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Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

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Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#111

Post by jrowen »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #47
echoangle wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just not what user experience means, two products having the same start and end state doesn’t mean the user experience is the same. Imagine two tools, one a CLI and one a GUI, which both let you do the same thing. Would you say that they by definition have the same user experience?

If you drew both brushing processes as a UML diagram the variance would be trivial Now compare that variance to the variance options given with machine and computing UX options you’ll see clearly that one (toothbrushing) is less than one stdev different in steps and components for the median use case and one (computing) is nearly infinite variance (no stable stdev) between median use case steps and components. The fa…

I would almost define "experience" as that which can't be described by UML.

Ask any person to go and find a stick and use it to brush their teeth, and then ask if that "experience" was the same as using their toothbrush. Invoking UML is absurd.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#112

Post by lo_zamoyski »

mc32 wrote: post #96
jack_tripper wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The tech industry became less about making the world a better place through technology When the hell was even that?

Things like hypertext, search, email and early social networks (chat networks connecting disparate people) and also the paperless office (finally). Images and video corrupted everything as they now became that which addicted eyeballs.

> chat networks

I think you may be looking at history through rose-tinted glasses. Sure, social media today is not the same, so the comparison isn’t quite sensible, but IRC was an unpleasant place full of petty egos and nasty people.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#113

Post by Findecanor »

I would say that it is the term "UX" that is the confusing part of "UX/UI".

By Don Norman's original definition [0], it is not merely another term for "UI" but specifically when you do have a wider scope and not working with a user interface specifically.

So, the term "UX/UI" would refer to being able to both work with the wider scope, and to go deeper to work with user interface design.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BdtGjoIN4E&t=10s

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#114

Post by lo_zamoyski »

vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #92
jack_tripper wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The tech industry became less about making the world a better place through technology When the hell was even that?

In the 80s and 90s there was much more idealism than now. There were also more low hanging fruit to develop software that makes people’s lives better. There was also less investor money floating around so it was more important to appeal to end users. To me it seems tech has devolved into a big money making scheme with only the minimum necessary actual technology and innovation.

I would agree that it was different, but I also think this may be history viewed through rose-tinted glasses somewhat.

> There were also more low hanging fruit to develop software that makes people’s lives better.

In principle, maybe. In practice, you had to pay for everything. Open source or free software was not widely available. So, the profit motive was there. The conditions didn’t exist yet for the profit model we have today to really take off, or for the appreciation of it to exist. Still, if there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit, that means the maturity of software was generally lower, so it’s a bit like pining for the days when people lived on the farm.

> There was also less investor money floating around so it was more important to appeal to end users.

I’m not so sure this appeal was so important (and investors do care about appeal!). If you had market dominance like Microsoft did, you could rest on your laurels quite a bit (and that they did). The software ecosystem you needed to use also determined your choices for you.

> To me it seems tech has devolved into a big money making scheme with only the minimum necessary actual technology and innovation.

As I said earlier, the profit motive was always there. It was just expressed differently. But I will grant you that the image is different. In a way, the mask has been dropped. When facebook was new, no one thought of it as a vulgar engine for monetizing people either (I even recall offending a Facebook employee years ago when I mentioned this, what should frankly have been obvious), but it was just that. It was all just that, because the basic blueprint of the revenue model was there from day one.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#115

Post by AlienRobot »

taskforcegemini wrote: post #104
porkbrain wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Text selection used to be frustrating on mobile for me too until Google fixed it with OCR. I get to just hold a button briefly and then can immediately select an area of the screen to scan text from, with a consistent UX. Like a screenshot but for text.

They are using OCR for selecting plain text?

At least it's not AI... yet.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#116

Post by sho_hn »

sprash wrote: post #54
whatever1 wrote: post #48

Desktop is dead. Gamers will move to consoles and Valve-like platforms. Rest of productivity is done on a single window browser anyway. Llms will accelerate this Coders are the only ones who still should be interested in desktop UX, but even in that segment many just need a terminal window.

It's not dead. It's being murdered. Microsoft, Apple, Gnome and KDE are making the experience worse with each update. Productive work becomes a chore. And the last thing we need is more experiments. We need more performance, responsiveness, consistency and less latency. Everything got worse on all 4 points for every desktop environment despite hardware getting faster by several orders of magnitude. This also means th…

FWIW, this just isn't true for KDE. We hit a rough patch with the KDE 4.x series - 17 years ago - that has been difficult to live down, but have done much in the way of making amends since, including learning from and avoiding the mistakes we made back then.

For example, we intentionally optimized Plasma 5 for low-powered devices (we used to have stacks of the Pinebook at dev sprints, essentially a RaspPi-class board in a laptop shell), shedding more than half the menory and compute requirements in just that generational advance.

We also have a good half-decade of QA focus behind us, including community-elected goals like a consistency campaign, much like what you asked for.

I'm confident Plasma 5 and 6 have iteratively gotten better on all four points.

It's certainly not perfect yet, and we have many areas to still improve about the product, some of them greatly. But we're certainly not enshittifying, and the momentum remains very high. Nearly all modern, popular new distros default to KDE (e.g. Bazzite, CachyOS, Asahi, Valve SteamOS) and our donation totals from low-paying individual donors - a decent proxy for user satisfaction - have multiplied. I've been around the commnunity for about 20 to 25 years and it's never been a more vibrant project than today.

Re the fantastic talk, thanks for the little KDE shout-out in the first two minutes!

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#118

Post by DangitBobby »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #66
ares623 wrote: post #9

Are we stuck with the same toothbrush UX forever?

I was going to say "are we stuck with the same bicycle UX forever". Because we've been stuck with the same bicycle UX for like 150 years now. Sometimes shit just works right, just about straight out of the gate.

There have been absolute fucking gobs of UX changes to bikes in just the last 5 years. They just usually end up on mid range or higher end bikes. Obviously they don't fundamentally change the way a bike works, otherwise it wouldn't be a bike anymore.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#119

Post by bigstrat2003 »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #46
analogpixel wrote: post #8

Why didn't Star Trek ever tackle the big issues, like them constantly updating the LCARS interface every few episodes to make it better, or having Geordi La Forge re-writing the warp core controllers in Rust?

Man, I should hope that the warp core controllers on the USS Enterprise were not written in C. On the other hand, if the writers of Star Trek The Next Generation were writing the show now, rather than 35-40 years ago - and therefore had a more expansive understanding of computer technology and were writing for an audience that could be relied upon to understand computers better than was actually the case - maybe ther…

> recently-written episodes of Star Trek coming out in the past few years (that seem to be much less popular than TNG, probably because the entire media environment around broadcast television has changed drastically since TNG was made)

That's probably part of it. But the larger part is that new Star Trek is very poorly written, so why is anyone going to bother watching it?

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#120

Post by virtualbluesky »

johnea wrote: post #89

A) I'm not going to watch the video because it's hosted by goggle, and I'm not interested in being goggled. B) However, even without watching the video, it must be describing corporate product UI, because in the free software world, there is a huge variety of selections for desktop (and phone) UI choices. C) The big question I continue to come back to in HN comments: why does any technically astute person continue to…

Do you have suggestions for those less informed about projects that are pushing the envelope on desktop UX?
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