In the last three months I’ve run into one which would give you the rules
one
at
a
time.
And another which would give the message “password rejected”. Yo momma is rejected, you piece of shit shoftware.
I’m an American running a Japanese OS computer in Taiwan. Various web sites look at different things to determine which language to offer me. My preference is first English, then Japanese and never Chinese.
Google is the worst, it had determined that I really don’t mean it when I say I want English. No matter how many times I set my preference as English, it gives me Chinese.
I’ve been both on the purchasing side and the supplying side of systems and no one really considers the UI. This is one thing which I’m passionate about and it drives me completely batty because no one in the purchasing and supply chains really handle it well.
At a Japanese import company, we had a database built for us to automate the ordering process. The contractors were pissed at me because I kept bringing in different staff members to test it, and wouldn’t let their programmer hold the staff’s hands while it was being tested. What usually happens is that the experts test the system and can figure out on the fly what is happening. I wanted to make sure that everyone could understand it.
The wrong departments are in charge of ordering the systems and there are too many people in between the inside customers and the suppliers.
Things get subcontracted out and each subcontractor has one good programmer who does it their own way.
When I set up the Japanese branch office for a US manufacturer, trying to make the ordering system compatible was a complete hassle. They had the telephone number fields set up for only US numbers. Japanese phone numbers can follow a variety of formats such as 02-1234-5678, 033-123-4567 and 0424-99-5041. It almost killed the programmers, and for the life of me I don’t understand the inflexibility and lack of imagination.
I worked for a manufacturer of touch screen panels, and they had placed arbitrary restrictions in the system in the design stage. Some 23-year-old, first year programmer made some fucked up assumption of how the world outside his mother’s basement works and we’re stuck with it forever.
I’m guilty of designing a UI that did this. When I was testing it, I never made the mistake of mixing up alt+shift+s for saving and alt+shift+d for delete, but the temp staff person did. Oooops.
n/m, already explained…
The USPS, for free, will give you a table that identifies each zip code with a proper city/state combo. Yes, some zip codes have multiple city names and even one (I guess? Which one?) straddles a state line, but that doesn’t matter.
Regardless, if your zip is 07030 and this is both Hoboken NJ and part of Newport, it doesn’t matter which city you put on the envelope - the letter is still going to the post office that handles mail for zip 07030.
So, yeah, I agree: Tying the free city-state table to address inputs would be nice, and it’s easily done.
Adobe still have competing shortcuts across their own suite of programs. You’d think they’d try to have menus that worked the same in each, but they were all developed independently of each other and integrating them all together into something logically linked seems to be an eternal struggle for them to achieve.
You’d think that would be really straightforward to sort out, expecially for a vendor who has a captive market and a streamed versioning model - they have everything they need to just do it.
Yeah, I knew that. I wasn’t as explicit as I probably should have been.
There are three layers: What does MS do within Windows’ own UI? What does MS do within their own products’ UIs, e.g. Office & Paint? What does MS *suggest *other companies do in their UI when writing apps to run under Windows? I short-handed all of those separate ideas as “At least within Windows …”. My bad.
MS does a thorough job of #3 and a very good job of following their own advice in #1 & 2. Once in awhile they buy some company to get their app and it comes with conflicts vs. the standard. Typically the next version = first version released under the MSFT banner has the shortcuts realigned to standard, perhaps with a “compatibility mode” for people unable (= unwilling) to transition. Heck, Excel 2016 still has a feature to use Lotus 1-2-3 style slash-menus dating from ~1985.
It sucks that Adobe went their own way and it double-sucks that their app portfolio isn’t even consistent within itself. 
The Mrs memorized SAA keys during their brief heyday and still can’t remember the basic Windows Ctrl- keys for Word/Windows functions. Sigh.
Yep. I started my career back in the mainframe/mini-computer/dumb terminal days when every UI was command line. Once you learn touch-typing your speed can be extremely high. When Windows/Apple UI’s and mice came along there was strong pushback against using them by people who needed to work at speed.
