UI Sins: A Rant

[Dullstar]

Hoooooooooly crap, the number of bad user interfaces out there is staggering. I felt like sharing a few things that annoy me. I'll start with some minor ones.

First of all:
Dear iOS:
I am very much aware that Music is not allowed to use cellular data. I am not using the music app in any way that justifies allowing it to waste data. Sure I'm probably not going to go over the data limit, but better safe than sorry, yes? So you don't need to remind me about my choice of settings. There is almost no reason to notify the user of a setting that they themselves personally changed. If it could cause undesirable behavior, and it's possible that the user may have changed it accidentally, then I could see the notification being reasonable...  but only if there's a prominent and obvious way to tell it, "No, changing this setting was not an accident; this is how I want it."

Dear Cortana:
Please stop being such an attention whore. Then again, thank you for at least having a setting that's not completely impossible to find to suppress your desperate pleas to be acknowledged. iOS does a few things wrong; see above complaint; but at least I have to accidentally hold down a button too long for Siri to start bothering me; and she doesn't show up until I ask for her.

Dear Cortana's Overlords:
Cortana's senpai noticed her, and was subsequently displeased. I should think that if I've completely hidden Cortana as much as the settings will allow, then maaaaaaybe she shouldn't start telling me what to do in an update. "Oooooooooh, tell me to make you a to-do list!" Hey, guess what? That's actually really annoying. The reason I don't use Cortana isn't the fact that I don't know what she can do - it's that I would rather just do it myself. I type quickly enough to greatly counteract the amount of time I'd probably have to spend correcting her anyway - I type fast and don't really talk all that fast. That and it's kinda awkward when there's other people in the room. "Oh, hey, could you blah blah blah blah blah?" "Wait, what?" "Oh, no, sorry, just talking to the computer..." Also my desktop doesn't even have a microphone in all the time, since I only plug it in when I actually want to use it.



But these user interface sins are rather small and petty compared to the pile of absolute garbage I'm going to rant about:

So I have an assignment that involves using a certain program that is not entirely unlike PowerPoint. The only thing that it can do that PowerPoint can't is to have people comment on your slides (which is implemented kinda poorly but that's beside the point). Now, a lot of programs try to do things for the user. When done well, this can be fine. I don't have a problem with a program auto-suggesting some settings for something, or suggesting corrections to possible mistakes...  as long as 1) it can be overridden when the behavior is not desirable without a convoluted workaround (e.g. say if autocorrect won't let you use a certain word, but instead of being able to change it back after it gets corrected, you would have to make an image file of the word you actually want to use and put it in where the word should go) and 2) the behavior helps me more than it inconveniences me (this is why autocorrect is disabled on my phone) - and autosuggesting settings, even if they're not necessarily correct right away, can be a good starting point to adjust things further.

Then some software just decides that it wants to be smarter than the user and that it knows more about how to make something look than the user does. "Hey, here's an image that could totally have more brightness/contrast!" *makes some sort of adjustment that causes any even remotely bright spot on the original to look like kinda like a lens flare* "Oooooh, look how pretty it is! What do you mean you had text overlaid on that? It can't have been that important. Not as important as making it nice and bright " Sure, I could have picked something with which that wouldn't happen - but that's a very unexpected result - there was plenty of contrast between the text and the background in the original and it was perfectly readable. Then this thing comes along and basically desides "Because you used something other than black text on a white background I'm going to mess with the colors to make the whole thing unreadable!" Screw you, program-that-is-not-entirely-unlike-Powerpoint.

Also, making a narrated slideshow is just EASIER in PowerPoint. Why? It lets you edit things so you don't have to do the entire narration portion and slide timing perfectly in one take (this program will let you upload audio from an external source, but the narration and slide timings are tied together so if you upload it then you can't add slide timings which becomes a problem when the assignment has auto-advancing slides as a requirement). So because I am too lazy to repeat the same long-as-crap thing repeatedly into a microphone until I get it perfect, as single mistake forcing a restart (I don't mind this so much if it's live, but it feels like something that's recorded should be done until it is free of obvious mistakes), I figure this convoluted setup is the best I can do with my current equipment:

1) Record into audacity.
2) Edit the audio to be correct.
3) Position microphone next to speaker.
4) Use the microphone to record the sound from the speaker into the program while adding the slide timings.

