I stopped reading when he claimed Minority Report was a great movie, the forecast UI was "incredible and desirable" and confused the technology in the movie with the book on which is was based.
Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
291–300 of 379 posts
Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s an inherent dichotomy in UI in that the most “efficient” interfaces generally have the steepest learning curve. You can be really efficient in a terminal or VIM. But figuring those out take a lot of work. When we design interfaces we try to make them have a short learning curve but expose greater ability as you use them but it’s still hard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve > The familiar expression "a steep learning curve" is intended to mean that the activity is difficult to learn, although a learning curve with a steep start actually represents rapid progress.
Well, progress along the Y axis is only achieved if progress is made on the X axis too. If the curve is too steep, the user is expected to learn too much too quickly, and many will simply give up.
Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
#293I had sort of an "aha" moment reading a non-technical co-workers conversation on Slack the other day. Someone built a Slackbot to show the menu for whatever food truck is outside our building that day, and people could use it just by typing "/foodtruck". They were blown away and loved it. Rather than opening a browser and navigating some disparate menu pages, they could simply fire off a command in their "console". I…
Ding, ding, ding!!! I've been beating this drum for a few years now. The interesting thing about chat bots is the UI not natural language processing. I think people are completely overwhelmed by the massive lack of consistent UI the Web has brought us. I also think the more "apps" that could be brought into platforms like Telegram, the happier users would be. There's also evidence of this in China where 100's of mill…
I realize it’s called “WeChat”, but isn’t it super popular because all of the mini UI-driven apps inside of it?
I don’t get the impression that people really talking to bots much using that app. They’re either chatting with humans or interacting with UIs.
Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ... I cannot actually find good details on who runs any given IRC network. I have no idea what I'm dealing with or how they're using my data. I have no legal recourse if I do discover bad behavior... Ah, the good old days of the Internet. You make me so nostalgic.
Back when I was a kid this sounded romantic. Now I just know it means that folks spy on me for fun.
As opposed to the non-anonymous internet?
Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
#295I wrote a comment under a different post just a few days ago. My comment got _way_ out of hand and wasn't as articulate as I had hoped. But the salient point I made with it is simple and applies equally well to this article. UI is hard. User interfaces seems really simple. Every programmer I know has looked at a UI and thought to themselves "I can code that in an hour!" and then ended up spending weeks, sometimes _mo…
>UI is hard
How many people are actually putting effort into their UIs? How many people do usability tests? I know Microsoft has done them before, but what about Slack? There are a lot of complaints here about their UI. I'm sure not many free software projects do usability tests.
You can't just slap things together and hope for the best, you need to have tests, and you need to run the tests again when you make changes. We've already learned this with the software itself.
I've been reading "Designing User Interfaces for Software" by Joseph Dumas from 1988. It enumerates common usability issues at the time, but many of them are still common. Inscrutable error messages, inconsistent terminology, unexpected interactions, the list goes on. These are solvable problems by they require a departure from "worse is better".
I'm not sure that UI is hard, it seems like it just requires effort to be put forth.
Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
#296I agree with the article in that designers can be too focused on the shiny and non-functional aspects of interfaces.
Personally I would treat design as being purely about function and anything superficial is about aesthetics.
But I think the author is throwing the baby out with the bathwater by wanting to restrict all animations. Fast, subtle animations, especially in the form of transitions between states/screens are extremely important for keeping the user informed about where they are in the context of the system.
Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the rediscovery of mIRC like interaction workflows.
IRC... But yes, Slack is basically IRC with a built in bouncer. And i case people wonder, a bouncer or BNC, was a personal proxy that would be running on some server somewhere, and that maintained a presence on the IRC networks for you when you logged off. And when you logged back on, you got a log of all the traffic on the relevant channels and direct messages while you were gone.
Yes. This is why slack has been more successful than irc.
Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
#298Yes! I am so glad somebody called out the UI animations! The one in 1Password bugs me every time, I don't use Spaces because it takes too long for the animations to play out. There are more examples. Every time a programmer adds an animation, a settings option should also be added to "disable animations". Advanced users will love you for it!
I'm confused. By Spaces animation, are we talking about the horizontal sliding transition? On my machine (High Sierra) the transition time between Spaces is dependent on the finger gesture swipe velocity. I'm not really sure I would even call this an animation- the Spaces x-offset is being adjusted as I move my fingers along the track pad in the same way as scrolling up/down in a browser behaves. There's literally no…
Incidentally, I am on Xubuntu, and I would love to have the workspace switching transition that macOS has. Switching workspaces on xfce is lightning-fast but I would love to have an indication on whether I moved left or right. (other than the small indicator in a Panel) Ubuntu solves this with a HUD (or at least did with Unity).
Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
#299I agree with the article in that designers can be too focused on the shiny and non-functional aspects of interfaces. Personally I would treat design as being purely about function and anything superficial is about aesthetics . But I think the author is throwing the baby out with the bathwater by wanting to restrict all animations. Fast, subtle animations, especially in the form of transitions between states/screens a…
I also think animations are not what’s making slack take so long to load.
I don’t think it would load any faster without the animations.
Re: Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s great for someone watching over your sholder eg if you’re doing a product demo but less good if you’re on your own. There it just slows you down when you want to move on to the next task.
I gave reasons why it could help the user themselves. (Here's another: for users learning Vim) And why should it necessarily make things slower? The animation could be quite fast, and I don't see why such animations would necessarily need to block or hold up future inputs or animations. (I do think, though, that you'd need to actually try it out to see if it works in practice)
I think they'd be great for new users but we'd need to be able to turn them off. No matter how fast and intuitive an animation is it's never going to be as fast as no animation.