121–130 of 214 posts
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.
I enjoyed this talk, and I want to learn more about the concept of “learning loops” for interface design. Personally, I wish there were a champion of desktop usability like how Apple was in the 1980s and 1990s. I feel that Microsoft, Apple, and Google lost the plot in the 2010s due to two factors: (1) the rise of mobile and Web computing, and (2) the realization that software platforms are excellent platforms for mil…
We now have giant title bars to accommodate the hamburger menu button, which opens a list of...standard menu bar sub menu options.
You could fit all the same information into the same real estate space, using the original and tested paradigm.
I understand the desire to want to fix user pain points. There are plenty to choose from. I think the problem is that most of the UI changes don't seem to fix any particular issue I have. They are just different, and when some changes do create even more problems there's never any configuration to disable them. You're trying to create a perfect, coherent system for everyone absent the ability to configure it to our l…
Inability to imagine someone might have different idea about what's useful is general plague of UI/UX industry. And there seem to be zero care given to usage by user that have to use the app longer than 30 seconds a day. Productivity vs learning time curve is basically flat, and low, with exception being pretty much "the tools made by X for X" like programming IDEs
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I still wonder why not everybody was lingering in the holodeck all the time. (equivalent of people being glued to their smartphones today) (Related) This is one explanation for the Fermi paradox: Alien species may isolate themselves in virtual worlds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox
The lack of capitalism meant that the holodeck program authors had no need to optimize their programs for user retention to show them more ads. So much fewer people suffer from holodeck addiction in Star Trek than are glued to their screens in our world.
Similarly in Stat Wars with droids: Obi-Wan is right, droids can't think and deserve no real moral consideration because they're just advanced language models in bodies (C3PO insisting on proper protocol because he's a protocol droid is the engineering attempt to keep the LLM on track).
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?
Because, something that a lot of tech-obsessed Trek fans never seem to really come to terms with, is that Trek didn't fetishize technology. In the Trek universe, LCARS wasn't getting continuous UI updates because they would have advanced, culturally, to a point where they recognized that continuous UI updates are frustrating for users. They would have invested the time and research effort required to better understan…
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I feel a major shift happened in the 2010s. The tech industry became less about making the world a better place through technology, and more about how to best leverage power to make as much money as possible, making a world a better place be damned. This also came at a time when tech went from being considered a nerdy obsession to tech being a prestigious career choice much like how law and medicine are viewed. Tech…
>The tech industry became less about making the world a better place through technology When the hell was even that?
The subtle running joke was that while the main characters technobabble was fake, every other background SV startup was “Making the world a better place through Paxos-based distributed consensus” and other real world serious tech.
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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?
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?
Because the LCARS GUI is only for simple recurring tasks, so it's easy to find an optimal interface. Complex tasks are done vibe coding style, like La Forge vibe video editing a recording to find an alien: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Faiu360W7Q I do wonder if conversational interfaces will put an end to our GUI churn eventually...
It might be nice way for making complex, one off tasks by personnel unfamiliar with all the features of the system, but for fast day to day stuff, button per function will always be a king.
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?
Trek needs to visibly "sci-fi-up" extant tech in order to have the poetic narrative license to tell its present-day parables. Things just need to "look futuristic". The don't actually need to have practical function outside whatever narrative constraints are imposed in order to provide pace and tension to the story. I forget who said it first, but "Warp is really the speed of plot".