Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity • Hacker News Board

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#321

Post by tripzilch » Sun, Jan 24, 2016, 3:04 PM UTC

lifeformed wrote: post #273

aikah wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is style of substance. The presentation,the design of the website is great, but the content feels like a bunch of random incoherent stuff put together with a catchy name. Yes the webpage is beautiful, there are nice animations, but that's it, there is nothing else. It's an nice portfolio though, but there is nothing to discuss when it comes to UX/UI itself.

How is it random incoherent stuff? Did you even watch the video? It seems pretty straightforward and refreshing.

There's nothing about UX design in the video either.

If he wants a job building marketing pages and videos for software, sure.

But if he wants a job as a UX designer, and I would go by the info on his sites, his design process consists of mockups and talking about it with his professors.

Seriously, if these are his skills, how the hell would he do UX design for an assignment when the target audience does not include himself?

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#322

Post by tripzilch » Sun, Jan 24, 2016, 3:29 PM UTC

ianstormtaylor wrote: post #121

GuiA wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work at a company where we hire people for exactly that kind of gig, with a heavy focus on building prototypes of your designs that are actually usable because that's the only viable way to design interfaces. Here's feedback as to why I'm not sending this website to my studio lead to schedule a phone screen with the designer: 1) reused assets from other companies (big no no, even for just a mockup) that are inconsi…

I don't believe your comment was intended to be constructive at all. It sounds much more like jealousy and looking for an excuse to tear down someone who's put in great effort. The concept and presentation of it are definitely impressive, especially for someone who's only 21 and still looking for internship-level work. He's easily in the top 5%, probably top 1% of designers, in terms of being able to see a complicate…

> I'd be surprised if he isn't able to land internships with any of the big tech companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, etc.) with this piece as part of a larger portfolio.

Sure, but perhaps I'd be more surprised if that internship had to do with UX/interaction design. Maybe marketing, or webdesign.

If I were to make a drawing of a house, even a detailed rendering, and made a website about why I would like such a house, why it would be a nice house, that wouldn't make me an architect.

Your point about the larger portfolio is an important one. Where is it? At 21 he must have been studying this field for 2 maybe 3 years?

The site does look very neat and well-polished. That is impressive, no matter what. Clear indicator of talent. Whether that talent is UX design (people keep talking about "design" in this thread, as if it's some general thing), he does not demonstrate: no tests, no design documents, no research. Except he does claim to have focused on research, yet no word about what this research entails, the process, how it went, what he found out.

So I'm going to say, he's got great talent, for marketing shiny things to the general public. And if you think about it, it makes a lot more sense that someone great at marketing reaches the top of HN, than someone great at UX design? ;-)

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#323

Post by tripzilch » Sun, Jan 24, 2016, 4:24 PM UTC

king_magic wrote: post #112

There are a few things I like in this (particularly the Finder bit), but so much of this is just a bunch of extraordinary statements with absolutely no universally-accepted justification, spoken as if they have some sort of universally accepted justification. For example, "Panels use screen space more efficiently and are a more elegant way to multitask than normal windows." Says who? You? It just drives me crazy when…

No, no, he's done research, right from the start. Says so right on the page titled "design process".

That's how he knows, I'm sure. He wouldn't just be making that stuff up out of thin air, and surely the "research" and "design process" did not exclusively consist out of the previous iterations of mockups we can see on that page.

Certainly he's also written the technical design document that describes a clearly outlined goal at the start, works that out referring to well-known theories, studies and previous research done in the field of UX design.

Obviously the statements about efficiency have been corroborated by hard numbers obtained from use cases, user studies--done on people other than himself or his professors--about discoverability, efficiency, employing user tasks and scripts (as described in the literature he must be familiar with). He's a student of interaction design on a university. So he must certainly know that research implies science and interaction design involves actual social studies and that building mockups, animations and a gorgeous website with demo video is only a tiny and not even that important part of the field.

