Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 315 posts

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#51

Post by conductr »

arichard123 wrote: post #14

I remember using a TUI for a Bank in the UK, and them switching to a web-based javascript system. Because the TUI forced keyboard interaction everyone was quick, and we could all fly through the screens finding what we wanted. One benefit was each screen was a fixed size and there was no scroll, so when you pressed the right incantation the answer you wanted appeared in the same portion of the screen every time. You…

I was making this argument in early 2000s, how the "upgrade" would kill efficiency - and it largely did for data entry. I did this swap in medical industry and finance industry and it landed on deaf ears all the time in the name of modernization. Actually, feels like I'm reliving it right now with AI.

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#52

Post by urnicus »

baruchel wrote: post #25

I wrote the main application for my wife's business — she's a psychologist. That was only a few years ago, but as a senior lecturer in the more theoretical parts of computer science, I never really needed fancy UIs with flashy graphical effects. So I built a core engine and used the classic dialog tool as the thin user-facing layer. At first, my wife was pretty disappointed — as a computer science teacher, wasn't I s…

I've got a mental picture of you excitedly unveiling your work to her. Glad she came around and very cool.

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#54

Post by urnicus »

calvinmorrison wrote: post #15

I'm in the distribution/manufacturing ERP vertical in the US for SMB clients... yes we see it. No - not often Most people are running on 90s-2000s era stuff rather than TUIs. For the most part, it works well, and is not very costly. Check out Sage100... flexible, cheap, on prem... runs everything from job / work tickets to inventory, purchasing, financials, payroll, etc. Aint sexy but it works!

Nice - thank you!

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#55

Post by andix »

arichard123 wrote: post #14

I remember using a TUI for a Bank in the UK, and them switching to a web-based javascript system. Because the TUI forced keyboard interaction everyone was quick, and we could all fly through the screens finding what we wanted. One benefit was each screen was a fixed size and there was no scroll, so when you pressed the right incantation the answer you wanted appeared in the same portion of the screen every time. You…

Sounds like the UX designers for the new applications didn't understand the requirements. I worked on two web app projects that required to be usable fast and with keyboards only. It's not that hard, if you define the requirements right.

Also no scrolling was a requirement. This was done by defining a min and max screen resolution, and designing everything exactly for that. The app was supposed to be used exclusively full screen, so no need for responsive design.

The result was a bit like a video game, very few loading delays and instant responses to user input.

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#56

Post by perlgeek »

estimator7292 wrote: post #20

Many (most?) older retail businesses still use TUIs. They're reliable, consistent, and orders of magnitude faster than GUI systems. When I worked ar Sherwin Williams, I got good enough with the TUI that customers could rattle off their orders while I punch it into the computer in real time. It's absolutely crazy that a well designed TUI is so much faster. It turns out that if you never change the UI and every menu it…

I agree with basically everything you've said, but I'd add that I sometimes wish we had a way to sometimes pop up a GUI for very specific tasks.

For example, enabling a fast multi-select of rows in a longish table (or even worse, a tree) is one of the tasks that TUIs don't really excel at. Popping up a PDF or image viewer would also be great.

The TUI I'm working with runs on a pair of Linux VMs, and is accessed from Windows, Linux and Mac, so asking all our users to enable X forwarding doesn't really work.

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#57

Post by bryanlarsen »

bdavisx wrote: post #45
arichard123 wrote: post #14

I remember using a TUI for a Bank in the UK, and them switching to a web-based javascript system. Because the TUI forced keyboard interaction everyone was quick, and we could all fly through the screens finding what we wanted. One benefit was each screen was a fixed size and there was no scroll, so when you pressed the right incantation the answer you wanted appeared in the same portion of the screen every time. You…

A GUI can be as effective as a TUI if it's designed to be 100% usable from a keyboard - the problem is very few applications take the time to do that design.

The other thing that a TUI generally does that a GUI doesn't is that it lets you type ahead, you can drive it without looking at the screen.

Most GUI's make you wait for the form to appear before you can type into it. That totally destroys the flow of operators.

There are GUI's that are properly designed to be keyboard driven and to allow type-ahead. Those can be truly best-of-both-worlds. Too bad they're so rare.

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#58

Post by conductr »

bdavisx wrote: post #45
arichard123 wrote: post #14

I remember using a TUI for a Bank in the UK, and them switching to a web-based javascript system. Because the TUI forced keyboard interaction everyone was quick, and we could all fly through the screens finding what we wanted. One benefit was each screen was a fixed size and there was no scroll, so when you pressed the right incantation the answer you wanted appeared in the same portion of the screen every time. You…

A GUI can be as effective as a TUI if it's designed to be 100% usable from a keyboard - the problem is very few applications take the time to do that design.

Maybe in some cases. But largely, no, it really is not comparable. These TUI interfaces literally had 0 latency for any action. You could paste in text (from clipboard), with \t characters, and it would advance the input focus and could fill out an entire form with once paste action. There's a ton of real world cases where the browser is just too heavy to keep up with fast paced data entry.

I've never once seen an experienced user equal or gain efficiency when switching. It's always a loss even after months of acclimation.

Re: Ask HN: My family business runs on a 1993-era text-based-UI (TUI). Anybody else?

#59

Post by privong »

An interesting theme here in the comments (that I am sympathetic to) is "TUIs have steep learning curves but are fast/efficient for people with proficiency". I wonder if a small part of the modern preference for GUIs is related to a lack of employee retention. If companies aren't necessarily interested in working hard to keep employees then training new hires needs to be faster/easier and that could work against TUI and keyboard-based tools.

Of course, if that's a factor I'm guessing it's a small one in comparison to expectations about what "modern" software should look like.

Post reply on HN