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Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

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Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#291

Post by npsimons »

hawski wrote: post #283

Funny to have a rant on UX on medium not suitable to long form posts. It is sadly very similar in desktop realm. You can’t copy text from the most part of the interface. There can be an error and you have to rewrite it to find what is this all about. The computer has this already written down, it’s just silly. That is the one thing that usually is better about webapps. Of course there are silly designers who want to…

> By default you can manipulate the data to your heart’s content.

http://blog.vivekhaldar.com/post/3996068979/the-levels-of-em...

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#292

Post by npsimons »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #98
graphitezepp wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is much closer together, you don't have to move your hand only your fingers. It is clearly the better input device for pure digit sequences.

Not for left handed people. My primary hand is better/closer to the top row. My non-primary handle struggles with the keypad, especially if I don't use it very often - which I don't. Worse, if you're on a laptop a lot then this habit is kicked out the door. Enabling a numpad on the keyboard is less efficient than just using the top row.

> Not for left handed people.

I'm left handed; the numpad is freakin' awesome for number entry. Back when I still played games like Descent and WoW, it was also very efficient to setup the mouse for my left hand and leave my right hand on the number pad. Aim and fire with mouse, maneuver with numpad (in Descent), or action bar items on numpad (in WoW).

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#293

Post by Rhinobird »

gilbetron wrote: post #92

No? Getting on a BBS in 1983 at 300 baud means text files "downloaded" at the same speed you can read. Word processors were crazy painful to use, and incredibly slow. A text editor was just a line-by-line replacement. My TRS-80 would slow to a crawl even making the most basic (ha!) of programs. Over the years, I've often thought about why computers never seem to get faster - mostly it is because people have a toleran…

The author went back a tad far, but not too much. The Amiga came out in 1985 and the Apple IIGS in 1986. The user experience of those machines would be more comparable a modern PC with a thousand times the clock speed and memory

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#294

Post by vanderZwan »

finchisko wrote: post #182

I think what guy is actually experiencing strong feeling of nostalgia for older times. And I understand that. I see it on myself more and more with coming years too. We were simply born in some era, which holds strong memories in us. We hold sentiment to old things (programs), because somehow they're connected with best memories from time we were much younger. And the best memories are usually bounded to age around 2…

> My point is, that maybe todays software is not all that bad.

Well, as an interface designer who is supposedly in the age category where his best memories are still being created I feel a bit insulted, because from my point of view, a lot of things are pretty bad. Don't get me wrong, things are also a lot better, but there is more to life than HD video, better color fidelity, novelties made possible by virtual reality, and the interconnectedness of the web - even when these are all big improvements over the past! But it does feel like the computer is being domesticated into the new TV.

As far as interfaces themselves go, the main culprit (from a design POV) is almost always the priority of touch-first design, with mouse a distant second, and keyboard input only existing for things that could not removed through dumbing things down, like input forms.

Now touch interfaces are great in some areas, but any time I have to select/copy/paste text I am painfully reminded of their limits. In general it feels like 90% of the time I am struggling to do things that would be trivial with mouse and/or keyboard. And let's not even go into the lack of tactile feedback[0].

Even more insulting is that it is not that hard to make an interface that supports different modes of input, or where the potential keyboard input is easy to understand. There even exist modern quasi-innovations like react-select, which uses a select field for mouse and touch and lets you type to autocomplete among available options for keyboard power-users[1].

The opening line about perceptual slowness also rings true. In my childhood we had long loading times because of slow hard drives or CD-drives. Now we have them for the sake of saving development costs and adding ad revenue. The internet is a bloated mess, which from a content perspective it doesn't need to be at all; many websites work better if you turn off JavaScript[2].

Then there is web development itself, starting with a reliance on bloated overly generic modules, all the way down to the metal where there is an unawareness that there is even such a thing as an ever increasing memory/processor performance gap, or that this might also affects JavaScript code.

Well, it does, and not even browser vendors themselves seem to be fully aware of it. For example: on all platforms that I've tried, a simple radix sort is between two to eighty times faster the built-in sorting algorithms when sorting numbers, for all array types, regardless of whether it is in-place or a sorted copy[3]. (in the use-case for which I investigated it, the improvement is five to ten-fold, allowing me to do interactive animations where before I had to resort to slow renders). The difference makes sense for plain Arrays, which cannot assume integer values, but why the heck are the typed arrays so slow? They're plain contiguous memory array; compared to all the other browser complexities this is about as simple as it gets!

I could go on for a while but the point is: it's not like things were better in the past. It's just that a number of these things should have gotten better and instead seem to have regressed. And I know it's complex combination of many reasons, but it's still saddening to see.

[0] http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...