For example one job I had was to support a 911 agency, and that’s a job where every second counts so a lightening fast UI (and system response time) was critical. The dispatchers did NOT want to learn how to use GUI’s and mice. (Sadly, I think all 911 systems are Windows based now.) Our 911 system was brilliantly designed with a very robust parser. For example if you needed to dispatch police unit 1A12 to incident #1234 you could list the command parameters in any direction thus:
D 1A12 #1234
D #1234 1A12
It looks too simple now, but what this meant was that the dispatcher didn’t have to think about what he was typing, he could just pound whatever he thought of first into the keyboard - perfect for high-stress situations.
Much is said about developers typically being people who love problem solving and attacking challenges, but in my opinion more of them are just as lazy as any other non-technical human. (Including myself when I was a developer. There were times when I had to be forced to dig my teeth into a problem that I viewed as Not My Problem. That attitude did change with time, though.)
I’ve had numerous forms where, when I entered my ZIP, asks if I’m in Town A or Town B. Seems the same could be done for states if it’s an issue. Honestly, just asking the town would probably clear up the state issue without a separate state check.
I spent a decade using the mouse for almost nothing(*, other than rare drawing apps) except switching from one text window to another. Word processing was done via editable LaTeX files. An environment like that, allowing reproducibility and the editability of edit commands, is enormously more efficacious than “Friendly” GUIs … but if I try to explain this to anyone born after the Jurassic they haven’t a clue what I’m talking about.
-
- An exception is the early Macintoshes. I once worked in a shop where my work machines were often Macs in disrepair — no keyboard or no mouse. I discovered that much work could be accomplished on a Mac with ONLY the mouse, but on a Mac with ONLY a keyboard, the ONLY thing you could do is change the name of your hard drive! :smack:
When I bought my first Mac 10 years ago, with OS X 10.4 Tiger, and brandished my copy of David Pogue’s “Switching to the Mac” book, three surprising things stood out to me:
First, even the most complex Macintosh application has a pitiful anemic settings panel. Compare the rich customization and complex properties panels for MS Word in Windows, then look at the counterpart for Pages–it is truly minimalist. And I understood that minimalist can be a good thing, so I accepted this one.
Second, all Macintosh application help stinks. I was so used to hitting F1 in a field in a PC application and having context-sensitive help open up explaining the field’s use in detail. On my first Mac, the only help available would open a very slow window that would include such useful one-liners as “Use Safari to access the Web.” (an exaggeration, but it was pretty lame).
Finally, it was amazing how little one could do with the keyboard. On a PC I could do almost anything without a mouse, and the occasions where I couldn’t find a keyboard shortcut to accomplish a task were notable by their rarity. On the Mac, however, one has to enable accessibility first, and even then many actions just can’t be performed from the keyboard.
These differences are, in part, due to the different philosophy of Macintosh and persist to some extent today in MacOS Sierra.
After working in software design and development for over 30 years, there are too many examples of really bad UI for me to list.
In addition to all the ones listed above, here’s a set of things that totally bug me about modern web design:
[ul]
[li]Gray text on a white background … JUST STOP IT, ALREADY![/li][li]Ads that flash, rotate, move, jiggle, or bounce … I HATE having my attention drawn to whatever piece of crap you want to sell. Do me a favor and give me a static image; I absolutely promise you that I will look at your ad at least once![/li][li]I was recently interested in buying a side table and looked some up online. I bought one and am happy with it. Now, every damn website I visit is showing me more examples of what I have already bought.[/li][li]I would like to find and defenestrate the ‘genius’ who decided that putting a video at the top of a webpage and then relocating that same video to the lower left- or right-corner when I scroll the page was a good idea. As I may have mentioned, I absolutely hate rectangular things that flash, rotate, move, jiggle, or bounce; now, I have a smaller reminder of a video that I didn’t want to watch in the first place get moved to the bottom corner … AND, YOU CAN’T CLOSE OR DELETE THE DAMN THING![/li][/ul]
Web designers, if you are trying to piss off your users by deploying these tricks, well, then, Mission Accomplished!
