Most of the apps I make will never see the public. They are mainly used as tools I use to make my professional work as video-producer easier and more productive.
But even when I make apps for myself and my direct colleagues, they must “feel good”. I should not be making large user manuals to work with the apps. A clear intuitive UI helps a lot.
Yesterday I came back from a nice 2 week vacation in Eastern Europe and Germany. And I finally found time to answer emails and watch my own nerd-videos.
The video bellow was one of the videos that inspired me to look at UI design decisions. I think it might be inspiring for the Xojo community as well. So, here it is.
I don’t mind “simple and boring” so much; my complaint about modern UIs is that functionality and usability have suffered. It is ridiculously difficult to find many drag control points in both Windows and MacOS these days, for grabbing window resizers, splitters and so forth. It seems they’ve made them all one pixel wide. Unnecessarily hiding important controls in the name of simplicity is also an issue, as is the abandonment of the menubar.
And they’ve added so much junk on a window’s title bar that you can’t just grab anywhere to move it. If you do and you’re not careful, then you’ve triggered the universe’s Self-Destruct sequence.
I use an app that has the search bar in the top header section on macOS, you cannot select the text with the mouse as it starts the move of the window. Very annoying.
The Finder window is a good example of how bad this has become, over the years. Grubby little icons with no outline to enable you to avoid entering their airspace and being shot down
One of my cornerstone rules when programming in my world is to reduce the number of steps required to do a certain task. Having to do more steps than absolutely necessary is by far most annoying thing with an UI in my opinion. Far more important than looks.
Yes and no. Steps are important. But it must be clear to the user which steps he has to take. This is the main reason why I hate phones so much. I want to have a button to do an action. Instead I have to watch a video about an obscure combination of gestures.
One of the various reasons I have shelved my iPhone and gone back to using the Doro clamshell I had before that. It still works after sitting unused for seven years.
Another point that developers should consider is if a given UI element change actually adds something to the app. Changes for the sake of change should be avoided, as it just confuses the user. In a car, most of the stuff required to drive it are fairly standardized. Why place the brake pedal on the roof just because it looks cool ? There is nothing wrong with being “me too”, unless you can make a point of adding something to the user experience. As a very simple example, I added a scale point in the middle of a selection rectangle, to allow scaling from the middle without having to change tool. The other dots work in the same way it’s done since early versions of MacPaint and MacDraw in 1984.
I would argue that it also needs to make sense though. Putting a point in the middle like that does not say “scale from the middle” to me. In my experience, the way this is usually done is to allow the user to hold down the Option or Alt key when dragging one of the corners.
Have never seen the method you describe, and it does not make sense to scale from the center by dragging a corner point.
In any event, you need to know what the dots actually do, in my case by displaying a help text when pointing at the dot,
The method I used is better as it adds way more control and options. Besides that, the Option/ALT keys are better used for other features on the outer dots.
Or when you just want to move a window but you hit some hidden UI trigger and your whole screen explodes into a system-wide thumbnail view of all windows (I forget what it’s called but it’s very disconcerting and disruptive).
That’s when you drag a window to the top too fast and it shows all the open windows and spaces setup. No! I just want to move the window to the top of the screen thank you macOS.
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