On 06/04/2021 12:19 PM, Rich wrote:

The Real Bev <bashley101@gmail.com> wrote:

On 06/04/2021 09:39 AM, Robert wrote:

On 01/06/2021 14:53, Rich wrote:

Then some idiot UI designer, in order to justify their continued
paycheck, needed to go and make changes, and one of the changes was
to remove the textual labels, because /studies/ show that visual
icons convey more meaning faster than textual labels (the UI
designer idiot completely overlooked that this study was done in
the context of "the users already are familiar with what the
pictorial icons mean").

Proof that the public schools are no longer teaching the students to
read.

No, it is well settled that the human visual system recognizes images
faster than "words" (text). Several million years of needing to
quickly identify "friend" from "foe" in "the wild" set the system up to recognize and react to imagery much faster than interpreting the
meaning communicated by an arrangement of letter strokes.

The problem the UI designers who decided to drop the textual labels
forgot was that while the human visual system is fast to recognize an
image, in order to understand the "meaning" of the image your brain is reacting to, you *already have to know what the image means*.

If you do not yet know the meaning of the pictures, then near instant recognition of an image is meaningless, because you don't know what to
do. Once you /do/ memorize that the little image of a twisted left
facing arrow means /undo/, then you can later recognize it faster.

But how do you get to that point of knowing the twisted left facing
arrow means "undo"? The very first time you see it, if you've never encountered "undo" anywhere else, you puzzle over what it might mean.
This is the part the UI "experts" overlooked. In their performance
testing, the users already knew the meaning of the images, and they
could find and hit a "twisted left facing arrow" faster than finding
and hitting the word "undo". But the UI "experts" forgot to also test
with users who had zero idea what "twisted left facing arrow" means.
Because if they had tested with those folks, they would have found out
that the .2ms speed improvement for the folks "in the know" was well overshadowed by the 20 seconds of puzzling from the users who had no
idea what the images meant.

And what did the combined icons + text words provide? The ability for
the users who don't yet know what the images mean the opportunity to
learn the meaning as they used the program. The words + icons provided
the path from lack of knowledge to knowledge. Removing the words, and leaving only the icons, simply tore down that bridge, leaving those
with the lack of knowledge no path to learn that same knowledge (at
least not by discovery from using the UI).

And let's not forget those of us who have functions that, although we
rarely use them and wouldn't recognize their icons if our lives depended
on it, want to have them instantly available when we want them.

The icon designers obviously don't care about people with less than
perfect vision. Grey-on-grey fonts, minimal-contrast designs, thin
letters... Even the ones I chose for my old Thunderbird are
problematical. The left and right arrows are white on light blue such
that I can't even see which direction the arrows point. Their position
is a dead giveaway, of course, and I never use them anyway because I
just don't need to. But somebody must, right?

I'm glad I'm not the only one having trouble deciphering icons on modern >>> UIs. I want words not pictures!

Yesss!

--
Cheers, Bev
Schrodinger's Cake: You can have it AND eat it.
--Roland Curtis

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The Real Bev <bashley101@gmail.com> wrote:

On 06/04/2021 12:19 PM, Rich wrote:

The Real Bev <bashley101@gmail.com> wrote:

On 06/04/2021 09:39 AM, Robert wrote:

On 01/06/2021 14:53, Rich wrote:

Then some idiot UI designer, in order to justify their continued
paycheck, needed to go and make changes, and one of the changes was
to remove the textual labels, because /studies/ show that visual
icons convey more meaning faster than textual labels (the UI
designer idiot completely overlooked that this study was done in
the context of "the users already are familiar with what the
pictorial icons mean").

Proof that the public schools are no longer teaching the students to
read.

No, it is well settled that the human visual system recognizes images
faster than "words" (text). Several million years of needing to
quickly identify "friend" from "foe" in "the wild" set the system up to
recognize and react to imagery much faster than interpreting the
meaning communicated by an arrangement of letter strokes.

The problem the UI designers who decided to drop the textual labels
forgot was that while the human visual system is fast to recognize an
image, in order to understand the "meaning" of the image your brain is
reacting to, you *already have to know what the image means*.

If you do not yet know the meaning of the pictures, then near instant
recognition of an image is meaningless, because you don't know what to
do. Once you /do/ memorize that the little image of a twisted left
facing arrow means /undo/, then you can later recognize it faster.

But how do you get to that point of knowing the twisted left facing
arrow means "undo"? The very first time you see it, if you've never
encountered "undo" anywhere else, you puzzle over what it might mean.
This is the part the UI "experts" overlooked. In their performance
testing, the users already knew the meaning of the images, and they
could find and hit a "twisted left facing arrow" faster than finding
and hitting the word "undo". But the UI "experts" forgot to also test
with users who had zero idea what "twisted left facing arrow" means.
Because if they had tested with those folks, they would have found out
that the .2ms speed improvement for the folks "in the know" was well
overshadowed by the 20 seconds of puzzling from the users who had no
idea what the images meant.

