giwake

game developer, I think?

  • they/them

i make games and music, sometimes.

profile picture by @thewaether!!!

moving to https://bsky.app/profile/giwake.bsky.social


xkeeper
@xkeeper
Sorry! This post has been deleted by its original author.

Turfster
@Turfster

It's extremely late, so I'm going to Choose Violence™️


Old-timey interfaces from the dawn of computing were clearer and more readable because they were for actual computers, aka Big Fucking Machines For Doing Serious Things On:

  • designed by a programmer that wanted to surface all the options. These weren't great, because it usually resulted in a wall of buttons, but every single god-damn possible button was there, potentially across multiple grouped tab pages, and each one told you exactly what it would do, because they'd either just be text, or be text and have a tooltip.
  • designed by a UI/UX expert on graph paper, and then/or implemented with the same super-fucking-basic UI toolbox that was extremely limited in what it could do. Mostly text, perhaps a checkbox/radio button, maybe text + lowres 256colour icon, or just one of those icons, but most importantly: in 99% of those cases, those icons came from a limited set that was used all through your OS of choice, and meant and did the same thing in every single fucking program.

These days, UIs are a fucking wild west of little fiefdoms and "visionaries" (aka 5 year olds with a crayon) trying to monopolise your attention on Your Mobile Phone Of Choice first, which means that everything looks fucking different across every single gag "app" or webpage (which is what programs are becoming more and more too thanks to That Demon Electron, May Its Designers Burn In Hell Forever), and there's absolutely no such thing as a tooltip any longer, because how the fuck do you do hover on a stupid touch screen? You don't, so Not Invented Here, that's how.

You don't need to have anything explained to you anyway, just do what you're told like a good little consumer in your little baby-proofed glass box, and give all your money to the worshippers of Mammon.

Things stop working on your device because you haven't bought the new iFloop 74 Xz. Bad little consumer-serf, you should be ashamed of yourself, throw that old thing in the trash and go give us, your capitalist lords and masters, 5000$ for a new thing that is basically the same as the old thing, but now comes in chartreuse. Pay no attention to the mountain of tech trash, we need to buy ourselves a fifth yacht to go pollute the ocean with, so you better make that line go up for infinity.
It's not like that trash and shortages are going to impact us anyway, just you and any coming generations, but who cares about those. Not us, that's who.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @xkeeper's post:

honestly that's my read too, doubly so when you get the "is the fill color in the back because that's supposed to be like, non-toggled, or toggled". iOS at least let you have an accessibility option to clearly label them "ON" and "OFF", though i think it's extremely telling that they were even needed in the first place.

Part of my theory is that 80s and 90s UIs were designed by people who grew up before computers existed. They understood that other people would need to learn how to use these interfaces, so they designed them to be legible and consistent. They spent the time and money to do focus tests with actual people on the other side of a one-way mirror, and when an idea didn't work they fixed it.

Today, UIs are designed by people who grew up around 90s and later UIs. Ideas like buttons and checkboxes and fields have always existed for these people; they do not believe these ideas need to be taught. As a result, they feel comfortable riffing on their appearance simply to try a new fashion. Focus tests are expensive, A/B tests are cheap, so they don't do focus tests anymore, and the only metric for a design "working" is coarse statistics like page visit counts and bounce time. Analytics can be made to tell whatever story is desired.

god don't even get me started on statistics and how much shit just absolutely twists it to make up whatever they want. and of course the only feedback they get is "causes the desired outcome" and "doesn't cause the desired outcome" and not "was completely incomprehensible" or "was non-functional" or "the user became so irritated with this shit they just closed the page"

i often feel like i'm the only person who actually gets upset about some of this stuff and i don't get it.

i hate this stuff too but i pre-gave up a long time ago. too tired to be loudly mad at this point

It's extremely infuriating that "is this thing actually intuitive to use?" is a question NOBODY considers anymore, that you're supposed to just guess that this thing with zero indication of anything is the thing you're supposed to click on to do something useful

Oh I do get frustrated at how companies constantly make software worse, and how in a lot of cases there's no choice in whether you update or not

hell, mobile discord is such a good example, it's just broken half the time when I open it, or christ, android itself, it always updates, changes little things along with whatever fixes they do and it doesn't even tell me when it does, the only update I have any control over is whether I move to android 11 or not, and even that's not permanent, it's always "later" and never, well, "never"

I went on an entire rant like a week ago (on discord) about the Microsoft store app, starting with how it's impossible to set per-app restrictions on updates. I gave the example of how No Man's Sky on steam has an update every couple weeks or whatever (it's probably more like every month or two but I don't recall), and every update is as large as the entire game even though the size of the game seems to stay nearly the same, and how with steam I can set it to not update until I say to (or until I try to run it), but the Microsoft store does not have this functionality, as far as I could tell. It has an option to turn off auto updates for every app, and that's it. And mind you, I failed to even find that option, because I didn't find any settings buttons anywhere. Someone informed me about that option and I was like "where did you find that, because I couldn't find an options thing anywhere in the store app" and they responded "I just clicked my profile picture and clicked Settings" - and that set me off on an even longer rant about what an awful UI/UX design decision that is. That profile picture button doesn't look the other buttons, which all have wireframe-looking icons, doesn't highlight on mouseover like they do, how it's a shit UX design having settings for a program hidden in a submenu that you open by clicking your Microsoft account avatar, how even if it looked like a button that would be a shit place for the app settings because you wouldn't expect it to contain anything other than account-level functions. And how none of the buttons even look like buttons - they're all borderless and just look like text which you're just supposed to guess is clickable, apparently. Also Google play does the same bullshit with hiding actual important shit behind your avatar as a button, as of the past year or two or whatever. Which doesn't make it acceptable. It just makes it worse. Everyone doing the worst UX decisions they can think of is bad, even if some people react to complaints about bad UI/UX design by saying things like (actual quote) "lots of programs do that these days deal w it"

Special shout out to Infor Mobile Supply Chain Management, the app that frequently has a hamburger, a waffle, and a meatball on screen at the same time, and sometimes if you press the wrong one, or God and his saints preserve you, the back button or home button, it just throws whatever you were doing straight in the fuckin trash

God yes, ranted in here about having to "upgrade" my phone because they make it impossible to fix your own stuff, and the new phone is worse in every way

Also touchscreen "gestures" are the worst bullshit that we all have to live with and accept as normal or functional

just wiggle your finger in the right direction, which is so obvious and absolutely not prone to "your finger briefly touched the side of the screen is this a geSTURE?!?!!?!"

And nothing in the screen is a clue about which gesture does what! You'll learn them once when booting up the phone and then rely on memory or asking around, or (the increasingly useless) google results. Mark of a functional, intuitive UI.

Also some apps will use the same features for different things, none will tell you. Have fun!

in reply to @Turfster's post:

I know this will never happen, but I often dream of socialism-style tech standardization where there is The Cell Phone™️ that is the default model that almost everyone has, and how these kind of standardization could lead to a better streamline of how things are designed for it.

Pinned Tags