[HerbMcM]

Once upon a time I used Android Auto and things were good. Most controls were in the corners, you see, which allowed me to perform a couple of changes without looking at the touchscreen. One day, a GUI designer decided to put a horizontal bar going through the top of the display just to display a very tiny clock on the top right corner. The top left corner I used to bring up the menu and quickly select options no longer worked reliably as it was under that horizontal strip. I stopped using Android Auto after a couple of months.

[andybak]

This was one of the first lessons I learned about good UX design and was the canonical example when discussing what Mac OS classic did right and Windows did wrong.

I think it was Norman Nielson thing or one of those old school gurus.

How are people allowed to work on UIs without learning the core syllabus? The basics of their trade? I grew up on this stuff and I'm not even a UX specialist or a UI designer.

Or are they getting overridden by bad product managers and other shitty stakeholders?

[internet101010]

They are being overridden by people trying to justify their jobs by changing things for the sake of changing things.

[amatecha]

Right? When I worked in the office I kept a copy of Apple's Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines on my desk. It's amazing how "solved" a ton of that kind of stuff was, 30+ years ago. If you design software / UI and don't know the history of HCI and its top players, well…

[permo-w]

Slightly tangentially, just now reading the first section of the guidelines concerning metaphors, it's interesting, and an illustration of how far computers have taken over our lives, that now that a lot of the traditional UI metaphors are likely far better known for their software purpose than their original real world meaning

[syncsynchalt]

See also Fitt's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law) and with regards to Apple OS design, Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Tognazzini), now at Norman Nielson Group.

[lolinder]

This is why I may never upgrade to a vehicle newer than ~2010. I've dealt with too many consumer electronics that auto-update in ways that make them useless to me, and I'm not willing to make a car-sized purchase in the vague hope that this consumer electronic device will be the exception and will keep working for 10+ years (assuming I maintain it) in the same way as it did when I bought it.

I develop and rely on muscle memory when driving, and I'm not going to invest in muscle memory that can be changed out from under me on the whims of some product manager somewhere.