I hate the damage that Apple seems to have done in this regard. I also hate it when apps hide features because “they’re for power users and regular users won’t understand them”.
Sure, there’s a difference between UX being so bad that it’s frustrating to use and “we need to simplify things because we don’t want to scare the users”.
Lemmy UI has its problems to solve and features to add, but it’s not bad, even on mobile. I’ve been using it extensively and it does fine all things considered.
Anyways, at this point I believe there’s even a benefit to making a UI a bit ugly and scary, so you end up with a higher quality of users instead of quantity, as cold as it might sound.
Edit: I didn’t mean to just talk about Lemmy. That was just an example and I understand that for a social platform numbers are important. My rant was more general in regards to the dumbing down of UI in all areas.
Lemmy needs all the users it can get imo.
If we start taking a “well, we don’t want those people” stance, then it’s going to fizzle out.
And it’s all well and good people saying “I don’t want an overly large community!”, but you need frequent activity or it’s not a real community.
A community with say five posts a day and four active commenters is essentially dead.
Five posts a day isn’t bad as you put it. You’ve been for years overstimulated by Reddit’s abundant content. Many of us have been contributing to lemmy perfectly fine; we see reccurent usernames and profile pictures, we grow compassionate and sincere with each others thanks to this familiarity.
Not everything should keep on mindlessly growing. Not growing fast enough isn’t a problem, yet our modern, capitalist lifestyles make it seem so. That said, I am not against lemmy’s ongoing growth per se.
No. And to think otherwise is elitist. Ease of access is important. Advanced features are important.
Making UI easy to use for casual users is how you end up with power users or advanced users.
I need a UI that makes it easy to get started and then let me grow into it. I don’t need something that takes weeks to figure out and then I can lorde it over the un-initiated.
Agree with this.
From the op:
“they’re for power users and regular users won’t understand them”
It’s right though. 90+% of users are fine with default settings, so it makes sense to hide them. Otherwise, at best it is confusing & intimidating, at worst a lot of users will have an awful UX because they tweak settings they don’t understand.
Umm… No? There is no correlation between quality of user and their willingness to trudge through a bad UX.
I think there is an important difference between UX and UI here.
In terms of UI I fully agree with the poster here. Over architected and designed uis are annoying and cumbersome. I’ve seen too many designers over design for the sake of design.
UX however is a different matter. User eXperience should be brain dead simple. Follows the actual customer quote - “the customer is always right”, meaning if the customer thinks there should be a button here that does the thing, there probably should be. Even if it breaks some design rules, obviously the experience demands it.
As an IT trainer to non-technical people, HOLY SHIT NO.
The key to inclusive UI/UX is customizability, starting with a simplified template and allowing the individual user to build from there.
