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Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

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Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#281

Post by gmmeyer »

vikramkrishnan wrote: post #272

The front end developer at one of the companies I was working for nearly fainted when I told him I like Craigslist's web interface. The only criticism he could muster was "But it looks like the 90s". And then he proceeded to tell me off "because you don't want to learn how to use a new interface". Of course I don't want to, it is a skill with zero transferability. Learning how to be productive with an interface that…

Craigslist has an amazing interface. It's so easy to use. It's ugly, but who cares! I don't care if it's pretty. It does exactly what I want. There was a great article on this a few years ago that I think is perfect: https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-the-drudge-report-is-one-of-t...

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#282

Post by SirZimzim »

vikramkrishnan wrote: post #272

The front end developer at one of the companies I was working for nearly fainted when I told him I like Craigslist's web interface. The only criticism he could muster was "But it looks like the 90s". And then he proceeded to tell me off "because you don't want to learn how to use a new interface". Of course I don't want to, it is a skill with zero transferability. Learning how to be productive with an interface that…

Having to build pixel perfect pretty UIs is one of the main reasons I've been holding back on getting a new job.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#283

Post by hawski »

Funny to have a rant on UX on medium not suitable to long form posts.

It is sadly very similar in desktop realm. You can’t copy text from the most part of the interface. There can be an error and you have to rewrite it to find what is this all about. The computer has this already written down, it’s just silly. That is the one thing that usually is better about webapps. Of course there are silly designers who want to expose their users to the same limitation, by blocking copy or context menu. But usually they don’t do this, because it’s more work.

That’s why CLI will likely never die. By default you can manipulate the data to your heart’s content. It may be slow and sometimes half-assed, but it still will be faster. You don’t have to rewrite anything. It’s a bit sadly the closest we have to a data-oriented system. Where one can manipulate all available information without massive hurdles. Only with some hurdles.

What else: Oberon, Plan9 interfaces (Acme!), Powershell, AppleScript (? - when I was using OSX at work few years ago I couldn’t find reference manual of the language), certainly more throughout the history.

We can’t do anything useful in 2d and yet we are working on VR/AR interfaces where undoubtedly we will make same mistakes (and more!).

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#284

Post by vikramkrishnan »

AlexandrB wrote: post #159
fusiongyro wrote: post #39

In the name of usability, we have practically neutered these computing machines. I think optimizing for user experience is partly to blame for this. You don't want users to have a confusing experience the first time they use the application, and you want the application to look good and be inviting. But that may be at cross purposes with making applications that allow open-ended exploration. Exploration implies that…

> In the name of usability, we have practically neutered these computing machines. Except usability is getting worse too. There is now less and less content on the average screen and more and more whitespace and "design chrome". Buttons no longer look like buttons, hamburger menus are legion, and many new features are found behind undiscoverable gestures that must be mastered.

I have a theory that by optimizing for the UI/UX of a First time user, things have gotten worse for the power user. In the past when most of our apps were desktop apps, there was a hidden assumption that the user would be using the apps for years and therefore had the time to build up muscle memory, currently when bulk of the apps on App Store are not downloaded and those that are, are barely opened twice, it makes sense to optimize to make the whole thing easy for the FT User. That by definition makes it harder for the power user. Notice that the really responsive websites are ones that cater to a group of people who by definition are more likely to be power users: HN, Github etc

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#285

Post by zlynx »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #115
owenversteeg wrote: post #63

It's a tragedy of the commons. It's very rare for one piece of software to be solely responsible for slowness, but each individual piece contributes just ever so slightly. I happen to know quite a bit about front-end technologies, so I'll speak to those. Bootstrap is around 100 kilobytes. One hundred thousand bytes - after gzip and minification. By itself, is it slow? Not very. Bootstrap fans will point you to endles…

> some code from Stackoverflow that iterates over your DOM in O(n!^n!) OK, I'm curious. What's a legitimate problem where the most naive solution is O(n!^n!)?

