that there have been *decades* of user-interaction research into portable, hand-held, touch-operated devices like the iPhone and iPad.
Despite the fact that the iPhone wasn't even publicly available four years ago. And no, pen-based tablets and PDAs are NOT the same thing.
I mean, it's not like Apple hasn't had any experience creating and publishing and standardizing user-interfac
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incredibly, for things to move forward you Need *someone* to push, which is what the authors are doing.
Damn kids (Score:3)
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Dan Fogelberg? Kids?
Time to get back on your meds, pitchpipe. Fogelberg is soooo 1970's. You might as well throw in a few zoot suit references for good measure.
Oh, wait. Hula hoops.
You were meta-ranting.
Sorry.
Please carry on. I get it now.
Tradition & Intuition (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not anywhere near the caliber of UI expertise as Norman or Nielsen. But there's a big advantage to pioneering a new physical interface: you don't need the language part of your brain. My 1 year old twin nephews can interact with their iPads with only the most basic of demonstrations of how a new app works. They can't read or write but they can follow demos of fingers creating action pretty well.
Is bringing along the old interface of mice & menus helping or hurting? I particularly like the new "swipe up" gesture to scroll down of a touchscreen rather than the traditional "elevator window" model of scroll bars where clicking up scrolls up.
They are absolutely to be commended for chastising developers that there is no easy way to discover actions if they are not intuitive; I'd rather they come up with ways to address this than just fall back on menus though. For example, Apple included an interactive tutorial for using the custom gestures built-in to Pages, Numbers and Keynote because they aren't discoverable at all. Some I've forgotten because I don't use them (and I'd have to re-watch the tutorials again to re-program my brain). But the ones I have picked up on are absolutely ingrained and effortless now. Unfortunately, built-in tutorials are the exception rather than the rule, and even when they are included they more trouble to refer to than a drop down menu. But there are ways to improve without eliminating gestures.
I wouldn't want to use the gesture interface when I'm programming during the day, but when I'm swiping through my early morning junk mail, RSS feeds, and to-do items, my brain feels far more engaged on my iPad than my desktop. It's almost like the touch gestures are autonomic and leave my (limited) higher brain functions alone to read though the fog (at least until my caffeine kicks in.)
I agree that people need to improve gesture interfaces which are in their infancy, but I don't think it's justified to throw the baby out with the bath water just because of long traditions.
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So dragging your finger from left to right in a drawing program is supposed to do the same things as dragging your finger from left to right in a contact list? Which should do the same exact thing when you drag your finger from left to right in iBooks or the Kindle app?
Sorry, but context and mode mean that the "same" gestures do different things. Discoverability is often an issue, true, and consistency can always be improved, but the fact that the same gesture doesn't trigger the same kind of action isn't a
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So dragging your finger from left to right in a drawing program is supposed to do the same things as dragging your finger from left to right in a contact list?
How many times are you going to repeat this? Every time someone says that gestures should be consistent?
Just stop. It's obvious that you haven't put anymore than a seconds thought into this.
Sorry, but context and mode mean that the "same" gestures do different things.
Yeah, everyone else figured this out ages ago. They just don't feel the need to specify 'context' when that is obvious to everyone but you.
What people write: Swiping right means delete in email, but does nothing in calendar.
Which everyone but you interprets as: Swiping right [on a list item] means delete in email, b
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Well, I thought I understood it.
Norman & Nielsen say gestures lack intuition because they lack consistency, discoverability, visibility, and feedback. They say they suck for other reasons too (scalability, et al). Compared to the successes of the traditional menu interface, OS vendors should: disallow inconsistent gestures. Develop gestures that can be reliable and not prone to error. Only release gestures in the wild before perfecting them in the lab. Add a button to universally pop up applicable menus
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I'm not anywhere near the caliber of UI expertise as Norman or Nielsen. B
Don't sell yourself short, half of Nielsen's claim to fame is being opinionated more than "right"...
I especially love his quote "the developer community's apparent ignorance of the long history and many findings of HCI research which results in their feeling of empowerment to unleash untested and unproven creative efforts upon the unwitting public."
This could almost be translated to "we have told you over and over how we think you should design a UI, and yet you STILL try to innovate!"
Like many other things
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Is bringing along the old interface of mice & menus helping or hurting? I particularly like the new "swipe up" gesture to scroll down of a touchscreen rather than the traditional "elevator window" model of scroll bars where clicking up scrolls up.
Try scrolling to the bottom of a long menu / a lot of text. You'll see why the "elevator window" scroll bar is superior to finger swipe is superior to what you describe. It also gives some visual queues of where you are in the list and how far there is to go up or down where a touch alternative doesn't.
Also, an equivalent the indispensable Home and End keys are notably absent in a touch interface, perhaps replaced by some non-discoverable gesture I haven't found by guesswork or a google search yet.
So
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much better to have a baby or kid barf on a ipad than on a keyboard. and believe me, if there's a ipad or iphone in the house, it's gonna be "theirs" fairly quickly.
Gaming on the PC is quite succcessful (Score:2)
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PC games tend to standardise on WASD. The PC supports control schemes as simple as any console, it also supports hundreds of inputs using key combinations. ARMA and X3 are the biggest culprits in my collection, Shi
Bad summary (Score:2)
I remember when ... (Score:2)
*Get your experts to evaluate the competitions apps/platforms. "Oh noes! Three mouse buttons! One mouse button! This simply will not do!"
