> 2: People are more tolerant of minor usability issues when the design of a product or service is aesthetically pleasing.
I think this is true for someone’s first interaction with a thing. But if you rely on something, minor usability issues skyrocket in importance, and aesthetic importance drops really fast.
> But I've never seen anybody having this as a first reaction to some software. It needs some time to kick in.
It used to take time, but the association has become common enough that it's a red flag right at the start for me. It won't make me not try it out, of course, but it does set a certain expectation in me.
The effect is strongest with websites. I think the correlation between being pretty/shiny and the site being generally worthless is high enough to be roughly predictive.
I have a knee-jerk reaction to sites that reveal things or animate as I scroll down. It was cool the first time or two…years ago. Now it feels gimmicky at best, and more often it obscures the page in a way that makes me feel like I need to scroll the entire page before reading it so there’s no hidden surprises.
Of course this also boils down to intent - is the page an art thing where presentation plays a part in the interaction? Cool. But I was on a product page for a home media server that did this and it was painful - I wanted specs, testimonials, information, and I had to scroll through animations and slide-in text and all kinds of stuff to get a grip on the -product-
> if you rely on something ... aesthetic importance drops really fast
IMHO it bothers me more because I'm forced to experience it more. It's like the annoyance accumulates. I may care more about UI than the average user though, or maybe I'm just more able to articulate my thoughts about it because of my profession? Not sure.
In some ways I prefer the older interfaces to more modern ones because, even though they were ugly, it was often more obvious what was clickable, what workflow was expected, and if you needed something it would probably be in the horrendous menu tree somewhere. Nowadays it's often impossible to determine what is clickable and what is not, but things look much prettier. I don't really need pretty, it's just a nice-to-have. Of course there are newer interfaces that are easy to understand and older interfaces that are borderline unusable. It's just been my experience that an older interface will be easier to use, though probably more annoying to go through. YMMV.
I think the clearest delimitation between old and new is a lot of old interfaces really tried to make every GUI element appear distinct. I think as we presume that users are familiar with basic GUI elements we’ve started replying on them having intuition from context clues instead. “The button doesn’t look pushable, but we know that you expect a button here anyway.”
I signed up for a Lemmy instance a while ago, and just stopped using it because the default lemmy web UI adopted 2010s worst trend of making buttons, text areas, and combo boxes all the exact same featureless rounded pill. It’s legitimately difficult to use on a phone. One big pile of pills that do random things.
Humans are pattern-matching machines though. I think anyone, UX-designer or not, can notice annoyances that are clearly just not following the obvious pattern.
I know people that have quit jobs, because they were forced to use software that “I could never learn”. (Salesforce) It got in the way of them doing their job.
However, I’ve seen way more people tolerate an outdated or badly styled UI because “it just works for me, ok?”. No one is quitting a job because their CRM is aesthetically unpleasing.
As a dev, I've never quit a job because I didn't like the software I had to use. But if I'm evaluating whether or not to take a position somewhere, the use of certain software is certainly a mark in the minus column.
There’s an example of that in the linked write up - a user reported really enjoying colorful, full-page images…on the first use. After subsequent use, the failures of the UX made such aesthetics more annoying than useful
> 2: People are more tolerant of minor usability issues when the design of a product or service is aesthetically pleasing.
I think this is true for someone’s first interaction with a thing. But if you rely on something, minor usability issues skyrocket in importance, and aesthetic importance drops really fast.