And what did the combined icons + text words provide? The ability for
the users who don't yet know what the images mean the opportunity to
learn the meaning as they used the program. The words + icons provided
the path from lack of knowledge to knowledge. Removing the words, and
leaving only the icons, simply tore down that bridge, leaving those
with the lack of knowledge no path to learn that same knowledge (at
least not by discovery from using the UI).

And let's not forget those of us who have functions that, although we
rarely use them and wouldn't recognize their icons if our lives depended
on it, want to have them instantly available when we want them.

Yep, that is, of course, the very /point/ of button bars, esp. the
customizable button bars. Have the set of functions one wants easily accessible.

The icon designers obviously don't care about people with less than
perfect vision.

That is because most of the designers tend to be 20 somethings whom
still have their perfect vision, and *they* don't see an issue.

Grey-on-grey fonts, minimal-contrast designs, thin letters...

Yup, google's "material design" is esp. problematic here. Everything
is two shades of grey that are barely discernable from one another.
The colors probably looked great on the designer's properly color
adjusted, wide gamut, pricey monitor. But put the colors out in the
real world on not color perfect, not wige gamut, monitors and in less
than perfect ambient lighting conditions, and what one gets is
something that all looks the same.

Even the ones I chose for my old Thunderbird are problematical. The
left and right arrows are white on light blue such that I can't even
see which direction the arrows point.

White on light blue, that's not the best combination there.

Their position is a dead giveaway, of course, and I never use them
anyway because I just don't need to. But somebody must, right?

Well, that or someone thought sombody might use them, so they put them
there. And for the 20 something designers with perfect vision and
pricey wide color gamut monitors, the icon's probably look great. For
the rest of us, they smear into an indistinguishable blob.

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On 06-Jun-21 10:38 am, Rich wrote:

White on light blue, that's not the best combination there.

Designers probably also forget that people use different desktop themes.
The icon I was required to find, even if it it hadn't been in the hidden
icons area, appears as white on light grey with my particular desktop
theme. Even if it hadn't been hidden, it questionable whether I'd have
spotted it given that I had no idea where to look.

Sylvia.

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On 06/05/2021 06:35 PM, Sylvia Else wrote:

On 06-Jun-21 10:38 am, Rich wrote:

White on light blue, that's not the best combination there.

Designers probably also forget that people use different desktop themes.
The icon I was required to find, even if it it hadn't been in the hidden icons area, appears as white on light grey with my particular desktop
theme. Even if it hadn't been hidden, it questionable whether I'd have spotted it given that I had no idea where to look.

And let's hear it for the idiots who use small outline letters. Or
small drop-shadow letters. It's really hard to improve on Arial Bold
for pure legibility, why do they have to provide useless embellishments
with negative utility value?

Firefox is nice in that it gives us more control over the fonts than
Chrome, but it seems to insist on its own choice of menu and toolbar
fonts. I've got a lot of font entries in my userC*.css files, but over
the years many of them no longer work.

--
Cheers, Bev
"Why put fault tolerance in the OS, when it's already built
into the User?" -- Steve Shaw, regarding Win95

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The Real Bev <bashley101@gmail.com> wrote:

On 06/05/2021 06:35 PM, Sylvia Else wrote:

On 06-Jun-21 10:38 am, Rich wrote:

White on light blue, that's not the best combination there.

Designers probably also forget that people use different desktop themes.
The icon I was required to find, even if it it hadn't been in the hidden
icons area, appears as white on light grey with my particular desktop
theme. Even if it hadn't been hidden, it questionable whether I'd have
spotted it given that I had no idea where to look.

And let's hear it for the idiots who use small outline letters. Or
small drop-shadow letters. It's really hard to improve on Arial Bold
for pure legibility, why do they have to provide useless embellishments
with negative utility value?

I've heard (although I have no direct evidence) that this is a symptom
of a website that was developed on a Mac. What I heard was that Mac's
seem to default to thin stroke width font faces (possibly because with
retina displays, such thin strokes still render/display well) and so
the prevelance of websites using "thin stroke" fonts is directly due to
that Mac default being copied into whatever html/css is output by the
tool the designer used.

This scurge is so bad on the web that I created a bookmarklet to remove
any 'font weight' CSS declarations from the current web page being
viewed. Naturally this also removes bold, but it un-thins those awful
thin fonts (CNN is *very* bad for thin, nearly invisible, font
strokes).

Firefox is nice in that it gives us more control over the fonts than
Chrome, but it seems to insist on its own choice of menu and toolbar
fonts. I've got a lot of font entries in my userC*.css files, but
over the years many of them no longer work.

Yes, all of the browsers, including Firefox, have become guilty of infantializing themselves (removing anything even remotely considered
expert or power-user features). Since only a small number of their
userbase is expert or power-users, the vast majority don't notice the
loss. But we do. Except that what we hear back when we complain is:
"well, but, we did a usage survey, and that feature was so little used,
we decided to reduce our technical debt and remove it". Of course they
never stop to think that expert or power-user features are, almost by definition, only going to be used by a small fraction of the total user
base.

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The Real Bev wrote:
...

