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

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

I can't believe how bad SourceTree has become [on Windows] over the last year or two. It's gone from buggy as crud to downright unusable at times. While setting up a new box for development today, I tried the most recent version, and it wouldn't stop asking me for my bitbucket password, even though I had zero tabs for repos that pointed to bitbucket. I'm also not a big fan of all the UI changes. I mean, it's just ugly now. The worst of iOS 7 style flattening plus a color palette from the Limited Edition Fluorescent Crayola Box.

I give up again.

What I did the last time I got absolutely fed up with SourceTree is to go back to version 1.7, the last version that looked great and seemed stable. I've been using that on my main dev box for months without incident.

But I do need to remember how to fix the security hole SourceTree 1.7 has, namely that they thought it'd be a good idea to open special SourceTree app URLs. Brilliant.

Luckily, the fix is a pretty straightforward registry hack. Here's a quick sum:

so fwiw, the vulnerability was...

SourceTree for Mac and Windows are affected by a command injection vulnerability in URI handling. The vulnerability can be triggered through a browser or the SourceTree interface.

Versions of SourceTree for Mac starting with 1.4.0 but before 2.5.1 are affected by this vulnerability.

Versions of SourceTree for Windows starting with 0.8.4b but before 2.0.20.1 are affected by this vulnerability. (edited)

but you can edit the registry entry to ignore any urls.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\sourcetree\shell\open\command]
@="\"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Atlassian\\SourceTree\\SourceTree.exe\""

Save those contents in a .reg file, open it, and profit.

The old value, in case you were interested, was...

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Atlassian\SourceTree\SourceTree.exe" -url "%1"

The deal here is that SourceTree will open, but it won't get fed the URL, so nothing adverse should happen. Guess you could just remove it all, or write the %1 to notepad or something similar, but since I don't really want to open SourceTree from a URL, this is fine by me.

And we're nicely back to SourceTree 1.7, its pretty obvious peak from where I'm sitting.

EDIT 20180330: And here's a link to where the SourceTree UI designers talk about how what they have now is an improvement.

Labels: git, sourcetree