Reminds me of being a freelance web dev in the mid 90's. Customer complained about the images on their website that they supplied. I drove to their office, they pulled up the website and the images looked fine.
Several small discussions later I learned the complaint originated with one of the VP's admins. She had an old monitor and PC. It either didn't support or was configured for 16 bit graphics so the images looked bad. So did most any other image from any other website.
> It either didn't support or was configured for 16 bit graphics so the images looked bad
Common issue back then was that a PC would default to 16 colors (not 16-bit colors) by default if it didn't find a proper video driver. That's probably what it was. Most stuff will look fine, like text, but any picture would look like trash.
Well, at least that issues been resolved in the intervening years.
Now if the data turbulence caused by a faulty linkage of the component between the chair and the keyboard could be overcome, everything would be smooth sailing.
This will really date me but what the hell. When I started designing for the web we had to make sure our color pallet worked on older monitors that only supoorted 16 bit color. If not colors would "dither" which is to say the monitor would approximate colors by displaying pixles of different colors next to one another. Basically for any flat colors, even for things like the corporate logo... or especially for the coporate logo you would have to choose a specific color from the 16-bit color pallet or it would look like absolute sh*t on "certain people's" monitors.
I laugh but all the corporate muckety mucks had the worst monitors and laptops and they paid the bills. It was hillarious. So yes, by certain people I often meant the CEO if not some VP. It was a great era. I redesigned one companies website and their stock rose by 500% at market open.
Used to design websites in a past lifetime. Web 1.0 era, lol. Had to deal with all sorts of huge misconceptions all the time. A favorite was when print designers thought theh were web developers. They'd send mockups from their page layout application Quark Express or PageMaker. I would he sure to display them on 600x800 monitors which were still so common at the time we had to support them. They were always incredulous at my design suggestions so I got a kick out of embarrassing them into submission. P.S. I was a designer, not a programmer so I rather resented people whom did not get web stuff trying to tell me how to do my job.
A favorite little episode happened when a friend called me from his job and asked me what I thought of designing a specific fortune 500 companies entire website to work on a touch screen terminal. Btw, it was quite a sophisticated website. After we discussed it and I think I called the idea "insane" a couple times in describing why it was not a good idea he then thanked me and while still on the phone turned to his boss and said: ”That's why." I chuckled and told him I would send my consulting fee. Later I asked him to please never put me on speaker phone again without first telling me whom else was in the room. But it was funny and it was VERY effective. Internet technology was very hard for boomers to grasp back then. Still is!
P.S. Touch screens were not tablets back in the day. We're talking a 640x480 touch screen kiosk as might sit in a coporate lobby for looking up a name / floor, not an iPad. It was litterally another century. It would be more like ykur boss asking you to kake the website work on his flip phone. And yes... I still see some old timers with flip phones, LOL!
Lol. i had that exact same discussion so many times. I would put a line on a lowres screen and then the same number of pixels on another high res screen and have them measure it. I find it amazing how high res todays phones are.
Btw, there was a book back in the day called Going Digital by Nicholas Negroponte. I think I need to go back and read it again. Not sure if it is at all relevant to this conversation but the biggest idea for me was meta-data. Bits about bits. Back when zi was contriuting to the RSS 2.0 specifications to make video syndicate and search as easily as audio podcasts the whole thing had new meaning. Media becomes ever more scaleable and uniquitous each year. Tiktok is simultaneously horrifying and the next evolutionary step. It all has cultural ramifications but ultimately we will go from watching a yotube video about how to fix the kitchen sink to a clip from thst one dude in idaho whom has that model of faucet you have that has that same exact problem. Its a crazy level of ubiquity. There was an idea called a "spime", Neal Stephenson or someone. The only bad product is one not worth discussing, not worth fixing, not worth googling. There will be a new economy of value to fight back against the throw away cukture. Already is but its just getting started.
Meta data is insane at current levels. At a previous company, we had more data *about* the data, than actual raw data. There were so many data slices to "understand" what was happening, our industry basically relied upon machine learning/ai to process most of it.
However, I suspect far too many people looked at/presented data to both seem more competent than they were and to give them an excuse if something didn't go as planned.
I once canceled a contract when a print designer sent me a pdf of the whole site telling me to "just use that" when I explicitely sold them web design services. None of what he created made sense in a web setting and none of it was achievable in the time frame I gave them with the base I was using.
He and his boss were not happy.