This would have worked so much better if they'd just let us use PowerPoint instead.
Also note that if you want anything more professional than "I took a bunch of pictures from Google Images and talked over them!" you have to make a PowerPoint anyway because the only way you can add slides is to import them from PowerPoint. (Assuming you want slides that are visually more than just a single picture with literally nothing else, which you probably do, because this is a presentation for a class, not a "My Vacation Pictures" slideshow.)

Also note that the school is literally paying Microsoft so that every student has access to the online versions of Office anyway so there's literally no reason not to be using PowerPoint other than "We wanted to use something that isn't PowerPoint but has a similar, but much less professional-looking unless you like convoluted workarounds, end result!"

I will also note that it's not related to open source, either. This is just as proprietary as MS Office, but like 10,000 times less useful.

Did I mention that, in order to narrate the presentation, which is a requirement of the assignment, you literally have to leave a voice comment on your own presentation, meaning that the narration is considered a comment? That doesn't make sense from a design perspective, as it doesn't match the way any other application ever uses the word "comment."

And to clarify even further: this is not a presentation class, and I have no reason to believe that they want to enforce you doing it in one take.

/endrant



Got any stories of your own dealing with crappily designed programs? Feel free to post them here!

[Simon]

involves using a certain program

Alarm bells already ringing because you have to use a certain tool, not deliver a common type of file. Like the XY problem, except forced from above.

Sadly, the trend goes to entire suites of web applications, they hide the underlying data and only allow operations on them. What I want in object-oriented code is not what I want with my precious user data.

2) Edit the audio to be correct.
3) Position microphone next to speaker.
4) Use the microphone to record the sound

Lovely solution. Bonus points if

• the bad program P won't let you record from the standard sound output, therefore step 3 is necessary,
  
• P's output format is not human-editable,
  
• you run P through the smartphone and 1-4 minimizes interaction with the phone.
  

And to clarify even further: this is not a presentation class, and I have no reason to believe that they want to enforce you doing it in one take.

This happens in so many courses of study.

Math teaching is hard to improve, it has reached a tolerable optimum in reading text and hand-writing text. Few occasions force incompetent people or tooling on you. Time weeds out the incompetent, and you can focus on on the helpful qualities of other people -- they're good at math.

Natural sciences force you to grind and report experiments. Computer science forces you to hand in group projects early during study. You learn software design by receiving grades tinted by your peers' work, you could instead watch the competent, possibly getting instant feedback from them.

All other subjects of study show your rant problem over and over.

-- Simon

[ccexplore]

So I have an assignment that involves using a certain program that is not entirely unlike PowerPoint. The only thing that it can do that PowerPoint can't is to have people comment on your slides (which is implemented kinda poorly but that's beside the point).

Hmm interesting.  I know Word (or at least the version available at work which may well be a professional edition) have commenting/review system built in, though I've yet to check out whether Powerpoint has something similar.  I do remember that Powerpoint allows you to include "speaker-only comments" alongside each slide, which I imagine can also be used as a blank canvas for leaving arbitrary comments, though admittedly not a very good system compared to a true integrated commenting/review system (since likely each person will have to open the file in a mode that blocks out everyone else from opening until the person's done).  And although I've never used them, I suspect the Google Docs suite probably has something similar as well.

It is quite unfortunate that the commenting requirement may be what's forcing you to use proprietary software that is apparently lacking in core features in the actual slideshow department, and at the same time probably not even a very transferable skillset compared to using Powerpoint.

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Regarding Cortana in Windows 10, you should be able to hide it through one of its right-click menus.  See attached.  As you can see I have it currently set to only show the circle icon instead of wasting space on the taskbar with the usual full-width text box, though I still have yet to use it even once so maybe I should just hide it completely already.   I'm sure you can Google to quickly find any other relevant settings to help shut her up and put her out of sight.   It has never annoyed me unprompted so far, but I also vaguely remember during the initial setup after Windows 10 was installed, there was one screen promoting Cortana and asking for permission to be set up, and I believe I explicitly chose the "set up later" (aka "no thanks") option so maybe that helped.

Also worth noting that you can simply type in the text box instead of actually speaking to use Cortana.  Considering that I don't even use the voice features on my Android phone (unless you count actual good-old-fashion phone calls ), there is no way in hell I'd ever do it on my laptop, and I'm quite sure that applies to a lot of people.  Even then, I've yet to have tried Cortana out via typing (or using anything similar on any other platforms for that matter).  I guess my life hasn't gotten all the interesting/hectic enough yet for such a thing to be even remotely useful for me.