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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

#121

Post by DonHopkins »

mpweiher wrote: post #81
paddy_m wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I'm starting to understand. So Display Postscript was useful because it let you know that what you put on the screen as a programmer would be what's printed? And it allowed for cool graphics effects like custom strokes and fills. So that primarily matters for stuff you want to print. It wouldn't matter as much for assembling a UI. How does windows handle this stuff?

In theory, you could also capture screenshots as high-quality vector graphics.

In practice that's what you could do with HyperLook on NeWS:

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

HyperLook was like HyperCard for NeWS, with PostScript graphics and scripting plus networking. Here are three unique and wacky examples that plug together to show what HyperNeWS was all about, and where we could go in the future!

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

HyperLook SimCity Demo Transcript

This is a transcript of a video taped demonstration of SimCity on HyperLook in NeWS.

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

Discussion with Alan Kay about HyperLook and NeWS:

Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, HyperCard, NeWS, and HyperLook

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

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#122

Post by [deleted] »

wongarsu wrote: post #23
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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#123

Post by menotyou »

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…

Arguably lots of UIs getting worse with every iteration of redesign.

- Windows GUI went downhill from Windows 7 (or even XP) with every release.

- Outlook went from good over fair to annoying so that I finally replaced it as my personal client.

These are not the only examples I could name but they are the most prominent. I think the main problem is that both technical staff and UX designers both trying to make something "new" or "fancy" which is in most cases the opposite of something usable. E.g. Aero was fancy but it took away that my active window had one signal color header bar and all others were tamed. Now all windows are colorful and yelling at me at the same time. Orientation is gone.

And after that UIs got even more "fancy".

Step 13 ("Nobody's happy but nobody hates it") is the plateau when everybody is to tired to keep on fighting - a compromise, not the state of the GUI reached anything acceptable. It is not fancy enough anymore for developers and UX designers to be proud of but at the same time and is still annoyingly bad for the users.

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#124

Post by skydhash »

paddy_m wrote: post #86
catmanjan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interested to hear about a high quality UI as I have never encountered one

CAD Software. There is CAD vs CAD esports. https://www.youtube.com/live/C1CqIcfDKbQ?t=1987s It seems dominated by solidworks but other programs (NX, Fusion 360...?) are allowed. The bloomberg terminal UI. Some emacs setups. (much more variability than VIM) Some VIM setups. The thing that all of these have in common is that they are designed for experts, not for every user. Also each one of those is a custom full plat…

Conflating beginner tools and expert tools (user-friendliness) is usually where everything go wrong. For most people, Wordpad was enough, Microsoft Word was for when you need a bit more control. But an expert tool is Adobe InDesign where you have the maximum control. And the UI is quite different.

Same when learning to code, a basic text editor like Gnome's Text Editor or Nano is all you need. But an expert will reach out to Intellij's for his project because his needs are more complex.

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#125

Post by skydhash »

codyb wrote: post #118
catmanjan wrote: post #52

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…

Or you can focus on a single class and produce the best UI for that class.

Static Interfaces for the common actions that everyone does. Best as basic utilities in the operating system (Notepad, The calculator)

Adaptive Interfaces where you have a few advanced layouts for people that wants a bit more. (Wordpad, Notepad++, Kate,...)

The expert tools (Blender, matlab, Adobe Illustrator,...) You will have a small userbase, but they're often willing to pay for a good tool that will solve their needs.

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#126

Post by fuzzfactor »

SoftTalker wrote: post #90
paddy_m wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best functional specs for a UI have come from business people building their own in excel. At a minimum they will have some idea of layout and what information should be displayed on which screens. This also lets them focus on the core information, not the styling. Building GUIs on the web, there are infinite ways to style every UI element and more attention goes to that then the actual interaction.

I'd disagree with that. People build wild shit in Excel that only they can understand. It makes sense to them because they built it. Nobody else can use it. Not all spreadsheets are like this but there are absolutely no guardrails to prevent it. Building a good GUI takes thoughtful design by someone who understands what makes a good GUI and what the goals of the interface are from the user's perspective. Someone who…

>thoughtful design by someone who understands what makes a good GUI and what the goals of the interface are from the user's perspective.

This is critically overlooked too many times.

>People build wild shit in Excel that only they can understand.

I resemble that remark ;)

In one respect, that's what excel is really helpful for.

With no other GUI, the default of a mouse on an electronic spreadsheet is one of the oldest and most familiar to those who need wild math to be accomplished immediately without delay, in spite of its drawbacks. And quite popular, most likely by "default".

Remember before they had a gooey all they had was an ooie.

Should have seen what it was like before people had a mouse ;)

How about back when almost all prospective users wanted computerized calculation abilities, but computers were so uncommon none of them had ever used a computer (other than a first-generation game console), yet. They were of course well aware of what computers could do but wouldn't be actually touching one until sometime in the (very near) future.

They were looking forward to it which was a good sign, but when you handed one to them, the ideal situation was if they could simply be directed to the power button on the device. Everything else needs to logically follow and be completely intuitive to those familiar with the domain, with no further guidance or support from the author. Budding operators who were absolutely computer illiterate must be able to get it right the first time. Would you settle for anything less when it's somewhat confusing industrial high-stakes computation under the hood?

That's just text but when you think about it, even the most complex logic & code might benefit from first making sure it can be well-navigated from a text-based UI, before adding the desktop & mouse to complete the "picture".

Remember, a text-based UI must ask the right questions, or there will be no correct response.

Any other UI which doesn't ask the same questions in one way or another, is unlikely to provide the same correct response.

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#127

Post by bloomca »

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…

The thing about MS I recently realized is that whatever they do (and most of the technologies they output), they target it from the enterprise angle. So they check boxes with features, they just need to make sure they are available/usable, but they don't particularly care how nice they are to use.

So it is indeed an intentional choice just to make a good enough product and move on to something else. They never want to polish whatever they have.

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#128

Post by bsder »

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…

> 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.

The problem I have seen is that all the GUI toolkits weld themselves way too hard to the code.

Consequently, when you want to adjust the UI, you always have to rewrite big chunks of the code.

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#129

Post by mpweiher »

mejutoco wrote: post #82
mpweiher wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The issue is that step 2 is wrong ... step 2 is to test it. But of course the best and only real way to test it is to test the real thing...so build it. Back to step 2. :-/ Recurring theme in pre-press: get the texts, get everybody to proof-read the texts, get customer sign off, do on-screen proofs of the layout, everyone signs off, do print-proofs, do proof-printer proofs, do a press-run. Everybody signs off. Prin…

I think these kind of tasks where many people are asked to review but nobody owns it are the problem. One assumes others reviewed it and then they might review them superficially. You could give $100 per typo found and I bet that first page would be caught.

Not really, no.

It's that we humans are really, really bad at reviewing something carefully that we know is not the "real" thing.

Re: GUIs are built at least 2.5 times

#130

Post by mpweiher »

DonHopkins wrote: post #121
mpweiher wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In theory, you could also capture screenshots as high-quality vector graphics.

In practice that's what you could do with HyperLook on NeWS: SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS)) HyperLook was like HyperCard for NeWS, with PostScript graphics and scripting plus networking. Here are three unique and wacky examples that plug together to show what HyperNeWS was all about, and where we could go in the future! https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-n…

Absolutely, since NeWS was largely the same concept, though with more intelligence on the PostScript side.
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