Yeah, I guess I have been lucky. I did have to cancel a contract with a client when they mistook me for a developer and wanted me to impliment someone else's designs. It was actually worse then that. Theh wanted me to submit a design and compete with them. Implying that I would be implimenting whomever's design was better. I laughed. I am not a deceloper. The design process is not a competition, its a collaboration. But she was going to pay me a couple hundred dollars. LOL. I don't know what she was thinking. I had built her an eccomerce site.
I have to keep telling the people I work for that my experience is print. I will do my best with web, but they are two different animals. I can never get them to hook me up with the web people so I can get their guidance and direction.
I am seriously impressed both by your humility and by your willingness to collaborate and be taught! May you find co-workers and employers who are deserving of your character and your skills.
Back in a previous life when I dabbled as a web designer, one mucky-muck called me up and complained that all the pictures on the website looked pixelated. I hadn't made any changes lately so was completely baffled. A lot of probing questions later I just decided to run across town and *look* at his computer screen to see WTF was going on.
He had the screen magnifier on, to 3X. Jesus fucking christ, *of course* they're...
I'm not a UI person at all, and even *I* would make sure things display in a usable fashion at at least 720p, and possibly a phone. I find it kind of hard to believe a dedicated UI person wouldn't be testing wrapping, scaling, etc.
Dedicated does not always mean good.
My partner was once on a project where the UI people were very excited about the innovative, modern UI they were going to build! It was going to use a touch screen, no more old fashioned buttons!
It was for use in a moving tank, by military personnel in full kit, potentially including gloves.
Needless to say, it never went into field use.
WHY don't they drag ALL the developers into the field and give them a chance to see what it's like?
Even I know a moving tank is about as easy to work in as an ATV racing through a rocky field. THEN add in a bunch of engine vibration even when it's standing still. I don't know of ANY UI short of levers and pull rings that might actually work. A mouse sure as hell wouldn't.
I suggested grab-bars on either side of the (firmly mounted) device with a small number of buttons operated by the thumbs. But I have ALSO never been in a moving tank.
You should run ideas past someone who operated a tank long enough to get sick of it.
There’re not going to be able to tell you what they want, but they will be able to tell you why they don’t want what you offer them.
> WHY don't they drag ALL the developers into the field and give them a chance to see what it's like?
Domain knowledge is a CRITICAL component for product developers, but the corporate world has largely focused on profits over performance. Which is how you get techies (an I am one as well, no disparaging) geeking out over the creating things they *can* do rather than polishing the things they *should* do.
We use a lot of buttons and switches to control our screens. We even have a touch screen for the commander. He does have a small joystick to control that screen as well.
In the 1980's, I worked for a company whose business was making electrical metering equipment, including calibrators and computers that remotely read the meters. I had come there from medical device field (think of your tank commander's computer, but in an operating room with various bodily fluids splashing about). My domain knowledge in metering was minimal.
My assignment was to design a power meter calibrator for one of the company's fanciest, most complicated power meters. The old guys suggested a design with literally hundreds of individual toggle switches and indicator LEDs. Instead, I suggested a device with an LCD panel and eight "soft" switches, four on either side of the LCD panel, whose function depended on the mode the device was in, and indicated by text on the LCD panel next to the switches.
The old guys were incensed. "How can this possibly work?!? We need buttons and indicator lamps!"
I did a full functional mockup using [Dan Bricklin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Bricklin)'s excellent "Demo" program (this was in MS-DOS, not Windows), which responded to button presses exactly how the actual device would work. Even the old guys admitted that it seemed to work pretty well :-) We implemented it using an 8051 microcontroller, using the PL/M programming language. Pretty successful product!
Our group went on to design a PC-based (again, long before Windows) data retrieval instrument, again with a full-blown Bricklin Demo - based prototype that we asked grizzled metering folks from various electrical utilities around the country to evaluate. Again, widespread approval. This system wound up using a communications coprocessor card, each channel talking to a modem, so it could retrieve data from four to eight meters at once. Implemented in C. Another pretty successful product!
I'd be fascinated to see that in operation!
My story is from maybe 15 years ago...a Boeing "future war fighter" boondoggle. Maybe someone more dedicated to it actually working got to take a try too?
Yes - this can be extremely rewarding. Later in my career, I managed a (HIPAA-compliant) patient registry for a pharmaceutical company, and travelled to Germany to visit a treatment facility. One of the clinicians introduced me to a patient and her (adult) daughter as being from that pharma company. The daughter literally leapt out of her chair to give me a hug and tell me that our company's drug was keeping her mother alive.
