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GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

patricia.no

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Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#111

Post by dbg31415 »

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 get something ready for feedback -- fast. (Plus, you save developers from wasting time coding something just to find out it’s wrong.)

Every front-end project should start with a clickable, usability-tested prototype before it ever hits a dev's backlog. It’s not rocket science. Skipping this step isn’t "moving fast," it’s just wasteful.

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#113

Post by codyb »

bob1029 wrote: post #25

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…

The fact frequent, repeated contact with the customer isn't the norm is why so many interfaces suck and so many engineers could't design a decent one with a gun to their head (although, frankly, that level of stress might not induce thoughtful design patterns).

Instead engineers get hit with micro view after micro view, and they build it using test flows that don't mimic the real world, and then they all tie it in to create a tangled macro view that's a shit show for the user.

I've been working to bring recurring Shadow Sessions here at my workplace by creating a basic scheduler (which is really the pain point at scale) that just sends you and somebody working in the tooling you're building (we're internal tooling) every three weeks and the feedback is overwhelmingly positive and we're working to expand the functionality a bit.

So, all you out there who want a nice win, set up a little scheduler and get your Product, Design, Engineers, Managers, and TPMs in rotating sessions with actual customers at a lightweight pace with minimal asks to create greater empathy which translates to all of us potentially ending up with better software in the world as a whole.

A fella can dream.

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#114

Post by DonHopkins »

paddy_m wrote: post #65
WillAdams wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a long while now, what seems to me a reasonably simple project (re-creating the UI of a drawing program and making it straight-forward to re-create program state with annotations/highlighting) has been stalled because I can't find a design tool which works better than just placing the screen grabs in a vector drawing program and annotating by hand.... I'm about at the point where I'm going to just code everything…

What made display postscript so great? I have only seen it mentioned in frothy marketing terms, not an in depth discussion of its approach, why it worked well, and how that compares to other alternatives.

PostScript is great for user interfaces!

I've written lots and lots of user interfaces in PostScript. Just not Display PostScript. NeWS was a lot better for making interactive user interfaces than Display PostScript, and it came out a lot earlier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool (entirely written in PostScript):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...

PizzaTool PostScript Source code:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/pizzatool.txt

I also worked on HyperLook, which was like HyperCard for NeWS with colorful PostScript instead of black and white pixels, plus networking:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-g...

Discussion with Alan Kay about HyperLook and NeWS:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/alan-kay-on-should-web-browse...

Then I used HyperLook to implemented the user interface for SimCity, programming the entire interactive user interface in NeWS PostScript -- Display PostScript couldn't do anything like that:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-simcity-demo-transcr...

Several years before that, I worked on the NeWS version of Gosling Emacs at UniPress, with multiple tabbed windows and pie menus. (Gosling also wrote NeWS, and much later Java.):

HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU

The source code for UniPress Emacs 2.20 recently surfaced! (We called the NeWS version of Emacs "NeMACS" of course.):

https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS

Here's the PostScript code of the NeWS Emacs display driver:

https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS/blob/main/src/D.term/Trm...

And lots of other fun interactive PostScript user interface code we shipped with NeMACS:

https://github.com/SimHacker/NeMACS/tree/main/ps

Pie menus:

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/win/pie.ps

Tabbed windows:

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/win/tab.ps

I used UniPress Emacs to develop an authoring tool for the NeWS version of HyperTIES, an early hypermedia browser, which we developed at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab.

Designing to Facilitate Browsing: A Look Back at the Hyperties Workstation Browser:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-to-facilitate-browsi...

HyperTIES Discussions from Hacker News:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...

I also worked on the Gnu Emacs 18 NeWS driver for The NeWS Toolkit:

https://donhopkins.com/home/code/emacs18/src/tnt.ps

A visual PostScript programming and debugging environment: The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — October 1989:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-octo...

PSIBER source code:

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/pub/NeWS/litecyber/

NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS more coherently:

1) Used PostScript CODE instead of JavaScript for PROGRAMMING.

2) Used PostScript GRAPHICS instead of DHTML and CSS for RENDERING.

3) Used PostScript DATA instead of XML and JSON for DATA REPRESENTATION.

More on that:

SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS)):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go...

Here's a comparison of X-Windows and NeWS:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-x-windows-disaster-128d398...

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#115

Post by rustcleaner »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #17

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 the real issue with GUIs: You have technical people building something (mostly) for non-technical people.

As a disgruntled power user, I think we have more of the exact opposite problem: the 'common denominator' users are driving interfare development toward oversimplicity. We have good software which continually undergoes translation into the GUI-equivalent of New-Speak. No please, I beg of you: don't spuritually reduce your program to some singular green [GO!] button! KDE 3.5 > 4+, GNOME 2 > 3+. Mozilla with a long habit of option removal (rivaled by GNOME project). If today's interface designers were in control 60 years ago, we would never have the Unix paradigm (it would be "too complicated" lol).

