Don Norman was a respected UI analyst during his days at Apple. How far he has fallen! I lost faith in his judgment after reading the NN/g article bashing PDF:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/pdf-unfit-for-human-consump...
The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
131–140 of 156 posts
Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
#132My favourite part of this article (disclosure: I've made almost this exact comment before elsewhere): > The see-and-point principle states that users interact with the computer by pointing at the objects they can see on the screen. It's as if we have thrown away a million years of evolution, lost our facility with expressive language, and been reduced to pointing at objects in the immediate environment. Mouse buttons…
> > Using a command-line interface is like having to learn the complete Korean language just to order food in the Seoul branch of McDonalds. Using a menu-based interface is like being able to point to the food you want and grunt and nod your head: it conveys the same information with no learning curve. That analogy makes one significant assumption: that you are trying to order food from McDonalds, which is a thing yo…
There are ways to do this even with GUIs, the prime example being "expert" software like 3D graphics tools like Maya or Blender or things like CAD although CAD's origins were command oriented.
Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
#133> At recent user interface conferences, several speakers have lamented that the human interface is stuck. We seem to have settled on the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) model, and there is very little real innovation in interface design anymore. Alternately, you can say that UX design stabilized on a known good pattern. This reminds me of how some people will refer to stable software projects that only receive…
If you read the article, much of criticisms about the state of the art at the time (mid-90s) has been addressed, and to great benefit. To take just one example, the use of natural language via voice commands to allow the user to discover new commands beyond what can be expressed with a visual UI - but there are many more examples.
The discoverability of voice commands is terrible.
I have no idea how to find out what I can do with Alexa, or which particular magic phrasing Alexa will understand.
My personal biggest issue, as means of illustration, is that I have no idea how to play the latest episode of something on the BBC app, rather than continuing from where I left off.
I'm sure there is a way, but none of my "natural language" attempts are recognised, and I can't find any way to find out what the true commands might be. Given that I mostly listen to news shows while doing something else (and hence rarely finish a particular episode) this makes the whole system near useless.
I may be missing something basic, or if you have any tips on the discoverability of Alexa commands, I'd be very grateful. But in my experience, the discoverability of voice commands is the worst I've ever come across; at least with CLI you have man pages, and with a GUI, even in the worst case of no documentation and obscure icons, there are buttons to explore through trial and error.
Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
#134All metaphors are learned. Given that technology tend to replace things from the manual physical world these metaphors makes a lot of sense as they help humans transition. Over time new concepts emerge which are based on metaphors native to the digital space and understood by the new generations.
Digression risk: Unless we count human evolution as “learning” I’d disagree: some “metaphors” are surely innate. A snake is scary to babies who have not learned it’s dangerous. Symmetry is beautiful to an untrained eye. Design should be informed also by our innate traits; refrain from taking the “blank slate” idea at face value.
Evolution is one long learning game :)
Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of pointer, you can do keyboard-everything, which some UX enhancements go for, like the browser extension Tridactyl. If you look at a lot of interfaces that are built for a specialized power user (e.g. cashiers), they avoid pointers and have keys for everything. Also, AutoCAD, the last I used it, looked to be centered around command-line primacy.
Sadly, POS terminals these days seem to be going in the direction of high-latency touch interfaces. Those old curses-based terminals were so fast to get things done in. Magit[1] is another modern example of a TUI done right: discoverable, good dwim[2] inference that doesn't get in the way of experts, plus an escape hatch for typing out the exact git commands for those 5% usecases. [1] https://magit.vc/ [2] do what I…
The research done for the original Macintosh UI showed that keyboard users aren’t actually faster than mouse users, but think they are because they lose track of time while concentrating.
Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
#136Jef Raskin—who led the Macintosh project for the first year (though apparently the design was changed further later on)—worked afterwards on a concept that incorporated typed-in natural-language commands. In his Archy, commands were part of an unorthodox GUI system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy Archy clearly hails from the eighties when it was still imaginable to change users' workflow with desktop computers—t…
This post introduced me to Archy which is exciting to discover. The zoomable interface of Archy addresses something fundamental that always felt off about current desktop GUIs - the inability to get a meaningful overview, that include both folder structure and file contents , and to be the inability to switch from higher to lower levels of perspective in a continuous way. It seems like Archy made the directory structure appear like a topographical landscape. Current desktop GUIs instead feel like navigating an endless Russian doll of drawers.
Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Because people don’t understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that ‘Guitar Hero’ is the same as a real guitar.” For me, this was the signal that this as a "if only people used computers like I personally think they should" pieces. I know lots of people who play guitar hero, lots of people who play real guitars, and some who play both (me f…
> Can't imagine using computers without one. I have no empirical proof of this, but I would be willing to wager the deed to my house that the vast majority of users, having been explained what a cli is, the benefits of it, and how to use it, would chose to never use a CLI again. As stated, I agree. But "ugliness" and unfamiliarity are big confounds here. The fairer experiment would be something like: For tasks where…
I think your question has been answered to some extent. As I understand it, there is wide spread usage of WeChat apps. Users of WeChat use the platform for many tasks other than text messaging. In, essence, WeChat is just a spruced up CLI.
Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, POS terminals these days seem to be going in the direction of high-latency touch interfaces. Those old curses-based terminals were so fast to get things done in. Magit[1] is another modern example of a TUI done right: discoverable, good dwim[2] inference that doesn't get in the way of experts, plus an escape hatch for typing out the exact git commands for those 5% usecases. [1] https://magit.vc/ [2] do what I…
The research done for the original Macintosh UI showed that keyboard users aren’t actually faster than mouse users, but think they are because they lose track of time while concentrating.
Do you have a link? I suspect there's some asterisks there. I used to operate a photo minilab and could process a roll's worth of photos in 1-2 minutes. That's 4 seconds at the outside to evaluate a photo, make brightness and color corrections, next photo. No way I'd be able to sustain the same rate by having to mouse around and click at least four different targets, bouncing from brightness to magenta/green to blue/yellow back to magenta/green to cyan/red before giving brightness a final tweak. Fitt's Law[1] is death to speed for all sorts of workflows.
I'm not saying that keyboard-based operation is superior in all cases, but a good keyboard-centric interface can eliminate the need to acquire a target (e.g. menu/toolbar item) for the most common operations because there's a hotkey. Well-understood operations can go almost at the speed of thought (either the operator's or the machine's).
Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
#139I think that using a bookcase that can be spatially ordered (in 2 dimensions) would be a really interesting concept for an operating system. Applications and files alike, filed on the same bookshelf. A very easy metaphor that makes it easy to explain how computers work, but also locate files that you use often (perhaps by size, shape, colour and location) without using the part of your brain that processes language.…
Dr. Gelernter and Freedman proposed time as a better metaphor than space almost 25 years ago. It's essentially what every social media app uses now. Although the dissertation proposes better tooling for navigation.
Re: The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
> > Using a command-line interface is like having to learn the complete Korean language just to order food in the Seoul branch of McDonalds. Using a menu-based interface is like being able to point to the food you want and grunt and nod your head: it conveys the same information with no learning curve. That analogy makes one significant assumption: that you are trying to order food from McDonalds, which is a thing yo…
There are ways to do this even with GUIs, the prime example being "expert" software like 3D graphics tools like Maya or Blender or things like CAD although CAD's origins were command oriented.
Blender does it especially well. The only thing it's missing when compared to command-line utilities is composability with other tools like pipes. Blender has tons of features, and it has to because of its monolithic design.
Then again, collaborative (open source) design is the workaround for monolithic software, and it's worked exceptionally well for Linux and Blender.