Certainly it can't be that this guy is in fact quite talented at marketing and that's why he's currently at the top of HN.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#324

Post by tripzilch » Sun, Jan 24, 2016, 5:10 PM UTC

mattlutze wrote: post #204

Tags are really tough. Unstructured categorization comes with its own basket of issues -- some distinct from structured taxonomies, but not necessarily less tricky. A few thoughts there: 1. What happens when my mental schemas change in a year? The word I use to look something up changes, and I suddenly can no longer find it. 2. What happens when I get a little lazy in obediently tagging everything I create? Imagining…

Great points. I've thought about some of these.

Currently, Firefox's bookmarks is the main task where I use tags these days. Bookmarks so quickly become quite a mess! I really like tags for the ability to have both a mess, quickly add things without having to think too hard, and ultimately being able to find stuff of course.

I had a quick excursion using Chromium for a few weeks--does it even have tags in the bookmark db? They weren't picked up when I exported from Firefox. I went back to Firefox because Chromium's address bar doesn't quite search my bookmarks and history the way Firefox does and only displays the top five results or so. Not something I can depend on to be able to find something back.

I really want to get back to having a load of tags on my music collection. Used to have that in Amarok, but I lost the DB many years ago. So useful, for custom playlists, weird personal microgenres that make sense only to you, tagging tracks you almost certainly don't want to hear if you put some album into a larger playlist (Daft Punk - Touch :-P) etc.

Anyway. Your thoughts:

1. Yes. For that, I imagine a powerful and snappy interface to organize tagged stuff. A bit like those automated MP3 ID3v2 tagger tools, but a bit more general. Should allow for mass re-tagging operations like: add tag #newthing to all objects tagged #onething + #otherthing but not #notthisthing. With the title matching "* about things". Only for objects (created) older than 1 year (because my mental schema also changed the way I used the #otherthing tag).

That's only power-users I'm afraid. I have no idea how to solve this for regular users. Although I've seen motivated/determined "regular" users structuring years of digital photos with folder systems in ways that maybe they wouldn't shy from such a tool as long as it's intuitive to use.

2. This is a big shortcoming of Firefox's tagged bookmarks. Back when I used del.icio.us (also many years ago), there was a bookmarklet I could use to add a site to my del.icio.us bookmarks. The greatest thing about it was that it would predict/suggest tags for your bookmarks, I miss this so much. It did so in two visually distinct ways: First, predictions on your own bookmarks, afaik it was just a set of tags that you commonly used in conjunction with the one or two tags you've typed so far. Maybe it also matched keywords in the title and url. If I were to implement this I'd sort them by Bayesian P(#newtag|title-url-keywords-tags-typed-so-far). The second set of tags were suggestions based on what other del.icio.us users had tagged that url (less useful and less privacy).

3. I think you could have both? But most importantly, what helps me a lot to navigate and orient myself in this tagged mind-palace (nice analogy btw), is the ability to not just sort and slice your database by tags and combinations of tags, but to also just be able to browse everything sorted by time. I find this in the photo gallery on my phone, which is an utter mess, but if I really need to find something, I switch to by-date view (groups by month). Even if I don't exactly recall what month a photo was taken (or it could be a picture that I saved from Twitter, or maybe that someone sent me by IM), scrolling through I see pictures through time and usually I quickly get a familiar feeling "wait it was before then, and after ... yea .. when the thing .. ah! got it!".

It depends on how your memory works of course. But I imagine it would work because even though you can tag and re-tag and restructure your documents, the ordered slice of time-line of say 1.5yr ago hardly changes if at all.

4. Yes exactly. You might notice the "solutions" or ideas in the points above are all based in some way or another in this observation.

Re: Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

#325

Post by shkkmo » Tue, Jan 26, 2016, 8:01 PM UTC

falcolas wrote: post #306

shkkmo wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of discoverability extends to OSX's keyboard shortcuts as well. I completely changed how I work after I discovered 'Command Tab' and 'Command ~'

The discoverability is there, but not in the wild of the OS; it's in the Settings panel. Better yet, it's configurable (and powerful). Settings > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Keyboard Ditto that for the touchpad (including animated examples) Settings > Trackpad > ... Perhaps we as power users are just used to not having to visit these locations?

Those are actually precisely where I discovered a bunch of OSX's shortcuts. I think this was around the time I configured the two finger right click to make playing Minecraft without an external mouse feasible.