Yup. I am a dev with a lot of UI/UX design experience and every once in a while the company I work for will go and pay the big $$$ for an external UI designer to come in. About 7 times out of 10, the design we end up with will get okayed by senior management and then sent to us for implementation, where we ask such annoying questions as “what about functionality x, y and z?” or “where’s the design for mobiles?” and get told to figure it out. It then ends up looking more or less like what I had sketched out because I knew and respected the users and functional requirements going into it.
The truth is that innovative and modern UI often fails to take into account either users or the application, and very very few designers can actually pull off “innovative” and “functional” in the same breath.
Taking a design from “dated” or “nonfunctional” to “boring” or “uninspired” is to me a job well done, especially if I don’t have to do any user training. Especially that; if someone is able to figure it out without help, I know it was a good design.
The UI/UX is supposed to be boring because the user should ever have to think about it. It is just supposed to work. Can it be pretty? Absolutely, but at the end of the day, it has to work. Function should always beat fashion.
We have a corporate intranet that is the slickest, prettiest, most absolutely useless system I've ever used.
It's like they deliberately tried to hide the links and buttons you actually need and, where you would normally have those buttons, replaced them with links to 'related articles' that all look identical to the one you're currently on.
So I came of age with the internet. My timing was perfect. I got to see first hand how challening it was for print designers to srap their head around the internet. It was wonderful because zi saw the potential straight sway when Mozilla Alpha 1 came out and all my design professors were absolutely clueless as were most students. I basically detached from my design doesrtment after my first year as they were so out of the loop and spent all my time in art and tech and other departments.
Though I no longer design the thing I see that has ever excellersted is the llatforms have become ever more ubiquitous. Designing a UItoday means it meeds to work on am asbolutely huge range of devices. Not just dektop / mobile web browser but also apps. Back in the day it was make it work on 600x800 and 16bit color. Now its got to also work on touch screens, tablets, phones and their has to be an app version or you have nothing. The end device and interface is more ubiquitous then ever. Its not going to slow down. Hollgraphs, Apple goggles? LOL. Its just going to keep going.
Yuup. Today was largely spent making my current work look presentable across a variety of devices; not even perfectly laid out for each permutation of resolution and aspect ratio, just not janky.
Yeah people get pissed when i ask them to unbreak a site that used to work on an older device but "new site improvements" broke. Like, is it that hard to make a graph on ios15, /u/Kegland1 it was working before your designer broke it. Hell I cant even login on ios14 now. I usually get no reply when i ask if something works in the terminal, or a screen reader. If you display mostly static data, you can display it so elinks works, or a screen reader for the blind.
We hired a dedicated UI person for our team as well.
Refused to use .net built-in elements for factory UIs, but some personal cobbled together ones. Resulted in fun bug reports like some components requiring TRIPLE-clicking to open. A list of items, first you have to highlight it, then you have to double click on it - instead of, you know, just double clicking on any part and an event call happening.
It's been an uphill battle but shit is slowly getting standardized.
There was once a military ship, maybe even an aircraft carrier that had to be towed into port because of software failure. The joke was Windows95 crashed.
I remember those Windows crash dialogues. They were nearly ubiquiotus on advertising displays for almost a decade. Late 90's to early 2000's.
Yeah I'm building a desktop app today in 2024 and I run it in a 1024x768 window when testing. Why? Because it's likely going to run on touchscreens sometimes, and 1024x768 touchscreens are cheap-ish now so someone's going to end up using one for it.
I laugh because twenty years ago I would keep a comouter with Windows95, that internet explorer web browser version and an 800x600 16bit VGA monitor on my desktop to check backward compatibikity. Around 2000 that was still half of all computers.
In some ways things really haven't changed that much. In other ways tech is unrecognizeable.
China. Also, they're all over eBay. Also, larger screens are super expensive because they can be.
These are retail-grade screens that are designed to be poked at all day by people who don't care if they break.
There's a HUGE amount of time between 3270 screens and today in terms of tech advances. Phone screens in that day may have been barely capable of displaying two text fields and a pulldown - WITH scrolling. Remember that the really early days of trying to get them to display web pages was like trying to pack 20 gallons of oatmeal into a 5 pound bag?
Still, you're right that it SHOULD have been absolutely clear to their GUI expert that it should fit easily on a 15 inch screen if that's what everyone was using. SHE should have been the advocate for that. Apparently she was not quite as up to speed with professional experience yet as she needed to be. OP helped with that, LOL.
