131–140 of 155 posts
This is a similar situation to when websites would be designed in Photoshop and the translated into "pixel perfect" HTML.
I get the frame but I don't think arguing the co-opting of Cockburn by the MBA crowd gets us anywhere.
Think about it. GUI - Graphical User Interface - a concept taken from HCI Human Computer Interaction. I think that describes Peek and Poke in BASIC pretty well 50 years ago though nobody attributes those to Dartmouth. It also describes AI at present around the world.
But HCI is lossy. Why?
Exploding n-dimensional dot cloud vectors of language leveled by math are exactly why I fear that GUI should have died with CASE tools as a hauntological debt on our present that is indeed, spectral.
The world doesn't need more clicks and taps. Quite the converse: less. Read Fitts. You don't run a faster race by increasing cadence. You run a faster race by slowing down and focusing on technique. Kipchoge knows this. Contemplative computing could learn too but I'm not sure waiting on the world to change works.
Imagine a world where we simply arrived at the same kind of text interfaces we enjoy now whether they benefit from the browser or are hindered by it. We just needed better, more turnkey tunnels, not more GUI! We sort of have those from meet:team:zoom, but they suck while few realize why or can explain the lossy nature of scaling tunnels when many of us built them impulsively in SSH decades ago for fun.
The present suffers from the long-tail baggage of the keyhole problem Scott Meyers mentioned twenty years ago. Data science has revealed the n-dimensional data underlying many, if not most, modern systems given their complexity.
What we missed is user interface that is not GUI that can actually scale to match the dimensionality of the data without implying a 2D, 2.5D, or 3D keyhole problem on top of n-dimensional data. The gap from system-to-story is indeed nonlinear because so is the data!
I'd argue the missing link is the Imaginary or Symbolic Interface we dream of but to my knowledge, have yet to conceive. Why?
It's as if Zizek has not met his match in software though I suspect there's a Brett Victor of interface language yet to be found, (Stephen Johnson?) because grammatology shouldn't stop at speech:writing.
Grammatology needed to scale into Interface Culture found in software's infinite extensibility in language, since computers were what McLuhan meant when he said, "Media" and I'm pretty sure "Augmentation is Amputation" is absolute truth if we continue down our limited Cartesian frame - we'll lose limbs of agency, meaning, and respond-in-kind social reciprocity in the process, if any of those remain.
The very late binding (no binding?) we see in software now is exactly what research labs were missing in the late sixties to bridge from 1945 to 1965 and beyond. I can't imagine trying to do that with the rigid stacks close-to-metal we had then.
I hope I'm not alone in seeing or saying that the answers should be a lot closer-to-mind now given virtualization from containers to models and everything in-between.
One can only hope.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Very interested to hear about a high quality UI as I have never encountered one
You got downvoted for the snark, but damned if it ain't a reasonable opinion. If you read the seminal "Design of Everyday Things" by Norman Rockwell you'll come away annoyed at half the physical _doors_ you walk through... here in 2025. I've been pushing these terms to help us talk about and design better interfaces at work... Static Interfaces - Your supermarket's pretty much a static interface. The frame of whateve…
As an aside, if anyone at Adobe is reading this, this sort of tool would be an excellent addition to Illustrator, Photoshop, etc. InDesign already has something like it, although that implementation leaves a little to be desired.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not just step 2, step one is to gain a clear understanding of user needs, different use cases, possible flows...
Now you're taking the whole design and development process and calling it "step 1", creating that parody "Waterfall" system.
If you have no idea what you want to do you are just "vibe" designing and coding.
Starting with gathering information doesn't mean you can't have an iterative process, where you gain a better understanding with each cycle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are there any available implementations of this? I've long wanted to experiment w/ HyperLook (or a successor to it).
You'll need a SparcStation emulator to run it, if not a real SparcStation. I've resisted the temptation because there's so much new code to write that I don't have much time to run old code. ;) Although it would be fun to run it in an emulator 1000 times faster than it ever ran on real hardware! Here are some links I've found: Unix & Linux: How to emulate the NeWS window system? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZhZqf…
Was more hopeful that someone had created a new implementation of that environment.
Let's turn this around --- for vector-graphic oriented development work what current environment would you recommend trying?
* Software development is design rather than manufacturing.
* Software manufacturing is CI/CD.
* The Toyota Production System (TPS) starts with an idea for a product, and not with building the product.
* Design is a core part of the TPS.
* Building the assembly line is part of TPS.
