Can StackOverflow leave nothing untouched? 🙄😉

Maybe some UXer can explain why arrows with circles around them are better than the old vote buttons with just arrows.

Has this been around for a while and I just missed them? 

Well, at least I now know it happened between now and 2020.

I worry that some UI changes are made just to keep people employed and busy. I'm sure there's a good argument or 15 to change it. I'm not sure they're always good reasons.

I still use a version of SourceTree on Windows from 2015 when I'm on Windows. There's nothing wrong with it. I prefer it. I had a coworker see it on a screenshare and say, "Where can I get that theme?" 

What if your redesign resources had been spent on anything else? How many sprints saved? How awesome would your app be? 

Again, not that a redesign is bad. In many markets, simply refreshing the page will drive sales. Just keep in mind the opportunity cost. I realize SourceTree's users are probably more "aged UI tolerant" than most (see my previous post where I admint to using kdiff3), but... 

How much better has SourceTree's core UX experience really gotten in the last six and a half years? What percentage of their storypoints went to it? Worth it? Idk. (But my guess is heck no. Also note that they've worked through several UI iterations since then. Remember when they used a diamond ring for Commit? And people liked it? /cringe twice. Brah culture much?)

In other SO news, I did hit 15k and can protect questions now. I expected to be more impressed when I hit it the way I was with 10k, but... not so much. It's cool, and I'm happy some answers continue to help folks, but I really need to find another semi-obscure but useful tag to sit on.

EDIT: Here's some description. There is a comment that this makes the page more accessible for the visually impaired. I'd like to know how. Does that mean I don't see the improvement? (no pun intended) Yeah, but that's the point of asking. Honestly, what's the improvement?

Maybe down/up/votes are clearer?

There's also a comment that the design doesn't really meet WCAG compliance after all. Apparently they didn't QA dark mode. 🤦

Labels: development, qa, sourcetree, stackoverflow, UI, UX

I liked it when Apple was a hardware company. Sure, as a stockholder, the services income is great. That's where the growth is. As a user, I hate Apple's services push.

Here's one small example: I have the 200 gig iCloud service that runs $3 a month. I have members of my Apple Family using it too. For some reason, two members have used craploads of iCloud space in the last month. We're nearly out.

Do I get a warning that "A & B's use of iCloud has jumped 400% in the last month [bonus if it says "mostly edited video"]. You might request that they check if the usage is required"?

No, no I get this:

macOS

That's a notification on my Mac. Apparently iCloud is going to go away. This implies I can't even use it, though of course all the stuff I have in iCloud continues to work now. I'm just headed to the state where I can't add anything new until something is deleted. But why be measured when you can yell the sky is falling?

Update: Had a reason to open System Preferences later on today. Was greeted with this screen.

Mail

This is from iOS' Mail app. Nevermind that I don't even really use my iCloud email account. This little red warning stares at me every time I open Mail. The clear implication is that all of my email is about to go kaput. 

Spoiler: With the exception of the @me.com or whatever account I have, my email is not under attack. Gmail, Outlook, personal webservers, whatever, they're all still good, and good in iOS Mail, regardless of my iCloud storage space situation. I'd say 50+% of iPhone users wouldn't be savvy enough to understand that right off.

That "Learn More..." link leads you to this overlay. Dark pattern alert: Note how the auto-renew warning is partially obscured by default on my SE2 screen. (I've scrolled in the second.) You can say that's minor, but so would making the "Add more storage..." font a bit smaller. Priorities.

The message is clear. Pay to play or your email goes away.

iCloud online/through a browser

The least offensive by a mile is the one from iCloud online.

That's a nice, measured, informative description. You haven't run out of space yet. If you do, you'll still have photos, video, and docs; they just can't be updated. Add a, "You might want to clean up your existing files or purchase more space; here's how" and it's perfect.

The best part is that its "Learn More" link goes here, which is a website that includes an entire section on "Make more space available in iCloud". But guess what's above that nice, reasoned section of true information?

That's right: Buy More Services!!1!!!?!?!

It's subtle, but subtle pushes make millions at Apple's scale. 

Aside: Though probably not at macOS scale. This page is a place where they could afford to leave the services money on the table. 

And that's probably what drives me crazy. Apple used to be the "leave money on the table company". Remember "We don't think you need a larger phone"? The slightly larger 5 size was "good enough" for a while. They could've made a larger phone sooner, but didn't until they were ready, not when the market was ready.

It's a horrible trope, but let's use it. Can you see Jobs saying, "And if you want to keep using your email, you just need to pay us an extra $7 a month above the $3 you're already paying us." This, the guy who wanted to sell you albums of music without DRM. He's going to hold your email hostage?