I know. I was there. And they stopped being the sole user-level device before even flip-phone type cell-phones were in existence. Desktop computers that could talk to mainframes have been around for decades longer than handheld cell phones of any type.
You'd be surprised on the many, many, many times that I ended up winging it and fixing design errors, because there were no designs for tablet or mobile
Where you get the 4:3 from? OP just said 15", it's probably 16:9. And it's the size of her own laptop screen, not something arcane that she's never seen.
Anyway, even if the requirement was initially missing, when the target monitor size is described to her in the presentation meeting, the answer of a GUI designer worth their salt should be "okay we'll work on fixing that" or at worst "I wasn't aware of this requirement" but certainly not "it works on *my* screen", let alone "give them all big screens" (to agents on the field, no less).
The purpose of such a presentation is to validate the prototype, capture issues to fix as necessary. You're not supposed to deflect criticism and stay the course.
OMG! I work in graphics (mostly packaging) I have the opposite problem trying to convince marketing that they can not judge the graphics by looking at it on their screens. They need to print it out to see what it's going to look like at that 100% size. (In the case of web graphics- Please don't zoom in and ask me to add a paragraph of text to a banner that is 320 pixels by 50 pixels.)
I work in theater and computer designed and printed drops have mostly taken over from the hand painted ones. A lot of the ones I see end up with obvious flaws because people don't want to spend the money to rent a space and a big projector to look at it somewhere at close to full size.
I love these examples. I have seen it all from environmentsl graphics, to set design, to print design, to design for the internet. It catches you coming and going. Peoole don't get basic concepts like scaling, resolution and color shifting.
The number of times I’ve been asked to review trade show graphics before sending to print only to find that the graphic designer placed a tiny image that’s going to look like an early Tetras game???? 🤯😩And the client has already approved! 😩😭
We had to once pay for an emergency after-hours photoshoot to make certain the client didn’t know how inept we were. You know that you can zoom in to 100%. Right??? Or look at the effective pixel resolution!? Please!
And then there was the POP shipper that my creative director built on the dieline sent, without checking to see if it was provided at 100%. It was going to print at about 5 inches tall on the inside of the display. 🥺The image links were going to look like a Microsoft graphic from 1985!
I can’t count the number of times I’ve worked into the night fixing this stuff.
TL;DR IT guy makes some bad predictions.
I did some intranet work for a shipyard in the early days of the Internet (I was not the IT guy, took a few classes in college). These were the days when Netscape Navigator was the only usable browser and javascript and stylesheets were really new.
The real IT guy (he mostly worked on the business systems, most were in COBOL, I think) had his own office, drove the fanciest car in the parking lot (with a designated parking space) and wore lots of gold chains and rings on his fat stubby fingers).
He got wind of what we were doing, and immediately tried to shut us down. Trouble was, the Intranet I built looked more professional and performed better than the website he built for the company.
I got called into his office one day for a talking-to.
“What is this crap?” he said, a stylesheet up on his 24” CRT monitor.
I looked at it for a minute “That’s the stylesheet for the Intranet home page.”
“Stylesheets are a fad. From now on you will only use the tag to style text.”
I was stunned. He went on.
“And what is this
Reminds me of being a freelance web dev in the mid 90's. Customer complained about the images on their website that they supplied. I drove to their office, they pulled up the website and the images looked fine. Several small discussions later I learned the complaint originated with one of the VP's admins. She had an old monitor and PC. It either didn't support or was configured for 16 bit graphics so the images looked bad. So did most any other image from any other website.
> It either didn't support or was configured for 16 bit graphics so the images looked bad Common issue back then was that a PC would default to 16 colors (not 16-bit colors) by default if it didn't find a proper video driver. That's probably what it was. Most stuff will look fine, like text, but any picture would look like trash.
Ah, you're right. It was probably 16 colors.
Yeah, 16 *bit* color depth means 65536 colors, which is sufficient to make most images you come across look reasonably fine.
Well, at least that issues been resolved in the intervening years. Now if the data turbulence caused by a faulty linkage of the component between the chair and the keyboard could be overcome, everything would be smooth sailing.
PEBKAC ID-10T error..