Sadly the essay argues against Lean Software Development by arguing that it says exactly the opposite.
A tight iteration loop is the only solution I've seen for building high quality UI/UX. Embrace that it's going to be terrible the first few times and plan for this. We could save on cost per iteration by avoiding the layout and styling pass until the very end. These interfaces are about communicating information. Plain text and basic form submissions work just as well as anything else when you're still trying to desi…
When I do GUI work, it's usually for hobbyist or internal projects. I value quality UI/UX extremely highly. I often get 'analysis-by-paralysis' here because I try to do the design and development in a synchronous single pass. Your comment about tight and rapid iteration being the only solution resonates with me. One 'trick' I discovered recently was to completely ignore UI design and focus on _formatting_ instead --…
This part is genius: > I have made GUIs many, many times and my best case scenario goes something like: > 1. A design has been made, everyone loves it. Detailed drawings have been made. > 2. The devs are told to Make It > 3. The devs Make It, exactly to spec > 4. Everyone looks at it and everyone hates it > 5. So many meetings. So much stress. This Is Terrible! What To Do? > 6. A new design is made. So much better! D…
The issue is that step 2 is wrong. Step 1 is to make a design, step 2 is to test it. Make a paper prototype and have your customer simulate working with it. If you feel fancy make a pretty prototype in Figma. If you have a good designer and cooperative costumer you can even combine step 1 and 2 with a whiteboard prototype. Ask the customer what a common task is. Draw the interface the whiteboard and ask the consumer…
Step 1 could even be wrong if making detailed drawings turns out to be wasting time by making detailed drawings :\
But OTOH you could say up until step 14 it's not as disappointing as it could be.
Then it ends with the devs being pissed, that's probably why it's only 2.5 instead of the full 3.0 :)
There is an alternative ending but you would have to be a whole lot more optimistic.
13. Nobody’s happy. But nobody hates it.
14. That's better'n They Do Not Love It innit?
15. Progress is being made.
16. The devs are energized for more.
17+. . .
Next round a couple people love it. But just a couple.
Do over again, and almost everybody is happy.
One more time and you've really got something there!
~35+. Champagne 6.0 showered on devs.
It could happen . . .
Feedback loops are critical. The faster you get real user feedback, the better. Decades ago, that meant coding first -- which sucked. So we evolved. Wireframes, pixel-perfect designs, clickable prototypes -- tightening the loop and cutting costs at every step. Today, tools like Figma make that process even faster and more accessible. Build it in Figma, using UX-approved components and brand-approved styles, and you g…
For folks who are still in the idea exploration phase or want to rapidly prototype low-fidelity flows without getting bogged down in design details, https://Wireframes.org has been super useful. It combines traditional drag-and-drop wireframing with AI-generated layouts from simple text prompts, which helps get something testable in front of users really fast — even before pixel-perfect designs are needed.
It’s a great way to tighten that feedback loop even further, especially for solo founders or early teams.
This part is genius: > I have made GUIs many, many times and my best case scenario goes something like: > 1. A design has been made, everyone loves it. Detailed drawings have been made. > 2. The devs are told to Make It > 3. The devs Make It, exactly to spec > 4. Everyone looks at it and everyone hates it > 5. So many meetings. So much stress. This Is Terrible! What To Do? > 6. A new design is made. So much better! D…
I think there's a figure mostly absent in these processes. Designers and devs are living in their bubble/silo and don't think like a user. It's very rare to find someone who can understand design, UX, and code and put it all together into a cohesive vision. In my experience, if you have the UX right from the start, then the rest becomes much easier. UX is the foundation that will dictate how it has to be designed and…
But also in so many cases it needs to be made to work in reverse :\
Even when the pure logic or core process is where the real magic happens, and makes the app what it is, if interfacing with a user is very important you could also say that the UI is the actual heart of the program instead, which ends up calling that wonderfully unique code that may be different than anything else. Or anything else that has ever had a UI before.
But you need a "more common" interface that can accommodate optimized workflows of some kind or another, in enough ways for target mainstream users to make the most of the unique parts of the core creatively-engineered code, enjoying the most easily gained familiarity at the same time. With at least as usable a UI as they are accustomed to if not better.
Once that's all said & done is when I think it would be best for the creative artists to bring it up to meet visual objectives, with carefully crafted content curation, and run that by all kinds of ergonomic testers.
If they come up with any engineering shortcomings I would listen to them, even if it's nothing like an actual deficiency or true defect. There should be some pretty tight functioning and I think that would happen less often.