There was one I helped suggest fixes for on StackOverflow a while back. The program searched DOM nodes, found its target, split the node, inserted the two new nodes, and continued searching in the new node it had just inserted.

The result of this was truly horrific performance. If one node contained thousands of matches, the repeated node removal, copying, inserting, repeat, took more than 30 seconds. 30 seconds on a 4 GHz machine.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#286

Post by Veen »

mnm1 wrote: post #262
ambrosite wrote: post #15

I wonder how much of this is a result of UI designers deliberately putting tiny delays/animations into their UIs to make them more "usable"? For example, it was a common piece of advice that if clicking a button opens up a dialog box, there should be a brief animation showing the box expanding from the direction of the button, so the user would associate the clicking of the button with the appearance of the box and u…

A lot. Just take a look at the desktop switching animation in OS X that's been there now for years. I bring that up anytime anyone tries to suggest Apple has decent design sense. No sane UI designer would put something like that in without the possibility of disabling it (like their other shitty animations). To be clear, any UI designer who hasn't understood the absolute fact that after a hundred or a thousand times,…

You can cut down on those pointless MacOS animations if you turn on "Reduce Motion" in the accessibility settings.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#287

Post by tandav »

ambrosite wrote: post #15

I wonder how much of this is a result of UI designers deliberately putting tiny delays/animations into their UIs to make them more "usable"? For example, it was a common piece of advice that if clicking a button opens up a dialog box, there should be a brief animation showing the box expanding from the direction of the button, so the user would associate the clicking of the button with the appearance of the box and u…

Who knows how to completely disable all animations in macOS?

I've tried many from this list https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/14001/how-to-turn-...

but it seems that most of commands doesn't actually make any affect

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#288

Post by gilbetron »

1_2__4 wrote: post #101
gilbetron wrote: post #92

No? Getting on a BBS in 1983 at 300 baud means text files "downloaded" at the same speed you can read. Word processors were crazy painful to use, and incredibly slow. A text editor was just a line-by-line replacement. My TRS-80 would slow to a crawl even making the most basic (ha!) of programs. Over the years, I've often thought about why computers never seem to get faster - mostly it is because people have a toleran…

Given the whole article is about how some people do care your dismissive comment is as pointless as it is incorrect.

Sure, some small amount of people care, definitely. And there are options for them. And everyone would like it if things were faster, but they just don't care enough to put their money towards a fast, but less feature-filled, option.

Plenty of UX research confirms what I have stated. Why does the average webpage take N seconds to load, with a standard deviation of D? Because that's the range most people are ok with it and going faster has rapid diminishing returns, while going slower lets you get away with a lot of inefficiencies that results in reduced cost.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#289

Post by debaserab2 »

jkoll wrote: post #113
debaserab2 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turns out building a standards compliant DOM rendering and JavaScript is actually pretty complex. When you throw in the heaps and heaps of different features that must follow volumes of specs, backwards compatibility with previous implementations, and cross platform compatibility I think it’s pretty safe to say that your average modern browser is one of the most, if not the most complex program installed on your mach…

250 megabytes for a simple email client.

It's not an email client. It's a web browser using the features of a web browser to give you email client features. There is no expectation that it have a similar footprint as a binary tailored for the job of being an email client.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#290

Post by gilbetron »

antod wrote: post #200
gilbetron wrote: post #92

No? Getting on a BBS in 1983 at 300 baud means text files "downloaded" at the same speed you can read. Word processors were crazy painful to use, and incredibly slow. A text editor was just a line-by-line replacement. My TRS-80 would slow to a crawl even making the most basic (ha!) of programs. Over the years, I've often thought about why computers never seem to get faster - mostly it is because people have a toleran…

Yeah. For me in 1983 loading something meant 5 mins waiting for the cassette to play through. Switching to a different program meant repeating the process again.

One of the computers I had was cassette tape based, and the tape "reader" broke. I was rather shocked to find I could use my parents cassette player and connect its output to my computer, and it would (generally) read tapes just fine. As a bonus, I figured out how to have the speakers on the tape player on at the same time so I could listen to my programs being read in :D
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