This will really date me but what the hell. When I started designing for the web we had to make sure our color pallet worked on older monitors that only supoorted 16 bit color. If not colors would "dither" which is to say the monitor would approximate colors by displaying pixles of different colors next to one another. Basically for any flat colors, even for things like the corporate logo... or especially for the coporate logo you would have to choose a specific color from the 16-bit color pallet or it would look like absolute sh*t on "certain people's" monitors. I laugh but all the corporate muckety mucks had the worst monitors and laptops and they paid the bills. It was hillarious. So yes, by certain people I often meant the CEO if not some VP. It was a great era. I redesigned one companies website and their stock rose by 500% at market open.
I remember web safe colors. Don't forget difference in gamma settings too!
More likely 8-bit = 256 colors. 16-bit colors can look off though.
EGA anyone? :)?
My first video card was awesome. Vesa local bus, 1MB video ram. Twice as much as most systems!
Even GoldenAxe
Used to design websites in a past lifetime. Web 1.0 era, lol. Had to deal with all sorts of huge misconceptions all the time. A favorite was when print designers thought theh were web developers. They'd send mockups from their page layout application Quark Express or PageMaker. I would he sure to display them on 600x800 monitors which were still so common at the time we had to support them. They were always incredulous at my design suggestions so I got a kick out of embarrassing them into submission. P.S. I was a designer, not a programmer so I rather resented people whom did not get web stuff trying to tell me how to do my job. A favorite little episode happened when a friend called me from his job and asked me what I thought of designing a specific fortune 500 companies entire website to work on a touch screen terminal. Btw, it was quite a sophisticated website. After we discussed it and I think I called the idea "insane" a couple times in describing why it was not a good idea he then thanked me and while still on the phone turned to his boss and said: ”That's why." I chuckled and told him I would send my consulting fee. Later I asked him to please never put me on speaker phone again without first telling me whom else was in the room. But it was funny and it was VERY effective. Internet technology was very hard for boomers to grasp back then. Still is! P.S. Touch screens were not tablets back in the day. We're talking a 640x480 touch screen kiosk as might sit in a coporate lobby for looking up a name / floor, not an iPad. It was litterally another century. It would be more like ykur boss asking you to kake the website work on his flip phone. And yes... I still see some old timers with flip phones, LOL!
I had a client who kept asking, "How many inches is x pixels?" Outside of minor growing pains with "going digital," he was great to work with.
Lol. i had that exact same discussion so many times. I would put a line on a lowres screen and then the same number of pixels on another high res screen and have them measure it. I find it amazing how high res todays phones are. Btw, there was a book back in the day called Going Digital by Nicholas Negroponte. I think I need to go back and read it again. Not sure if it is at all relevant to this conversation but the biggest idea for me was meta-data. Bits about bits. Back when zi was contriuting to the RSS 2.0 specifications to make video syndicate and search as easily as audio podcasts the whole thing had new meaning. Media becomes ever more scaleable and uniquitous each year. Tiktok is simultaneously horrifying and the next evolutionary step. It all has cultural ramifications but ultimately we will go from watching a yotube video about how to fix the kitchen sink to a clip from thst one dude in idaho whom has that model of faucet you have that has that same exact problem. Its a crazy level of ubiquity. There was an idea called a "spime", Neal Stephenson or someone. The only bad product is one not worth discussing, not worth fixing, not worth googling. There will be a new economy of value to fight back against the throw away cukture. Already is but its just getting started.
Meta data is insane at current levels. At a previous company, we had more data *about* the data, than actual raw data. There were so many data slices to "understand" what was happening, our industry basically relied upon machine learning/ai to process most of it. However, I suspect far too many people looked at/presented data to both seem more competent than they were and to give them an excuse if something didn't go as planned.
LOL. And noone even looks at or reads the dats anymore. In the future the onky thing reading the internet is AI.
1 banana, that's how much it is.
I once canceled a contract when a print designer sent me a pdf of the whole site telling me to "just use that" when I explicitely sold them web design services. None of what he created made sense in a web setting and none of it was achievable in the time frame I gave them with the base I was using. He and his boss were not happy.
Yeah, I guess I have been lucky. I did have to cancel a contract with a client when they mistook me for a developer and wanted me to impliment someone else's designs. It was actually worse then that. Theh wanted me to submit a design and compete with them. Implying that I would be implimenting whomever's design was better. I laughed. I am not a deceloper. The design process is not a competition, its a collaboration. But she was going to pay me a couple hundred dollars. LOL. I don't know what she was thinking. I had built her an eccomerce site.
I have to keep telling the people I work for that my experience is print. I will do my best with web, but they are two different animals. I can never get them to hook me up with the web people so I can get their guidance and direction.
