Gregory's Server@researchfairy At the top of my Christmas list this year is that the Mastodon website, in dark mode, have a *visible* scroll bar. Since I had eye surgery earlier this year, it's the only UI element I can think of that hasn't improved with perfect, corrected vision. "What's the lowest possible contrast we can use? Hey I know, let's choose a grey that's literally just one shade lighter than the background black." :eyeroll:
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 @acm_redfox Yeah I always turn scroll bars on when they're off. Mostly a Windows thing IIRC.... @acm_redfox @croyle AppleTV has a high contrast mode that adds white borders around the selected icon. It’s a huge usability improvement and still looks good. No idea why it isn’t the default. Settings > Accessibility > Display > Focus Style > High Contrast @alextm @acm_redfox Apple tends to favor that low contrast light-grey on white look. Probably Jobs' fault... Thank goodness for having other options available! @croyle @acm_redfox Yeah, fortunately Apple takes accessibility seriously enough that there are always a bunch of options for improving usability. The blame is likely more on Ive than Jobs though. Jobs loved the skeuomorphic look for software (early iOS and elements of MacOSX Aqua). It wasn’t until Ive took over software design that things started going ultra-minimalist. That first year or two of Ive’s software design was a tough adjustment! @alextm @acm_redfox You could be right, although I think Job's love of Mercedes, luxury goods, etc. made him easy to be swayed in that direction. I think Ive was the designed of what Jobs had envisioned. @croyle Yeah, it isn’t exactly clear from the information available. But we do know that Ive only took over software design a couple of years after Jobs passed when the company forced Scott Forstall out. It’s possible they discussed this direction prior to that of course, but Steve’s love for skeuomorphism is well documented, and it’s exactly because of his love for luxury goods as you stated. @alextm I find it an endlessly fascinating subject. I was heavily involved with web design/UI/UCD when I was at IBM and worked with several brilliant UI designers (and PhDs) that I learned a lot from... UI design and problem solving was always very gratifying work. @croyle It definitely is! Sounds like you had an interesting job at IBM. I’ve been fortunate to work with some very talented designers too, but mostly doing physical product design. For a while I had the opportunity to work with a really great external UX team on one of my projects, but the majority of my UI/UX/web work has been self taught. There’s so much to learn! @alextm Very true, it seems almost endless, which is a very mixed blessing. :) I loved learning new things about design and UI from those guys though... I got to experience just a little of physical product design, which had very interesting aspects to it. I'm a little jealous that you got to experience more of it. @croyle Agreed on the blessing/curse. There’s always so much to learn (which I love), but never enough time to learn it all! I’m very grateful for that phase of my career. I was working at Braun/Oral-B in Germany and got to chat with Dieter Rams a few times about various design topics. The rest of the team was ridiculously talented as well. I’ve been trying to find something like that but more focussed on UI/UX since I left, but it feels so rare to find that type of thing! @alextm Indeed. the guy I replaced as webmaster for our big sites at IBM moved on to a really fun job he lucked into, working with a team that envisioned and built a demo of a fully connected/integrated living area and garage. This was 20 years ago. I know they had a blast working on that project. I just got to see the work in progress. @croyle That sounds like a really fun project. One of the things I loved doing at Braun was creating consistent design across a range of mediums, everything from our websites to packaging to the UX and hardware design of the product itself. Working on a large system like connected home would be right up my alley. And I bet it would have been especially interesting at that point in time when most of it hadn’t been imagined at all yet! @alextm Yes, I appreciate the consistency across products and even mediums! That's something I often had to battle with. :) The connected space guys were having a blast on the project and I was a bit jealous. They were envisioning things like connected kitchens and refrigerators before those things really existed, and monitoring/alerts/etc. for all of the many systems on a connected car, etc. I couldn't help but ponder many aspects of it, even though it wasn't my project...  @acm_redfox Happy to help! I didn’t discover it until a couple of months ago, it’s such a small change but makes a huge difference :) |
@croyle yeah, i just turned them to Always as a result of this thread, and it took me a minute to confirm that it had worked! 🙄 (this reminds me of how Apple TV thinks I can tell which show is selected based on a 1% increas in size. um, no??)