And let's hear it for the idiots who use small outline letters. Or
small drop-shadow letters. It's really hard to improve on Arial Bold
for pure legibility, why do they have to provide useless embellishments
with negative utility value?

haha! for sure!

the first pet peeve i have are the tiny checkboxes that don't get any bigger when you increase the screen magnification in the browser.

the second is for a certain financial website which rarely loads at all until i figure out which settings are in the way.

i'm not looking forwards to mozilla's upcoming changes either. grr! just leave things alone, but they continually have to "improve the UI" because of "smart" aka dumb devices. tabs work fine for me as they are, i have things set up how i like them.
don't mess with it!


songbird

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songbird <songbird@anthive.com> wrote:

i'm not looking forwards to mozilla's upcoming changes either. grr!
just leave things alone, but they continually have to "improve the
UI" because of "smart" aka dumb devices. tabs work fine for me as
they are, i have things set up how i like them. don't mess with it!

It appears that Mozilla has slowly had control taken over by the
marketers.

Folks from the "marketing" department believe they always have to
"continually improve" things to continue to sell the thing they have.
I.e., they have to artificially create a reason for you to throw out
your V3.4 device you bought last year in favor of a V4.1 device this
year. So they continually change and/or "add new features" (usually
fluff) to make "new thing" this year look different from "that old
thing from last year".

The result is a constant, needless, change of things in needless ways,
all to justify why one should buy again the thing one already purchased
last year.

And, if Mozilla has been taken over by marketers, then all is lost
unless someone else can come along, buy up Mozilla whole, and fire all
the marketers, because no good ever came from the marketers, or from
having marketing in control.

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Sylvia Else <sylvia@email.invalid> writes:

On 01-Jun-21 4:30 pm, Sylvia Else wrote:

[...]

I did eventually figure this out. But when they mean click on a
toolbar icon, they should say that, and they should point out that it
may be hidden, in the hidden icons area.

This perhaps highlights a problem with trying to give instructions in
the context of UIs that are increasingly customisable. Each thing that
the user can interact with really needs a unique identity that
instructions can refer to, with the UI itself then being tasked with
showing the user how to reach that thing given how the UI is currently customised.

We can summarize this as:

People in high-precision fields should take their jobs seriously.

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The Real Bev <bashley101@gmail.com> writes:

[...]

I' never willing to do anything called 'sync'. The bastards never
tell you whether it means "Copy A over B" or "Copy B over A" or
"Combine everything in A, B, C... and copy the newest entries over the
older entries and copy the new construct to A, B, C...."

That's in the configurations. But, good point, in high-precision fields,
when language appears subtle, it should be replaced with new ones.
Consider ``filtering'', for example.

I've destroyed all my database (of something) once precisely for
thinking A was one thing and B was another. The software could have
told me --- okay, I will destroy 12644 records and write 0 records. It
would have immediately told me A and B were reversed.

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Robert <monstoor@spammedia.com> writes:

On 01/06/2021 14:53, Rich wrote:

Then some idiot UI designer, in order
to justify their continued paycheck, needed to go and make changes, and
one of the changes was to remove the textual labels, because /studies/
show that visual icons convey more meaning faster than textual labels
(the UI designer idiot completely overlooked that this study was done
in the context of "the users already are familiar with what the
pictorial icons mean").

I'm glad I'm not the only one having trouble deciphering icons on
modern UIs. I want words not pictures!

Same here. Here's a ``toolbar'' in a system I use:

https://i.imgur.com/Cfnwfpa.png

Sadly, not the default! Amazing!

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The Real Bev <bashley101@gmail.com> writes:

On 06/04/2021 09:39 AM, Robert wrote:

On 01/06/2021 14:53, Rich wrote:

Then some idiot UI designer, in order
to justify their continued paycheck, needed to go and make changes, and
one of the changes was to remove the textual labels, because /studies/
show that visual icons convey more meaning faster than textual labels
(the UI designer idiot completely overlooked that this study was done
in the context of "the users already are familiar with what the
pictorial icons mean").

Proof that the public schools are no longer teaching the students to read.

Good point! But how could they? The teachers and the whole system are composed by the students of yesterday, who don't know how to read
either. The inner is the outer. How will the minority make a
difference when results always lean towards the average?

That's not always the case. Take a look at science. It drastically
changes the world and is really only conducted by a tiny minority in its
core.

On the other hand, science changes only the outer, not the inner. When
it comes to people, we have no science at all whatsoever. We have only nonsense.

So, it looks really nontrivial.

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Sylvia Else <sylvia@email.invalid> writes:

[...]

Perhaps it's time for me to get out a shawl and rocking chair, and buy
a cat.

You know it's user-interface designers that are so out of their mind.

I use this software --- in the older version: it seems they're replacing
it with a new one and will discontinue this one. The software's
interface is an icon in the system tray of systems such as Windows.
When I click once on that icon, then a little window pops-up and then I
can see what it's doing and then I see on the top-right of the window a
certain region with three dots (which when I hover that region I see ``settings''). It's not a button, but a certain region.

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