[xg15]

> Me: "I don't like smartphone UIs. Everything is flat, nothing indicates where you can touch or not. I have to randomly try everything on the screen."

Response by non-tech person: "Well, yeah, of course you have to try everything? How else would this work?"

I think this goes deeper than many tech people realize.

From what I understood from talking with "nontechnical"(*) friends, relatives, etc, for a good potion of them, computers had always been "unpredictable magic". They got by through memorizing some very strict and rigid interaction sequences - "click this icon, then click that menu, then click that button, etc" and prayed nothing unexpected would happen. They were too scared and/or uninterested in computers to even try and find any rules or consistency in it.

I feel as if those nontechnical people "won" now. Now all UIs feel as inconsistent and unpredictable even for "techies" as any computer interaction felt to those people back then.

(* repeated from another thread: "nontechnical" in the "not fluent with PC use" sense, which is actually quite arrogant - they can have very high technical skill in other areas obviously)

[ConceptJunkie]

I've witnessed this so much over the years. Much of the time when someone would ask me for help with something on the computer, I would have no idea, but I could discover the answer with a little bit of exploration and a good understanding of how UIs are supposed to work.

Windows 2000 was peak Windows UI, and everything since then has been worse.

Then Microsoft started thinking it was a good idea to make native applications look and work like webpages, which was a huge step backwards. Fortunately, that stupid idea didn't last too long, but it did have some lasting effects like the advent of "flat UI" style, but it was the beginning of the modern era of flailing around trying to improve on something that didn't need improving with one bad idea after another.

These days, I sometimes find that _I_ cannot figure some things out in software like Outlook or Teams that should be obvious because there are so many different styles of UI in these tools, many of which are not very intuitive or discoverable. Mixed metaphors, style over substance, and the idea that "flat" is anything but a way to turn your display into a sludge of rectangles of slightly different shades of grey with little or no differentiation between them, and few or no visual cues as to what elements of windows are clickable.

There are certainly things that are better now, like the popularity of "Dark Mode" which took about 30 years too long to happen, but in general, I don't think UI is better than it was 25 years ago, especially after Microsoft wasted 5 years or more on the absolutely misbegotten idea that computers should look like phones. Of course, the legacy is that Windows still has the remnants of about 5 different styles of UI in different places, and I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't a few Windows 3-era UI pieces still hanging around the Control Panel.

[snarfy]

> Windows 3-era UI pieces still hanging around the Control Panel

odbc data sources

[thewebguyd]

> They were too scared and/or uninterested in computers to even try and find any rules or consistency in it.

Yes, and this is still true today. I work for a company with a large very non-technical user base. People absolutely will not explore, click on things outside of what they have memorized, or even try basic troubleshooting steps out of fear of breaking things.

It's actually really frustrating when trying to train to certain software or concepts because you have to lay everything out very explicitly, step by step. You cannot leave anything to the imagination or just assume that because the UI is "intuitive" that they will figure it out, because they won't even try.

I've encountered some form of that attitude and behavior at nearly every job I've had.

[dieselgate]

> People absolutely will not explore, click on things outside of what they have memorized, or even try basic troubleshooting steps out of fear of breaking things.

I agree with this in general but it can be tough for financial/business/order workflows where an irreversible change may be initiated. From the software perspective an audit log or Git-like history would easily mitigate these concerns but they usually don't exist. And "non-technical" users often just want to "know what buttons to click" to do their job.

To the point of the main article don't think I ever had the opportunity of using Windows 2000. Remember jumping from 98 to XP? Not sure about ME/Millennium either and if it's the same or a variant of 2000.

[thewebguyd]

> From the software perspective an audit log or Git-like history would easily mitigate these concerns but they usually don't exist

Yeah, and this is definitely a big reason why people are afraid to click and explore.

I still don't understand why big enterprise software still lacks any kind of version control. AUdit logs, yeah, but most big ERPs and other similar products don't have an easy "roll back this change" feature.

I think users knowing that they could immediately undo whatever they did and get back to a safe and known state would do a lot to encourage exploration and learning.

[peanball]

Not the same. ME also came out around 2000 but was based on windows 9x, windows 2000 was based on NT. The UI looked somewhat similar with those two.

[neonstatic]

> You cannot leave anything to the imagination

I don't know if there's ever going to be a suitable environment to have this conversation, but many people in any society are just not smart enough to experiment with things especially if those things are non-physical or abstract.

[marcosdumay]

My parents never had any problem understanding where they can click on Windows 3.11. They never could understand how to interact with DOS GUIs.

