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The best interface is no interface

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Re: The best interface is no interface

#31

Post by calinet6 »

Minor details aside, this is a spot-on analysis in the grand scheme of things.

Computers should be doing more for us. They're smart, they're good at logic, they can make decisions. It's our job as programmers to make the do more and allow us to do less.

I'm tired of complexity. I don't want a car that has a touch screen—I want one with a knob that's tactile and has a blue-to-red gradient that makes sense and only controls the thing it looks like it controls. I don't want to think about it. I don't want it to take three steps and two cluttered screens.

And if my fridge is going to be smart, I want it to be smart about being a fridge. I want it to do one thing smartly: make things cold. If it's going to do something else smartly, I want it to be relevant to keeping my food, so I don't know, figure out when I need new milk by allowing me to scan the barcode when I buy it. Then how about making it available on my phone so I can answer the age-old question "Do I need to buy milk?" when I'm at the grocery store. That might actually be useful.

But for pete's sake, if it has twitter, I will not buy it.

Computers should simplify our lives. If it adds complexity, screw you, start over and try again.

Re: The best interface is no interface

#32

Post by calinet6 »

mojuba wrote: post #13

Worst interface is one that's trying to learn about my habits without having a broader knowledge about my personality and the world as a whole. I don't want my axe to adapt to my hand and to my way of using it. Most of all I want my axe to be reliably predictable. So no, thank you, no self-learning climate control systems, microwaves or lawn mowers.

I think the bigger point is, "Don't put touch screens on them either."

Re: The best interface is no interface

#33

Post by mylittlepony »

calinet6 wrote: post #31

Minor details aside, this is a spot-on analysis in the grand scheme of things. Computers should be doing more for us. They're smart, they're good at logic, they can make decisions. It's our job as programmers to make the do more and allow us to do less. I'm tired of complexity. I don't want a car that has a touch screen—I want one with a knob that's tactile and has a blue-to-red gradient that makes sense and only con…

> Computers should be doing more for us. They're smart,

But they are not smart, that's the problem. We have to program everything.

Re: The best interface is no interface

#34

Post by AdamTReineke »

mylittlepony wrote: post #33
calinet6 wrote: post #31

Minor details aside, this is a spot-on analysis in the grand scheme of things. Computers should be doing more for us. They're smart, they're good at logic, they can make decisions. It's our job as programmers to make the do more and allow us to do less. I'm tired of complexity. I don't want a car that has a touch screen—I want one with a knob that's tactile and has a blue-to-red gradient that makes sense and only con…

> Computers should be doing more for us. They're smart, But they are not smart, that's the problem. We have to program everything.

We [as developers] make them smart for everyone [as consumers].

Re: The best interface is no interface

#35

Post by jbrennan »

fatbird wrote: post #26

I have two criticisms of the article: 1. Every story is a 'just so' story where the way the system works is exactly the way the user wants the system to work. Great, it's like putting a button front and center on your app and the user wants to push that button and look! It's right there! Awesome. Except I don't want to push that button, I want to push the other button that's now hidden away because the designer is st…

>2. Using AI is a "step 2: ???" solution, and the flaw with it is best exemplified by the columnist who bought a pregnancy book for a pregnant friend on Amazon

Flaws like this might exist right now, but that's really a "bug". It's a failure on our part (the software designers and engineers) to build a system that actually works for the human. So sometimes when we try to make our software smart, it ends up being [maddeningly] stupid. But again, this is only because we don't do our jobs right, not that they can't be done right.

So with a little more smarts from us, we could make a system that's a lot more flexible and allow for these sorts of things. We have to acknowledge that a user shouldn't have to fit our system exactly and we should allow for "Buying a friend some baby clothes but not have it think we have a child" cases by being smarter about how the system learns. We need to provide it with better context.

Re: The best interface is no interface

#36

Post by DenisM »

I found the article somewhat light on useful examples; however the premise is very interesting, so I would like to bring a couple of my own examples to the table:

In a restaurant named "The Herb Farm" in Seattle area you don't pay when you eat, you pay before the dinner, when making a reservation by phone (the menu is prix-fixe). So when you're done eating you just walk out - no waiting for the check, no computing tips, none of that nonsense that should not be part of a pleasant dinner. It's incredibly liberating, in a way I would never understood if I was only told about it.