There should be a bit of elitism in this. Some things are hard to do, not all software should turn all hard things into 'easy', 'simplified', singular [GO!] buttons.

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#116

Post by WillAdams »

DonHopkins wrote: post #114
paddy_m wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What made display postscript so great? I have only seen it mentioned in frothy marketing terms, not an in depth discussion of its approach, why it worked well, and how that compares to other alternatives.

PostScript is great for user interfaces! I've written lots and lots of user interfaces in PostScript. Just not Display PostScript. NeWS was a lot better for making interactive user interfaces than Display PostScript, and it came out a lot earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool (entirely written in PostScript): https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...…

Are there any available implementations of this?

I've long wanted to experiment w/ HyperLook (or a successor to it).

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#117

Post by rustcleaner »

bob1029 wrote: post #109
mmphosis wrote: post #108

I think most ui is borken by design possibly for perpetual income reasons. HyperCard, vb, and other easy to use and accessible builders are dead even though this what people really want. If I want a blue menu bar, I need to code markup!?!, but to stop me from creating blue menu bars, today I am forbidden from having a menu bar anyways. Crazy ideas and creatively built prototypes seem to have no place in the private M…

> I think most ui is borken by design possibly for perpetual income reasons. I don't know how the incentives really play out anymore. It's definitely self-interest in a lot of places. I have a new theory that some user interfaces are made to be janky on purpose such that the users are constantly bathed in cortisol and made easier to subjugate with the other dark patterns. The UI/UX for Azure instantly comes to mind a…

>I have a new theory that some user interfaces are made to be janky on purpose such that the users are constantly bathed in cortisol and made easier to subjugate with the other dark patterns.

Sounds like bullshit... I believe it!

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#118

Post by codyb »

catmanjan wrote: post #52
bob1029 wrote: post #25

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…

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 whatever website you're looking at. These are static. They've very powerful and were pretty much all you had before digital interfaces became ubiquitous. There's an initial learning curve where you figure out navigation, and then for the most part it's fairly smooth sailing from there provided the controls are exposed well.

Adaptive Interfaces - These interfaces attempt to "adapt" to your needs. Google is probably one of the most successful adaptive interfaces out there. A query for "Shoes" will show a series of shopping results, while a query for "Chinese food" will show a map of the restaurants nearby. The interface adapts to you.

I call this narrow adaptive because the query triggers how the UI adapts. I think "wide area" adaptive interfaces where the interface attempts to meet your needs before you've had a chance to interact with the static interface around it are tremendously difficult and can't think of examples of them being done well.

Adaptable Interfaces - This last interface bucket includes controls which allow a user to adapt the interface to their own needs. This may include dragging icons into a particular order, pinning certain view styles or filters, or customizing the look or behavior of the applications you're working with.

Finder, the iPhone's basic UI, terminal, basic music catalog management (e.g. iTunes)... these are interfaces which are created once with an initial curve of varying difficulty to learn and then live on for decades without much change.

Conclusion - The best interfaces combine an intuitive static frame, with queried adaptive elements, and adaptable features to efficiently meet the needs of a diverse group of user flows instead of attempting the one size fits all approach (which leaves 2/3rds of people annoyed).

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#119

Post by DonHopkins »

WillAdams wrote: post #116
DonHopkins wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PostScript is great for user interfaces! I've written lots and lots of user interfaces in PostScript. Just not Display PostScript. NeWS was a lot better for making interactive user interfaces than Display PostScript, and it came out a lot earlier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS The Story of Sun Microsystems PizzaTool (entirely written in PostScript): https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-story-of-sun-microsystems-...…

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=9ZhZqfC8sC4

Sun OpenWindows 3.0 (NeWS!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl08TvO0Bgw

Looks like this is running on a real Sun workstation, not an emulator. He shows RasterRap and The NeWS Toolkit demos, but not PizzaTool.

Good luck! Let me know if you get something working.

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#120

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

0xCE0 wrote: post #34

The article is poorly written. No clear message, topics jumped weirdly, and the overall style is like written by teenager/intern trying to be as impressing as some professional. But here's the thing with "GUIs/UIs/UXs whatever": The best UI/UX is created by a domain professional, who knows why and how it serves as the best designed tool for that domain - a tool made by a professional for himself and/or for other prof…

I don't know about other professional tools, but EDA tools for chipdesign are like they are because electrical engineers and the vendors are 20 years behind in how to develop software.
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