Nowadays they have decades of experience with computers. They still can't predict what part of a web-site they can interact with, but they have memorized all the actions they can make on the phone apps they use.

[exitb]

Let’s look at the very website we on. Would you prefer for every clickable element here to be a button? Or even underlined as a link? Do you ever get confused navigating this website?

[Telaneo]

> Would you prefer for every clickable element here to be a button? Or even underlined as a link?

Yes.

> Do you ever get confused navigating this website?

No, because I've been browsing the web for a while and know that every website does things their own way.

[exitb]

Given it’s a website mostly for experienced computer people who, like you, don’t really need those visual cues, don’t you think adding them would be superfluous?

[Telaneo]

No.

[CamperBob2]

It's a website for experienced computer people, and I appreciate its minimalist aesthetic, but that doesn't mean there's not enormous room for improvement.

[marcosdumay]

Now that you've said it, I think PG would have designed a better site if he didn't hide the underlines.

But also, it wouldn't get any worse if the same design was kept and the underlines were enabled. And it would improve the usability for first-time users, but the nature of HN is that those are always very few.

[ahartmetz]

I have recently discovered a config option "Underline all links" in Firefox, and it's really nice, actually.

[desdenova]

Wouldn't hurt if interactive elements didn't require me to zoom in order to interact with them on mobile.

[Terr_]

I live in regular fear that my fingertip will hit the wrong up/down icon.

[slopinthebag]

I often forget you can click on the timestamp. In fact for years I didn't know how to flag comments because of this.

[mrguyorama]

My mother learned BASIC in college (not at all proficiently though), searched the web before the era of Google to learn about my sister's medical condition, and has used technology to enhance her teaching (when it actually helps) whenever she can, including trying to learn OBS during COVID to better teach remote classes, but when Windows Vista came around, she had to ask "What do I do?" to open her program.

Because Microsoft, after spending millions to recognize that labeling the button "Start" was brilliant, removed that label.

There was no justification for abandoning the millions of dollars of research that multiple computer companies produced for good UI design decades ago.

It was all just thrown away because some design asshole somewhere wanted to swing their dick around.

Millions of the same people who had no issue migrating from Windows 3.1 to Windows 2000 systems have been fucked over. People who knew how to use computers were given a huge middle finger at everything they learned. They were handed a system that was objectively harder to use than the previous one.

For some "designers" wet dreams.

People are bad with computers because "Designers" have been objectively value negative for decades. Instead of paying attention to the reams of scientific data that tells you exactly how to make a UI better, they smoke crack and make things transparent.

Clear buttons with obvious intent have been replaced with a goddamned inscrutable "Hamburger" menu. Decades old metaphors and systems that made sense to people who were born before computers were abandoned. Reliable and predictable functions that you could trust across applications have been eschewed in favor of hacked together javascript trash that screws up basic things like scrolling and copy/paste and drag and drop. Even though such functionality is often provided directly by the browser, they override it and fuck it up.

And people call these idiots "The best of the best"

[smcg]

The goal of human-computer interaction is to make accessible software that is intuitively easy to use for the most people. We need to make this mandatory in CS education (again).

[EGreg]

It started with iOS 7 and Jony Ive

Steve Jobs was right. Then when he died (after removing Scott Forstall), Jony Ive got to do his hardware minimalism in software too. And everything Steve Jobs favored was suddenly derided as “skeumorphism”. It’s like what USSR did with Stalin under Khrustchev. I still remember when Chrome app just had a big white area where you’re supposed to enter the url and you had no idea unless you randomly happened to click there. And if the website background was white, too? Oh too bad LMAO. Minimalistic! Chrome had no… chrome.

[falcor84]

I don't remember when I first encountered it (maybe before ios7), but their cardinal sin for me was my struggling for 10 minutes to make the calculator app go into scientific mode, seeing absolutely no setting for that, before eventually discovering from a friend that you have to physically rotate the phone to landscape orientation to get the additional buttons.

[ConceptJunkie]

That reminds me of that notorious story of the adventure game from the 90s where you had to make a fake mustache out of cat hairs to solve a puzzle.

[joombaga]

Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned.

I was happy to find this Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_hair_mustache_puzzle

[ziml77]

Jony Ive is a plague on design. Just a few days ago someone showed me Ferrari's new EV that he designed. I am not a car person and even I can see it looks like crap! That man should just take his big Apple money and fully retire so he doesn't ruin anything else.

[jen20]

Windows 8 was released a whole year before iOS 7, so the blame here is misplaced (though I won't argue that Ive's approach to UI design was worse than what came before).