For another example, when you arrive to the restaurant "Canlis" they help you out of the car, and then you walk right into the place. When you're done eating, you walk right out and your car is already back there. They spot you on the way to the door and reshuffle the cars so that yours is at the front. So you just walk out, get in the car and drive off. As it turned out, searching for a place to park, parking, pocketing the keys etc etc is a huge mental overhead. I only realized that when I was liberated from it. The typical "valet" service actually does nothing for me - there is still overhead of asking for your car, waiting for it to be brought, tipping the valet. Meh.

Both places are charging a pretty penny for their services, so they can afford the "luxury" of good service, including good wages to the employees who make it possible. Sadly, neither does both of these things, which is still an open niche in Seattle dining. But more to the point at hand: where the restaurants make good service at cost of quality labor, computer systems could do the same at cost of good engineering, that is remove unnecessary delays and accidental complexity.

Re: The best interface is no interface

#37

Post by lhnz »

The title is wrong. I understand how the development community has gotten hung up on the absurd GUIs and CLIs we've had to use but that's not what the word interface means.

    Interface: A point where two systems, subjects, organizations, etc., meet and interact.
A door handle is an interface, a burglar alarm is an interface, etc. The term you're actually looking for is "invisible interface" instead of in-your-way interfaces. But if you wish to have the ability to interact with a system, you cannot remove its interface...

Re: The best interface is no interface

#38

Post by fatbird »

jbrennan wrote: post #35
fatbird wrote: post #26

I have two criticisms of the article: 1. Every story is a 'just so' story where the way the system works is exactly the way the user wants the system to work. Great, it's like putting a button front and center on your app and the user wants to push that button and look! It's right there! Awesome. Except I don't want to push that button, I want to push the other button that's now hidden away because the designer is st…

>2. Using AI is a "step 2: ???" solution, and the flaw with it is best exemplified by the columnist who bought a pregnancy book for a pregnant friend on Amazon Flaws like this might exist right now, but that's really a "bug". It's a failure on our part (the software designers and engineers) to build a system that actually works for the human . So sometimes when we try to make our software smart, it ends up being [mad…

Doesn't "provide better context" just push the problem one turtle away? How could I communicate to the website that the item for which I'm shopping is for a friend, not for me, and that I don't want the current actions to figure into future adaptive behaviour? Perhaps a checkbox? But now we're adding interface, which we were trying to eliminate in the first place.

I suggest that this is an intractable problem just because there's a fundamental tension between ease and flexibility. 'Optimize for the common case' always seems like a good idea (and the AI suggestion is just 'allow past history to determine the common case'), but we all have different common cases, and this heuristic helps us not all when we don't want to execute the common case, which is the hardest part of the design problem anyway.

I agree with the idea, generally, that we need to be smarter about how things work for people. I think "No UI" is like "No SQL": An appropriate solution in a certain set of cases, but nothing like a general solution for all.

Re: The best interface is no interface

#39

Post by LockeWatts »

DenisM wrote: post #21
Symmetry wrote: post #9

While having no interface is a nice idea, I think that there's also something to be said for "Make common things easy, rare things possible." That is, it's great to try to eliminate the need for an interface, but you can't assume or even expect that you'll always succeed, so you have to have an interface anyway. Also, a lot of famous security vulnerabilities like the fact that Windows will execute things on a memory…

Re payments - consider situation where I keep going to the same coffee shop, and I just tell the barista to "add it to my tab" and then drink my coffee and leave. That would be very liberating, and I know the barista personally I would have no problem for them to keep the tab for me, and I would close it weekly or monthly. Not so crazy now, iz it? If they could make it stretch to a point where I know the business but…

And the system could learn typical usages, and close the tab for me automatically, or bring it up for review if needed.

This sounds like an awful idea. I don't trust another developer to accurately be able to predict how I use my money.

What if someone needed to pay a bill with that money this week, and then can pay off their tab next week. But your AI decides to pay off the tab, you have no way of getting the money back, and now your house has no power.

Or maybe this is only a system designed for upper middle class people who have floating money to do that with. Seems a bit short sighted to me.

Re: The best interface is no interface

#40

Post by kapnobatairza »

zdw wrote: post #3

The best interface is hiding all the steps of a complex process and saying you did away with the interface. No steps = easy to debug when it goes wrong. You just point at it and loudly whine: "It's not working!" then nobody fixes it because all the back end is "magic".

One things that came to mind when reading your comment was some of my frustration using OS X. When an app in OS X or OS X itself stops working you don't get a blue screen or a "this application has crashed" error - it just stops working. Many of my friends would have the false illusion that OS X is much more stable than Windows 7 because they see less error messages.
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