Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why isn't People-Centric UI Design taking off?

hanselman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 78 posts

Re: Why isn't People-Centric UI Design taking off?

#61

Post by shanselman »

mbreese wrote: post #47
PeterWhittaker wrote: post #44

click a picture of your friend and then contact them in any possible way using any enlisted app from there Absolutely not! Not to scream and shout, but absolutely NOT! I have contacts who are both friends and coworkers or business partners or customers. I do NOT want to get in touch with them with "any app at all", I want the app that supports the workflow or information sharing pertinent to the context at hand. For…

I don't think that he meant that the computer would use any way possible to contact the person, but rather that you'd be presented with the option to contact the person with any known/configured method. I'm not saying that I like that method, but I don't think that it would be an automatic thing.

Exactly. I show this flow in the Screenshots. I see a merged view of one individual and it says "text fred" or "skype fred" or "tweet fred." Clean. Any app can enlist with their verb.

Re: Why isn't People-Centric UI Design taking off?

#62

Post by shanselman »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #50

Because the UI community has not yet found the perfect universal way to represent people, and it probably never will. I've often imagined how great it would be if operating systems were a little more opinionated about how data is represented, and how data and tools interact. Wouldn't it be great if every photo on your computer had the same rich capabilities? Wouldn't it be nice to be able to text your friend right fr…

Faces?

Re: Why isn't People-Centric UI Design taking off?

#66

Post by zainny »

msutherl wrote: post #35
bcoates wrote: post #6

Communication tools that people use heavily enough to care about acquire a context beyond just "Who I can communicate with". As the recipient, for the majority of my routine communications I get information from medium > sender > content, even though all ways of reaching me just make my phone jingle. The series of decisions that results in me calling someone is so radically different than the one that results in IMin…

I see no reason that the OS can't support both flows.

Which, incidentally, Android does.

Re: Why isn't People-Centric UI Design taking off?

#67

Post by userbinator »

Crito wrote: post #36
VLM wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add yourself as a people in the people centered UI. We've already had "My Documents" "My music" "My videos" "My pr0n" and similar such default directories in new OS installs for some time. Just kidding about the fourth one? I would imagine you'd have under Person "25cf" an option for dropbox, ebook, etc. In fact for shared stuff this could be kind of cool, click on my wife and here's our shared dropbox folder (well a…

I assume the "My" stuff is a useless relic from the pre-NT days. "My music" ? Of course it is mine, who's else's could it possibly be?

Well... the lawyers want you to think it's not really yours, it's the copyright holder's...

Ditto for "My Computer", "My Documents", etc. I think Vista was the first to get rid of the "My" prefix - and whatever reason they give for it, I still think they want to slowly separate users from the idea that they own (and thus are in control) of their machines...

Re: Why isn't People-Centric UI Design taking off?

#68

Post by philsheard »

This is also a representation of where the power and profit sits within the industry. If apps were subservient to people in the UI, it would be trivial to replace them. However, successful businesses are built through preference over competitors. These businesses pay the wages of people who design systems and services that achieve this. The app stores continue to feed the platform makers and that's where we end up.
Post reply on HN