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.
Edit2: I’m sorry. I didn’t want to come off as elitist. I’m actually concerned about the loss of power user features more than non-tech savvy users having a bad time.
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.
The same is true for comments too. You don’t really need every statement repeated five times in a 500 comment comment section. Once would be fine too.
Umm… No? There is no correlation between quality of user and their willingness to trudge through a bad UX.
Removed by mod
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.
So far several folks I know are avoiding Federated services due to this. They like the idea but they are less tech savvy.
100% agree. People nowadays are used to easier applications to navigate, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Not everyone has the time or patience to wrap their head around what’s usually quite a dense look.
Totally disagree, preventing “non power users” to use a platform means that the platform will die in a very short time. I’d rather prefer a community with “brainwashed” users (as you defined them) than a community with four elitari power users jerking together in their small narcissistic circle.
The key to inclusive UI/UX is customizability, starting with a simplified template and allowing the individual user to build from there.
Current focus with apps seems to be on mindlessly consuming content. TikTok/Facebook/reddit/etc all are trying to just be a feed of content where you just sit down, scroll, and consume.
I’ve always preferred to look over a lot of posts/content and choose what to engage with depending on what’s interesting to me or what conversations I feel like I can meaningfully contribute to. I don’t want to just mindlessly scroll memes, that leaves me feeling depressed and numb.
I’m not against “user-friendly” UI, but I don’t like it when it’s non-customizable or hampers my ability to choose what I interact with.
As an IT trainer to non-technical people, HOLY SHIT NO.
This is an incredibly selfish mindset to have. “The site is simple enough for me to understand and navigate it, so anyone else that has trouble for whatever reason can just go pound sand.”
I’d like more information density, but everyone has their own preferences. If this is an open platform, we can make clients that suits different needs.
You’ll notice that it’s really only the big tech that lean towards simplification. Small indie devs want to cram in as many features as they can. If an indie project is labeled as “simple”, then a) it’s often already more feature-rich than the big names, b) only at the beginning of development, or c) if it’s designed to be simple, you have a lot of alternative options (see Android launchers).
The big tech doesn’t want you to think. They don’t want you to have options. They want you to consume.
If you’re missing something, they want you to buy their solution: the next generation product, the accessory, or addon, the microtransaction, the subscription.
If you start wondering why your brand new device or operating system is slower than the stuff 1 or 5 or 10 generations before, it’s probably because of all the tracking and advertising systems in the background. But you’re not supposed to think about that. You’re only meant to click at the shiny buttons and consume the app.
Speaking of shiny buttons, I kinda believe the simplification and corporatification of design elements such as icons and logos is part of this. If someone makes a bunch of nice elaborate 3D icons… Well that’s art. Art makes you feel and think. The less art is around you, and the more it’s replaced by lifeless lines and the simplest of design elements, the more likely you are to just follow the leader and behave. Pretty much the idea of brutalism, frankly.
It’s nice when “easy” UI features teach new users how to use the “advanced” features, instead of replacing or hiding the advanced features.
For instance, the comment editor I’m using right now supports markup, but it also has a row of buttons that insert specific markup. If I don’t know how to type boldface in this markup language, I can press the B button and it inserts some stars for me. I still see the markup, which means that I can learn how to type boldface using the keyboard.
This is an improvement over having a WYSIWYG editor where pressing the “bold” button makes your text bold but doesn’t teach you how to type markup for yourself.
Another example of this is how menu items in many GUIs show you the keyboard shortcut that you could use instead of mousing through the menus.
I get where you’re coming from in terms of attracting quality users. I think the devs definitely should prioritise fixing bugs and crashes over graphic design (which I’m sure they do). At the same time I think we need a satisfying design that is unique to Lemmy, in order to enjoy scrolling through feeds and communities.
They have what you’re talking about, they’re called web forums. They have bad UX, high barrier to entry, and only contain nerds and enthusiasts that live and breathe that one thing.
That’s the opposite of what something like this is trying to be, which is building communities that can interact with each other. Scaring away users is antithetical to that goal.
This really comes off as elitist nonsense honestly. It’s like saying that anyone who can’t fix a car doesn’t deserve to drive one. People shouldn’t need to understand the inner workings of everything to be able to participate in it.
I understand. I saw somebody else post about how the search feature is going to drive off refugees, which made me feel conflicted.
I think patience is the most important thing to be practiced at a time like this. Patience for Lemmy, patience for this process of transition, and patience with ourselves.
Lemmy as a whole is a much newer place, and reminds me in a lot of ways i’d what Reddit was like 12 years ago when I started there. In some ways, the esoteric account creation product, the beta iOS app that needs Test Flight, the much more personal, smaller user experience, all come together to make something reminiscent of the good old days.
We need to show patience to of us are reeling the loss of decade+ old communities. It’s going to be natural to go through a lot as we adjust.
I’m afraid the post might have come off as elitist. That was not my intention.
it didn’t come off that way to me - just more so that the high quality users may be the more technical ones who put effort into understanding and acclimating to a new site.
Having new people come in and expand the culture of this new place is good!
However, having there be a little bit of a barrier to entry that requires people to read and think to understand isn’t a terrible thing. It’s always a balance.
@Wander Very much so!
The big one for me is UXs that make everything huge, with a singular focus on a single thing.
At best, it makes you merely have to scroll more. At worst, it massively interrupts natural user journeys in the most frustrating way imaginable.
It’s a waste of the space and the user’s attention, and it makes me feel like an idiot as a user.