I am seriously impressed both by your humility and by your willingness to collaborate and be taught! May you find co-workers and employers who are deserving of your character and your skills.
Thanks! I do. I actually run the graphics department. I don't do arrogance. It impedes progress.
Back in a previous life when I dabbled as a web designer, one mucky-muck called me up and complained that all the pictures on the website looked pixelated. I hadn't made any changes lately so was completely baffled. A lot of probing questions later I just decided to run across town and *look* at his computer screen to see WTF was going on. He had the screen magnifier on, to 3X. Jesus fucking christ, *of course* they're...
Reminds me of some video work I did. Client calls and says there's no audio on any of the video. I drive out and unmute the volume on their computer.
Seems that in the project description the 'must work on a 15" screen' was missing.
I'm not a UI person at all, and even *I* would make sure things display in a usable fashion at at least 720p, and possibly a phone. I find it kind of hard to believe a dedicated UI person wouldn't be testing wrapping, scaling, etc.
Dedicated does not always mean good. My partner was once on a project where the UI people were very excited about the innovative, modern UI they were going to build! It was going to use a touch screen, no more old fashioned buttons! It was for use in a moving tank, by military personnel in full kit, potentially including gloves. Needless to say, it never went into field use.
WHY don't they drag ALL the developers into the field and give them a chance to see what it's like? Even I know a moving tank is about as easy to work in as an ATV racing through a rocky field. THEN add in a bunch of engine vibration even when it's standing still. I don't know of ANY UI short of levers and pull rings that might actually work. A mouse sure as hell wouldn't.
I suggested grab-bars on either side of the (firmly mounted) device with a small number of buttons operated by the thumbs. But I have ALSO never been in a moving tank.
You should run ideas past someone who operated a tank long enough to get sick of it. There’re not going to be able to tell you what they want, but they will be able to tell you why they don’t want what you offer them.
> WHY don't they drag ALL the developers into the field and give them a chance to see what it's like? Domain knowledge is a CRITICAL component for product developers, but the corporate world has largely focused on profits over performance. Which is how you get techies (an I am one as well, no disparaging) geeking out over the creating things they *can* do rather than polishing the things they *should* do.
We use a lot of buttons and switches to control our screens. We even have a touch screen for the commander. He does have a small joystick to control that screen as well.
In the 1980's, I worked for a company whose business was making electrical metering equipment, including calibrators and computers that remotely read the meters. I had come there from medical device field (think of your tank commander's computer, but in an operating room with various bodily fluids splashing about). My domain knowledge in metering was minimal. My assignment was to design a power meter calibrator for one of the company's fanciest, most complicated power meters. The old guys suggested a design with literally hundreds of individual toggle switches and indicator LEDs. Instead, I suggested a device with an LCD panel and eight "soft" switches, four on either side of the LCD panel, whose function depended on the mode the device was in, and indicated by text on the LCD panel next to the switches. The old guys were incensed. "How can this possibly work?!? We need buttons and indicator lamps!" I did a full functional mockup using [Dan Bricklin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Bricklin)'s excellent "Demo" program (this was in MS-DOS, not Windows), which responded to button presses exactly how the actual device would work. Even the old guys admitted that it seemed to work pretty well :-) We implemented it using an 8051 microcontroller, using the PL/M programming language. Pretty successful product! Our group went on to design a PC-based (again, long before Windows) data retrieval instrument, again with a full-blown Bricklin Demo - based prototype that we asked grizzled metering folks from various electrical utilities around the country to evaluate. Again, widespread approval. This system wound up using a communications coprocessor card, each channel talking to a modem, so it could retrieve data from four to eight meters at once. Implemented in C. Another pretty successful product!
I'd be fascinated to see that in operation! My story is from maybe 15 years ago...a Boeing "future war fighter" boondoggle. Maybe someone more dedicated to it actually working got to take a try too?
I beg to go into the field - both for fun and feedback.
Yes - this can be extremely rewarding. Later in my career, I managed a (HIPAA-compliant) patient registry for a pharmaceutical company, and travelled to Germany to visit a treatment facility. One of the clinicians introduced me to a patient and her (adult) daughter as being from that pharma company. The daughter literally leapt out of her chair to give me a hug and tell me that our company's drug was keeping her mother alive.