What’s really sad is when there used to be a good UI and then the developers release a new version and you discover that they’ve fucked it up.
(Bolding mine.)
No it hasn’t. :smack:
A standard web pulldown will cycle through entries with the same starting character if you retype the character.
So, instead of typing TEX, type TTT… (however many times it takes to get to Texas). This usually isn’t too bad.
Which takes me to my gripe: Sites that force you to use a pulldown to select dates, or, even worse, that force you to use a stupid little calendar widget.
I should not have to take my hands off the keyboard to enter a date. I should not have to type “1” 80ish times to get from 1900 to my birth year. I should absolutely not have to click a tiny little fucking arrow to go back 30+ years and then another tiny fucking arrow to pick the right month and then click on a day.
Seriously, I can enter arbitrary information into an address field, why can’t you just validate that four numbers I type in is a year within a human lifespan from today?
Ah, yes, the Office ribbon still burns my chaps. At least on Mac I can find what I need quickly in the menus, but on Windows, I usually find that it’s faster to Google for the answer.
[quote=“BobArrgh, post:53, topic:777798”]
[li]I would like to find and defenestrate the ‘genius’ who decided that putting a video at the top of a webpage and then relocating that same video to the lower left- or right-corner when I scroll the page was a good idea. As I may have mentioned, I absolutely hate rectangular things that flash, rotate, move, jiggle, or bounce; now, I have a smaller reminder of a video that I didn’t want to watch in the first place get moved to the bottom corner … AND, YOU CAN’T CLOSE OR DELETE THE DAMN THING![/li][/QUOTE]
This is just a special case of fixed position content. All of which is horribly wrong. If I’m scrolling a web page, all of it should scroll. Not some of it. A classic symptom of someone who has no clue about UI.
I suspect that the fixed position ads are the product of companies that make ad blocking software. It’s only purpose seems to be to increase the number of people using ad blockers.
I’ve often thought of creating a user side script that grabs all fixed position code and turns it off.
This video thing leads to a another issue: autoplaying video. Dear idiots: your page may not be the only thing running on my computer. I could be video chatting with someone, listening to music, etc. I might click on 5 links in a row to open tabs and I certainly don’t want 5 things playing at once. You don’t get to play unless I permit it. Not ever. (And there’s YouTube where the turn off autoplay button rarely works.)
One standard stupid thing I ran into yesterday installing and using a new program. Windows that can’t be minimized and insist on being in the foreground. Why??? I can see Windows 2.0 programmers making this mistake, but we’re a wee bit past that now.
I’ve never heard of Toad, but in the case of Photoshop, the program originated on the Mac, and existed as a Mac-only application for some years. That’s where the CMD+SHIFT+Z was established for Redo, and the installed base of PS users was long accustomed to that shortcut. So when PS came out on Windows, they knew that many longtime users would likely find themselves working on Windows machines at some point, or needing to switch back and forth between platforms for one reason or another, so they kept everything the same on both platforms. Changing such an important shortcut would wreak havoc.
Videos: I seriously wish that everybody’s online video players would just adopt YouTube’s standards for the basic functions. I have found a number of sites where the “extra” controls on the video window are non-functional until you click the “Play” button. Want to watch the video in full-screen? First you have to click “Play”, and then click the “Full Screen” button, which results in a “hitch” in the playback as the player tries to simultaneously expand the window and play back the video. A minor thing, but small aggravations can add up.
Oracle forms – response buttons 99% of the time
<Yes/Accept/Submit> on the left || <No/Cancel> on the right
Last upgrade, new form,
{Cancel} | {OK}
Really Oracle?