As a whole, these seem like horribly unpolished, crass, rushed, used-car lot sales techniques. If you haven't seen it, you should take a look at the YouTube video that's made the rounds recently (though it's from October), embedded below, about the embarrassing state of the macOS Music app. The dude narrating obviously plays dumb several times to expose poor design choices that might not actually stymie him, but someone is hitting them without the expertise and savviness to get out.

The poor, half-arsed design choices he points out in Music reminds me of the ham-handed services advertisements, above. Lots of verbiage that isn't perfectly clear. UI is not deliberately designed. Each, with the possible exception of iCloud online, refuse to do a respectful job thinking through all the likely use cases at each step. 

Each Apple UI in these cases has a single goal, a happy-path-or-no-path mentality. In Music, it seems it's a very junior programmer fulfilling some acceptance criteria to the letter, and nothing more.

Above, with iCloud, that single use case is, clearly, PUSH SERVICES REVENUE, and do it under the guise of serving the customer.

NOTE: Language in the video is VERY NSFW.

Labels: apple, apple fail, happy-path-or-no-path, hats o' money, UI

Remember Joel Spolsky's "Let Me Go Back" letter? I do.

Microsoft, specifically Microsoft Office, doesn't.

I'm obviously trying to save the file to my local drive. And I obviously would prefer not to have to navigate that horrendous UI Word has now to move from OneDrive to my drive.

For an app that still impressively honors old keystroke recipes -- like alt-I, B (alt-insert, break) to insert a page break -- this really offends me (haha) as a user. They are actively preventing you from saving to your drive. (This is not new. This is simply the first time I got aggravated enough to post.)

This is not progress. This is a commercial for OneDrive.

... but...

Fewer keystrokes is better! Let me go back!

Labels: cloud, hats of money, microsoft, microsoft fail, office, UI, usability, users

Here's an interesting post on the SourceTree development blog about why they believe their changes to the UI in the last few years are better, and here's another than explains changes to the Windows client specifically.

I get the sentiment of some of the changes, like this one...

The Windows App always used tabs for navigating between open repositories, but we knew that those tabs weren’t quite right. The toolbar sat above everything else in the UI, but it only really belonged to the open repo (tab). We’ve swapped those panels so that tabs now live at the top of the hierarchy, much like browser experiences that you are no doubt familiar with.

... but I don't necessarily get the conclusions. You want to have a coherent design philosophy, like Material Design or Apple's User Interface Guidelines, sure. But I've never noticed tab placement to be a problem in SourceTree. I get that it's not a browser look, but also wonder why we need to standardize on browser behavior. Is overuse of tabs in Windows apps a convention in itself? Probably was. Do newer Windows users balk at that convention and prefer browser conventions? Maybe. I don't know. I didn't see a lot of A/B testing in the SourceTree articles.

What I do know is that I hate the flatness of the newer SourceTree. I also hate how spaced out each line for a checkin is. It's disorienting and not as info rich as the alternating colors version we had previously. I also dislike the icons in the toolbar. Before, the icons were colorful, but not distracting. Now they're as flat and non-descript as a Jony Ives' designed button on iOS 7.

I posted a discussion on their forums, not that I expect to see much in the way of responses.

Just for fun, I thought I'd ask if anyone else preferred the UI from back in 1.7. To my eyes, at least, it's much less fatiguing to take in at a glance than the flatness of more recent releases, with nice, though old-school, cues about where widgets start & stop. Sort of like having serifs in a font.

The colors are also more muted, giving information rather than everything demanding attention at once in an overly egalitarian fleet of brightness floating on a flat sea of white.

^{(I do kinda like that last line in the quote, above.)}

But one of the neat things about their own blog posts is that they do seem to care what you think. In that first that I linked to, you could schedule a 1:1 with them to discuss what you thought about design. Let's just go ahead and say that's crazy customer attention. ;^) And they ask for community posts if you have an opinion, so I'm doing my part, I guess.

Makes you wonder, though.

• How much attention and how much of a company's resources are put into UI where it's not useful?
• How can you tell?
• Do you embed metrics in your apps once they're released to measure real-world use?
• Is real-world A/B testing enough?

I mean, Linux still hasn't taken over the desktop for vanilla PC users. Why is that? Just apps? I'm betting there's some UI roughness that's also a barrier to entry. Good enough [for functional use] isn't always good enough [to sell (or be eaten?) like hotcakes]. And it's specifically these kinds of changes... less information, buttons being moved to different spots... that are the microactions that make everyone's day to day that much less productive.

Labels: design, sourcetree, UI

Labels: bitbucket, fail, UI