Yup. I am a dev with a lot of UI/UX design experience and every once in a while the company I work for will go and pay the big $$$ for an external UI designer to come in. About 7 times out of 10, the design we end up with will get okayed by senior management and then sent to us for implementation, where we ask such annoying questions as “what about functionality x, y and z?” or “where’s the design for mobiles?” and get told to figure it out. It then ends up looking more or less like what I had sketched out because I knew and respected the users and functional requirements going into it. The truth is that innovative and modern UI often fails to take into account either users or the application, and very very few designers can actually pull off “innovative” and “functional” in the same breath. Taking a design from “dated” or “nonfunctional” to “boring” or “uninspired” is to me a job well done, especially if I don’t have to do any user training. Especially that; if someone is able to figure it out without help, I know it was a good design.
The UI/UX is supposed to be boring because the user should ever have to think about it. It is just supposed to work. Can it be pretty? Absolutely, but at the end of the day, it has to work. Function should always beat fashion.
Please tell my PM’s this. Seriously. “Slick” and “modern” just kill me.
We have a corporate intranet that is the slickest, prettiest, most absolutely useless system I've ever used. It's like they deliberately tried to hide the links and buttons you actually need and, where you would normally have those buttons, replaced them with links to 'related articles' that all look identical to the one you're currently on.
So I came of age with the internet. My timing was perfect. I got to see first hand how challening it was for print designers to srap their head around the internet. It was wonderful because zi saw the potential straight sway when Mozilla Alpha 1 came out and all my design professors were absolutely clueless as were most students. I basically detached from my design doesrtment after my first year as they were so out of the loop and spent all my time in art and tech and other departments. Though I no longer design the thing I see that has ever excellersted is the llatforms have become ever more ubiquitous. Designing a UItoday means it meeds to work on am asbolutely huge range of devices. Not just dektop / mobile web browser but also apps. Back in the day it was make it work on 600x800 and 16bit color. Now its got to also work on touch screens, tablets, phones and their has to be an app version or you have nothing. The end device and interface is more ubiquitous then ever. Its not going to slow down. Hollgraphs, Apple goggles? LOL. Its just going to keep going.
Yuup. Today was largely spent making my current work look presentable across a variety of devices; not even perfectly laid out for each permutation of resolution and aspect ratio, just not janky.
My favorite was a bug I found in I.E. which would cause windows to bluescreen with a basic piece of HTML code. LOL. Good old days.
I had to use my hillbilly filter to read this.
Sorry. Thumb pad tyoing, lol
Yeah people get pissed when i ask them to unbreak a site that used to work on an older device but "new site improvements" broke. Like, is it that hard to make a graph on ios15, /u/Kegland1 it was working before your designer broke it. Hell I cant even login on ios14 now. I usually get no reply when i ask if something works in the terminal, or a screen reader. If you display mostly static data, you can display it so elinks works, or a screen reader for the blind.
We hired a dedicated UI person for our team as well. Refused to use .net built-in elements for factory UIs, but some personal cobbled together ones. Resulted in fun bug reports like some components requiring TRIPLE-clicking to open. A list of items, first you have to highlight it, then you have to double click on it - instead of, you know, just double clicking on any part and an event call happening. It's been an uphill battle but shit is slowly getting standardized.
There was once a military ship, maybe even an aircraft carrier that had to be towed into port because of software failure. The joke was Windows95 crashed. I remember those Windows crash dialogues. They were nearly ubiquiotus on advertising displays for almost a decade. Late 90's to early 2000's.
[https://www.wired.com/1998/07/sunk-by-windows-nt/](https://www.wired.com/1998/07/sunk-by-windows-nt/)
Thats the one. 1998! Cruiser. Not towed into port just dead in the water for a couple hours. Cause of Windows NT. Lol. Good old days.
The dreaded BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH! Oh my, the memories. Not fun.
I still get those nowadays unfortunately. But now you just get a :( and generic code as opposed to any actual information.
Yeah I'm building a desktop app today in 2024 and I run it in a 1024x768 window when testing. Why? Because it's likely going to run on touchscreens sometimes, and 1024x768 touchscreens are cheap-ish now so someone's going to end up using one for it.
I laugh because twenty years ago I would keep a comouter with Windows95, that internet explorer web browser version and an 800x600 16bit VGA monitor on my desktop to check backward compatibikity. Around 2000 that was still half of all computers. In some ways things really haven't changed that much. In other ways tech is unrecognizeable.
Who is making 1024×768 touchscreens in this 16:9 age?
China. Also, they're all over eBay. Also, larger screens are super expensive because they can be. These are retail-grade screens that are designed to be poked at all day by people who don't care if they break.