Ah, sometimes it's great to have lexdisia! (Score:2)
What I saw: Expert's Gay Sexual Interfaces Are a Step Backwards in Usability
Seriously? LoL
How much practice is required before you're considered an expert at these homo-erotic interfaces?
Is there skill quantization "tool", or perhaps a "Queer Eye" review?
Are the controller's or receptacles aesthetically pleasing?
Do lesbians with optional strap-ons have an advantage over the rest of us?
Are Expert heterosexual interfaces not equally as ridiculous?
I laughed for a good minute before I was disappointe
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you have issues.
unrealistic armchair approach (Score:3)
In the article they say:
In comments to Nielsen's article about our iPad usability studies, some critics claimed that it is reasonable to experiment with radically new interaction techniques when given a new platform. We agree. But the place for such experimentation is in the lab. After all, most new ideas fail, and the more radically they depart from previous best practices, the more likely they are to fail. Sometimes, a radical idea turns out to be a brilliant radical breakthrough. Those designs should indeed ship, but note that radical breakthroughs are extremely rare in any discipline. Most progress is made through sustained, small incremental steps. Bold explorations should remain inside the company and university research laboratories and not be inflicted on any customers until those recruited to participate in user research have validated the approach.
I appreciate that they're important contributors to UI design, but their attitude is unrealistic to companies that are trying to ship products, make profit and gain market share. Companies spending too much time perfecting their UI design will go out of business while their competitors are shipping flawed but ultimately usable products.
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methinks it should be the OS vendors' job to define and enforce guidelines. They are already doing it, just not that well.
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UI guidelines should be clear too.
Point in case: the menu button in Android. It's not guaranteed to do anything: some apps use it, others not at all, and the ones that use it do not necessarily use it in every activity. I'm also "guilty" of the latter part, because some activities really have a need for extra functions (it's a great way to hide secondary and infrequently used functions such as the preferences from the main UI) and others not at all.
And the Back button in Android: he argues it should never
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Companies spending too much time perfecting their UI design will go out of business while their competitors are shipping flawed but ultimately usable products.
There's a difference between perfecting a UI design and inflicting completely new, experimental ideas on unsuspecting users. Testing which particular gesture would be best for each interaction might take too much time, but completely omitting menus (leaving the only way to accomplish anything to be guessing the right gesture) is something that should've been thought over (especially if your target platform ships with a physical 'menu' button).
Ah, but... (Score:2)
total crap (Score:2)
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He has several good points on where usability needs work, though unfortunately is light on suggesting improvements.
But you must agree with his main point: touch interfaces need work.
They're off to a great start, now it's time to discover the nuances of actual use (those that can not be discovered in the lab), and improve from there.
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small flaws like I still haven't found how to edit URLs in my android phone's browser's address bar. I have to touch the URL, then long touch to get a menu, then select "copy" (no "edit" choice), then exit, and THEN i can get a cursor to edit the URL (though sometimes it doesn't work). I've tried tapping, double tapping, sliding....
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I wonder if you have a particularly perverted (by the manufacturer) version of Android. On mine, tapping the address bar once puts the input focus there - you see the blinking cursor. It preselects all texts (same as on the desktop, at least in Chrome), so if you don't want your input to overwrite what's there, you just tap again, and the cursor is placed at the point tapped.
(this is Android 2.3)
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Best Available (Score:2)
Gestural interfaces are ok on a touch screen, but when using a mouse, I find they're just inconvenient.
Yeah, mouse gestures were popular in Opera in, what, 2002? I think the difference is with a touchscreen they're the best you've got but with a mouse you have more expressive options.
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Actually, with interfaces, everyone doing it the same way is better than a few of them doing it differently, even if those few are actually doing it in a way that is otherwise easier to use, because the point of an interface is for people to understand how to use it.
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At least, that's the Microsoft theory.
On the other hand, everyone from Linux to Android to iOS disagrees, and consumers have a choice because of it(I.e. if you don't like the Windows UI, you can use any number of Linux UIs or the OSX one. Phone UIs give even more choice).
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Especially people in Ubuntu disagree. They really try all different changes to the UI, some of them seem to be there just for the sake of "making it different than the standard" and they fight tooth and nail against users who want to bring standard behavior back.
I wonder if the changes are backed by any kind of usability studies, or do they make them as they go along, because some of them are so retarded really no sane user or programmer would suggest them.
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you should RTFA, they make some very good points and a very cogent argument.
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Your summary is incorrect. It should be "...since they don't apply the basic principles of usability, which have nothing to do with particular interface metaphors or technologies, they are making simpleminded mistakes."
It has nothing to do with abandoning the old desktop environment, and everything to do with giving poor feedback, providing arbitrary interfaces that don't provide cues to the user, not providing consistent behavior in similar situations, etc. These are problems that have more to do with un
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Any interface I cannot grep through and trivially script is a step backwards.
You don't understand! Actual experts have proclaimed that point-and-grunt...er, pardon me, point-and-click is far more empowering than any form of communication using language! After all, chimpanzees can point and grunt, so clearly its a superior interface for humans as well. Sorry, I meant point and click again.
You're not going to argue with actual experts, are you? I mean, are you some kind of Luddite who wants us to return to the primitive ways of our ancestors? (Or is it the UI experts and Human Int