[1] http://jedwatson.github.io/react-select/

[2] http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

[3] https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-loop-vs-fil..., https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-100-element... https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-loop-vs-fil..., https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-100-element..., https://run.perf.zone/view/Radix-sort-Uint8Array-loop-vs-fil..., https://run.perf.zone/view/uint32slice0sort-vs-1000-items-ty..., https://run.perf.zone/view/uint32slice0sort-vs-radix-sort-10...

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#295

Post by fusiongyro »

s73ver_ wrote: post #236
fusiongyro wrote: post #39

In the name of usability, we have practically neutered these computing machines. I think optimizing for user experience is partly to blame for this. You don't want users to have a confusing experience the first time they use the application, and you want the application to look good and be inviting. But that may be at cross purposes with making applications that allow open-ended exploration. Exploration implies that…

I simply cannot agree with the take that making things easier to use "neuters" them. Enabling people to actually use these things makes them more powerful, not less. I think far too often, people get caught up with the false machismo of, "This is hard to use, yet I can use it, so I'm a badass and you're not."

I agree with you about false machismo. I'm trying not to say that hard-to-use tools are essentially good. I am saying that some essentially good tools are not very new-user-friendly, and that worrying excessively about the new-user experience has been detrimental overall.

One reason for that is the "new user experience" for a more powerful system will imply learning some things that are not directly relevant to whatever problem you are trying to solve. Excel worksheets, layers in Illustrator, "command mode" in vi and Blender, etc., are more like gas/brake pedals than they are like "do you want directions to this destination?" I don't see how you can avoid thrusting some learning on new users of a powerful system. Powerful systems are going to have powerful metaphors that are probably not totally intuitive at first.

You can do more stuff with Illustrator than Omnigraffle. It's a more powerful tool. That brings with it a longer or steeper learning curve. But, if you just want to make a few charts, Omnigraffle is easier to use.

I do feel that, over time, we have become very gun-shy about making complex applications that have richer models like this though, preferring to make applications with simpler UX that aim directly at smaller problems. And I think this is partly because UX is more straightforward for smaller problems.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#296

Post by pmlnr »

Bartweiss wrote: post #247
pmlnr wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a choice is not a thing for granted. You need to work for it. You need to maintain the right to it. Those who are not prepared, learn it, or live with whatever is provided by others.

This argument generalizes to everything , though. Do you not like owning a car/tractor/printer running proprietary software that you're not permitted to modify? I guess you should have bought a 20 year old version and upgraded it yourself. Do you want a choice of food that you trust won't make you sick? Then you probably should have worked for that lettuce from planting to harvest, not just complained about safety st…

I merely stated you need to do, act, work for choices and for freedom. Expecting freedom of choice for granted is spoilt belief.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#297

Post by jancsika »

> i posit that nobody wants autocomplete-style live DB lookups. They don't fit the mold that autocomplete fits in.

1. I live-code an example in about:blank with devTools window open.

2. I roll my own little jQuery-like closure for the sake of convenience.

3. It works.

4. I close the browser and forget about the thing.

5. Later, I decide I wanna test out a feature of the Web Animation API, so I open my browser to about:blank again.

6. I remember that I used a little closure last time-- as I type the var name Chromium pops up an "autocomplete-style live DB lookup" menu. At the bottom is My Little Closure from last time!

7. I move the mouse down to the relevant line in the menu. Or, I use keyboard arrows to navigate to it. Or I keep typing and narrow down the menu options.

Useful? Check. Discoverable? Check? Obtrusive? Negative-- in the case that I don't every want previously typed expression, that menu option is put at the bottom out of the way of the more common JS internals and DOM methods.

Default settings in a terminal (or terminal-based GUI) generally require the user to either type something to get into a history mode, or type tab to do completion. But both of those options are less discoverable-- they require me to know ahead of time that I want to retrieve something. With devTools it shows me what can be retrieved so that I know what's available even if I'm a neophyte.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#298

Post by pmlnr »

acdha wrote: post #164
jkoll wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

250 megabytes for a simple email client.

Versus, say, 1GB for Outlook and variable amounts for Mail.app depending on usage. It's not 1993 — these days email includes a full text search engine, rendering complex content, etc. Since even a phone comes with considerably more than 250MB of RAM, if you don't want to use the resources you paid for to make things faster or better, wouldn't that be an argument for using pine or mutt in a terminal window?

Thankfully on a webmail, these all happen on the server, not consuming client memory. Oh, wait.

Re: Almost everything on computers is perceptually slower than it was in 1983

#299

Post by SirZimzim »

Chaebixi wrote: post #245
skizm wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineers optimize for human scale time.

I kinda feel that UI developers should work with crappy, old PCs. Then they could optimize to the point where things are barely usable to them, but then they'd be snappy for everyone else.

Luckily Google Chrome has added device emulation recently for slower devices and network conditions. Hopefully tooling like that will make it in many developers Workflows.
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