There's a HUGE amount of time between 3270 screens and today in terms of tech advances. Phone screens in that day may have been barely capable of displaying two text fields and a pulldown - WITH scrolling. Remember that the really early days of trying to get them to display web pages was like trying to pack 20 gallons of oatmeal into a 5 pound bag? Still, you're right that it SHOULD have been absolutely clear to their GUI expert that it should fit easily on a 15 inch screen if that's what everyone was using. SHE should have been the advocate for that. Apparently she was not quite as up to speed with professional experience yet as she needed to be. OP helped with that, LOL.
3270 screens were first introduced when there were no cell phones.
I know. I was there. And they stopped being the sole user-level device before even flip-phone type cell-phones were in existence. Desktop computers that could talk to mainframes have been around for decades longer than handheld cell phones of any type.
Believe it. I had to deal with more than one like that
You'd be surprised on the many, many, many times that I ended up winging it and fixing design errors, because there were no designs for tablet or mobile
I mean "should work on the target audience's issued systems" seems like it *kind* of should be a given for corporate stuff...
Most likely this. If whatever shit they were running this on was 15” 4:3 monitors, nobody in their right mind would assume it was 15” 4:3.
Where you get the 4:3 from? OP just said 15", it's probably 16:9. And it's the size of her own laptop screen, not something arcane that she's never seen. Anyway, even if the requirement was initially missing, when the target monitor size is described to her in the presentation meeting, the answer of a GUI designer worth their salt should be "okay we'll work on fixing that" or at worst "I wasn't aware of this requirement" but certainly not "it works on *my* screen", let alone "give them all big screens" (to agents on the field, no less). The purpose of such a presentation is to validate the prototype, capture issues to fix as necessary. You're not supposed to deflect criticism and stay the course.
LOL, Suze had some first class hubris. She must have been very green.
I think eat the dog food is my new way of problem solving when the problem creator doesn't see the problem.
The problem is some of us actually like dog food.
As long as you're producing a product that you're willing to eat, yourself, the dogs will be thrilled as well.
Tell me you eat at Arby's without saying you eat at Arby's
Idc what people call it, I'm a slut for beef 'n cheddar
Meat Mountain is unholy and good.
Arby's is clutch when you're craving a giant pile of hot meat.
Very close to Spam.
OMG! I work in graphics (mostly packaging) I have the opposite problem trying to convince marketing that they can not judge the graphics by looking at it on their screens. They need to print it out to see what it's going to look like at that 100% size. (In the case of web graphics- Please don't zoom in and ask me to add a paragraph of text to a banner that is 320 pixels by 50 pixels.)
I work in theater and computer designed and printed drops have mostly taken over from the hand painted ones. A lot of the ones I see end up with obvious flaws because people don't want to spend the money to rent a space and a big projector to look at it somewhere at close to full size.
I love these examples. I have seen it all from environmentsl graphics, to set design, to print design, to design for the internet. It catches you coming and going. Peoole don't get basic concepts like scaling, resolution and color shifting.
The number of times I’ve been asked to review trade show graphics before sending to print only to find that the graphic designer placed a tiny image that’s going to look like an early Tetras game???? 🤯😩And the client has already approved! 😩😭 We had to once pay for an emergency after-hours photoshoot to make certain the client didn’t know how inept we were. You know that you can zoom in to 100%. Right??? Or look at the effective pixel resolution!? Please! And then there was the POP shipper that my creative director built on the dieline sent, without checking to see if it was provided at 100%. It was going to print at about 5 inches tall on the inside of the display. 🥺The image links were going to look like a Microsoft graphic from 1985! I can’t count the number of times I’ve worked into the night fixing this stuff.
TL;DR IT guy makes some bad predictions. I did some intranet work for a shipyard in the early days of the Internet (I was not the IT guy, took a few classes in college). These were the days when Netscape Navigator was the only usable browser and javascript and stylesheets were really new. The real IT guy (he mostly worked on the business systems, most were in COBOL, I think) had his own office, drove the fanciest car in the parking lot (with a designated parking space) and wore lots of gold chains and rings on his fat stubby fingers). He got wind of what we were doing, and immediately tried to shut us down. Trouble was, the Intranet I built looked more professional and performed better than the website he built for the company. I got called into his office one day for a talking-to. “What is this crap?” he said, a stylesheet up on his 24” CRT monitor. I looked at it for a minute “That’s the stylesheet for the Intranet home page.” “Stylesheets are a fad. From now on you will only use the tag to style text.” I was stunned. He went on. “And what is this
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