Comment on My Bank Recently Changed Their Interface to Move Money Between Accounts

• SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Yes, as it has been for decades. I also learned some about it back in the early days of the '80s into the '90s. It’s constantly evolving along with the tech (and the capabilities of the current majority of users), so there’s never been much of an absolute set of standards that have withstood the test of time. Again, there are a wide variety of people in the world - all with their own perspectives and ways of doing things. As such, the goal of a universally intuitive interface - while laudable - is a bit of a quixotic pursuit, IMHO.

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  • theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    They don’t teach material design or something, they teach you to look at the interfaces people use the most and copy the shorthand and general layout

    Then they teach you what not to do… Don’t make buttons appear and disappear, don’t make interactions move things around… These are basically universally confusing

    They get into a bit of color theory, making certain actions “weighty” by adding loading, and all sorts of other techniques

    But the most important piece is figuring out what the main use cases are, and making the tradeoffs to make the experience as frictionless as possible. Stuff like minimizing clicks, piching things by default, hiding unnecessary information, etc

    It’s like teaching art. You put labels on concepts and make them practice picking apart the composition so they can understand the individual elements at play and how they fit together

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    • SanctimoniousApe@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      I get the gist. I’ll use myself as an example in an attempt to make my point. I hate, Hate, HATE the very reduction of “complication” you’re referring to. Dumbed-down interfaces that contain no “unnecessary information” drive me nuts. What’s unimportant information to you may be important to me.

      By all means, design for the “most common use cases,” but the buck stops right there FAR too often anymore. There’s minimal, if any, customizability, alternate layouts that are more information-dense, or just any accommodation for those that didn’t fit that most common use case. It’s dumbing things down for those who don’t want to learn anything, or use their device to it’s fullest capabilities, and those of us who prefer to use our brain just get ignored and have to suffer.

      I get the desire to make things approachable for non-technical people, but if that’s all that ever happens then they’ll never learn anything more advanced than that. So our society gets more and more coddled, and capable of things for themselves - making them all the more dependent upon the tech oligarchs, which is, of course, more profitable for them and more power handed over to them.

      No thanks.

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      • theneverfox@pawb.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

        Well, that’s just capitalism for you. Maintaining code takes man hours, so of course the minute they had the slightest excuse to reduce code and fire people, that became the norm

        It’s profit dictating style basically

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