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Fantasy UI

pushing-pixels.org

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Re: Fantasy UI

#51

Post by protomyth »

pc86 wrote: post #49
_trampeltier wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, most todays UI is not really great. On websites you often can't navigate just with the keyboard and shortcuts does not work at all. An a really terrible new UI thing are these on / off sliders. So often is not clear where the slider is, because it's not clear if the slider or the background is colored. Also a lot of new software comes with shortcuts, but you would need 3 hands to push all buttons for it. Also for…

Saying "I can't navigate a website just using my keyboard" is sort of like saying "I can't drive my car just using the steering." Well, of course you can't. You're not supposed to be able to, unless you have some sort of assistance hardware/software loaded that articulates/emulates the missing control(s).

I'm a little confused how a person can play a 3D video game with just a keyboard, but a website is beyond control? I don't think a car is a good comparison as it is in 3D space unlike a website.

Re: Fantasy UI

#53

Post by rmac »

tgv wrote: post #13
krm01 wrote: post #10

As a UI/UX agency that focusses on B2B SaaS, I’ve always found Fantasy UIs fascinating. It’s the complete opposite of the simple & clean interfaces clients ask us to design. I’ve spent some time thinking about why these Fantasy UIs are so fascinating despite the fact they seem not very user friendly. My conclusion was that fantasy Interfaces are very much like the early web. Lots of moving parts (dancing banana gifs)…

One thing that strikes me is that these interfaces are incredibly specialized for the task at hand, and only that. You can't build for every task, you'd need a super-intelligent system that knows how to figure out what the task is and generate the appropriate UI for it.

This is why most b2b tools have boring interfaces: they don't know what the task is, so they generalize and build yet-another interface on-top of SQL. See splunk, looker, G Analytics, Stripe, Shopify, etc.

Is it possible to somehow let the end user design a ui/ux that works for them?

Re: Fantasy UI

#55

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

pc86 wrote: post #49
_trampeltier wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, most todays UI is not really great. On websites you often can't navigate just with the keyboard and shortcuts does not work at all. An a really terrible new UI thing are these on / off sliders. So often is not clear where the slider is, because it's not clear if the slider or the background is colored. Also a lot of new software comes with shortcuts, but you would need 3 hands to push all buttons for it. Also for…

Saying "I can't navigate a website just using my keyboard" is sort of like saying "I can't drive my car just using the steering." Well, of course you can't. You're not supposed to be able to, unless you have some sort of assistance hardware/software loaded that articulates/emulates the missing control(s).

From the very beginning, the web was multimodal. Why can't you navigate it with just a keyboard?

Re: Fantasy UI

#56

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

tgv wrote: post #13
krm01 wrote: post #10

As a UI/UX agency that focusses on B2B SaaS, I’ve always found Fantasy UIs fascinating. It’s the complete opposite of the simple & clean interfaces clients ask us to design. I’ve spent some time thinking about why these Fantasy UIs are so fascinating despite the fact they seem not very user friendly. My conclusion was that fantasy Interfaces are very much like the early web. Lots of moving parts (dancing banana gifs)…

One thing that strikes me is that these interfaces are incredibly specialized for the task at hand, and only that. You can't build for every task, you'd need a super-intelligent system that knows how to figure out what the task is and generate the appropriate UI for it.

Alternatively, make the UI malleable enough that the user can conform it to their usecase. A lot of applications used to try and allow that sort of thing, but the trend for the past 15 years or so has sadly been exactly the opposite. Case in point: bespoke "dark mode" has replaced the near-complete control over colors and fonts we had in the 90s. Instead of customizable toolbars and re-arrangeable MDIs with sub windows everything is a fucking electron app with giant shiny buttons for mobile users regardless of the platform it runs on or even if mobile use is suited to the tool.

Re: Fantasy UI

#57

Post by _trampeltier »

pc86 wrote: post #49
_trampeltier wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, most todays UI is not really great. On websites you often can't navigate just with the keyboard and shortcuts does not work at all. An a really terrible new UI thing are these on / off sliders. So often is not clear where the slider is, because it's not clear if the slider or the background is colored. Also a lot of new software comes with shortcuts, but you would need 3 hands to push all buttons for it. Also for…

Saying "I can't navigate a website just using my keyboard" is sort of like saying "I can't drive my car just using the steering." Well, of course you can't. You're not supposed to be able to, unless you have some sort of assistance hardware/software loaded that articulates/emulates the missing control(s).

Just when is a thread about VT terminals also an HN front now, have you ever seen how fast people could navigate on those terminals 20, 30 years ago. No website can do the same thing today, no mater how much CPU power you have.

Re: Fantasy UI

#58

Post by neilalexander »

If you haven’t seen them, look at the Microsoft Future Vision concepts for some quite interesting ideas:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-tFdreZB94

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0

To me, what makes these fantasy UIs compelling is that they are usually extremely context-aware and content-aware. We haven’t quite worked out how to make real world computers work that way yet.

We’re still very much tied to paradigms that are ultimately easier for the computer (apps, windows, menus, files) as opposed to things that are natural to humans. If I have one hope for ML, it’s that hopefully it will bring some context-awareness to computing so that the content becomes the user interface.

Re: Fantasy UI

#59

Post by Chris_Newton »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #38

My fantasy UI would be a sort of large flat desktop plane, with ~infinite zoom. FVWM and other do have the one large desktop space that you scroll around, instead of discrete virtual desktops, but I want to see the ultimate version of that. A vast virtual plane that you could scroll and zoom around, drag your files/content around, make groups with marked delineations like a map. Obviously there would be some kind of…

An interesting theme in UI this year has been what types of tools for remote collaboration have become popular as more people have been working from home. Several of the ones I’ve seen are indeed based on a sort of infinite canvas/desktop/whiteboard concept.

Apparently those businesses are doing OK providing that kind of SaaS, even though the things you can actually do on their boards might be much simpler than what full-power desktop software or more specialised SaaS can offer. And this does make sense: once you can put basic text and basic drawing in some sort of freeform layout and share that display with others remotely, you already have a useful collaboration tool.

Providing built-in support for more sophisticated visuals like tables or specific types of diagram might make things more efficient, as could making good use of shortcut icons, gestures, hotkeys and so on. However, these are incremental improvements. They might bring big improvements in productivity in some cases, but they’re still helping to solve the same fundamental problem in the same fundamental way.

So it seems that at least some developers are already experimenting with the concept you’re suggesting, if only in a relatively simple form so far.

Re: Fantasy UI

#60

Post by cmiller1 »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #38

My fantasy UI would be a sort of large flat desktop plane, with ~infinite zoom. FVWM and other do have the one large desktop space that you scroll around, instead of discrete virtual desktops, but I want to see the ultimate version of that. A vast virtual plane that you could scroll and zoom around, drag your files/content around, make groups with marked delineations like a map. Obviously there would be some kind of…

Your fantasy UI actually sounds very much like what Jef Raskin envisioned in his book The Humane Interface
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