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Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

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Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#71

Post by silisili »

sprash wrote: post #54
whatever1 wrote: post #48

Desktop is dead. Gamers will move to consoles and Valve-like platforms. Rest of productivity is done on a single window browser anyway. Llms will accelerate this Coders are the only ones who still should be interested in desktop UX, but even in that segment many just need a terminal window.

It's not dead. It's being murdered. Microsoft, Apple, Gnome and KDE are making the experience worse with each update. Productive work becomes a chore. And the last thing we need is more experiments. We need more performance, responsiveness, consistency and less latency. Everything got worse on all 4 points for every desktop environment despite hardware getting faster by several orders of magnitude. This also means th…

I agree with this. I remember when Gnome 3 came out, there were a lot of legitimate complaints that were handwaved away by the developers as "doesn't work well on a mobile interface", despite Gnome having approximately zero install cases onto anything mobile. AFAICT that probably hasn't changed, all these years later.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#72

Post by jhhh »

I understand the desire to want to fix user pain points. There are plenty to choose from. I think the problem is that most of the UI changes don't seem to fix any particular issue I have. They are just different, and when some changes do create even more problems there's never any configuration to disable them. You're trying to create a perfect, coherent system for everyone absent the ability to configure it to our liking. He even mentioned how unpopular making things configurable is in the UI community.

A perfect pain point example was mentioned in the video: Text selection on mobile is trash. But each app seems to have different solutions, even from the same developer. Google Messages doesn't allow any text selection of content below an entire message. Some other apps have opted in to a 'smart' text select which when you select text will guess and randomly group select adjacent words. And lastly, some apps will only ever select a single word when you double tap which seemed to be the standard on mobile for a long time. All of this is inconsistent and often I'll want to do something like look up a word and realize oh I can't select the word at all (G message), or the system 'smartly' selected 4 words instead, or that it did what I want and actually just picked one word. Each application designer decided they wanted to make their own change and made the whole system fragmented and worse overall.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#73

Post by pegasus »

calmbonsai wrote: post #41
Hammershaft wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the other examples you gave are products constrained by physical reality with a small set of countable use-cases. I don't think computer operating systems are simply mature appliance-like products that have been optimized down their current design. I think there is a lot of potential that hasn't been realized because the very few players in the operating system space have been been hill-climbing towards a loca…

To be precise, we're talking about "Desktop Computers" and not the more generic "information appliances". For example, we're not remotely close to having a standardized "watch form-factor" appliance interface. Physical reality is always a constraint. In this case, keyboard+display+speaker+mouse+arms-length-proximity+stationary. If you add/remove/alter _any_ of those 6 constraints, then there's plenty of room for inno…

That's just the thing, desktops computers have always been in an important way the antithesis of a specialized appliance, a materialization of Turing's dream of the Universal Machine. It's only in recent years that this universality has come under threat, in the name of safety.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#74

Post by RedNifre »

analogpixel wrote: post #8

Why didn't Star Trek ever tackle the big issues, like them constantly updating the LCARS interface every few episodes to make it better, or having Geordi La Forge re-writing the warp core controllers in Rust?

Because the LCARS GUI is only for simple recurring tasks, so it's easy to find an optimal interface.

Complex tasks are done vibe coding style, like La Forge vibe video editing a recording to find an alien: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Faiu360W7Q

I do wonder if conversational interfaces will put an end to our GUI churn eventually...

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#75

Post by jack_tripper »

linguae wrote: post #61
gtowey wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because companies are no longer run by engineers. The MBAs and accountants are in charge and they could care less about making good products. At Microsoft, Satya Nadella has an engineering background, but it seems like he didn't spend much time as an engineer before getting an MBA and playing the management advancement game. Our industry isn't what it used to be and I'm not sure it ever could.

I feel a major shift happened in the 2010s. The tech industry became less about making the world a better place through technology, and more about how to best leverage power to make as much money as possible, making a world a better place be damned. This also came at a time when tech went from being considered a nerdy obsession to tech being a prestigious career choice much like how law and medicine are viewed. Tech…

>The tech industry became less about making the world a better place through technology

When the hell was even that?

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#76

Post by xnx »

GaryBluto wrote: post #70
xnx wrote: post #64

I felt rage baited when he crossed out Jakob Nielsen and promoted Ed Zitron ( https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQt=1852 ). Bad AI is not good UI, but objecting based on AI being "not ethically trained" and "burning the planet" aren't great reasons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ&t=1852s You're missing the ampersand. It's really strange how he spins off on this mini-rant about AI ethics towards the end. I clicked on a video about UI design.

Same. AI is absolutely the future of human computer interaction (exactly the article from Jakob Nielsen that he crossed out). Even the father of WIMP, Douglas Engelbart, thought it was flawed: ""Here's the language they're proposing: You point to something and grunt". AI finally gives us the chance to instruct computers as humans.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#78

Post by pjmlp »

scottjenson wrote: post #2

I've given dozens of talks, but this one seems to have struck a chord, as it's my most popular video in quite a while. It's got over 14k views in less than a day. I'm excited so many people are interested in desktop UX!

It was quite interesting.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#79

Post by rzerowan »

analogpixel wrote: post #8

Why didn't Star Trek ever tackle the big issues, like them constantly updating the LCARS interface every few episodes to make it better, or having Geordi La Forge re-writing the warp core controllers in Rust?

Mostly i believe its that the writers envisioned and were able to wrldbuildinsucha way that the tech was not a subject but was rather a part of the scenery/background with the main object being the people and their relationships. Additionally in some cases where alien tech was interfaced with the characters inthe storysome UI/code rewites were written in, for example in DS9 where the Cardassian interfaces/AI are frustrating to Chief O'Brien and his efforts to remedy/upgrade such gets a recurring role in the story.

Conversly recent versions have taken the view of foregrounding tech aidied with flashy CGI to handwave through a lot.Basically using it as a plot device when the writing is weak.

Re: Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

#80

Post by xnx »

linguae wrote: post #50
whatever1 wrote: post #48

Desktop is dead. Gamers will move to consoles and Valve-like platforms. Rest of productivity is done on a single window browser anyway. Llms will accelerate this Coders are the only ones who still should be interested in desktop UX, but even in that segment many just need a terminal window.

Is it dead because people don’t want the desktop, or is it dead because Big Tech won’t invest in the desktop beyond what’s necessary for their business? Whether intentional or not, it seems like the trend is increasingly locked-down devices running locked-down software, and I’m also disturbed by the prospect of Big Tech gobbling up hardware (see the RAM shortage, for example), making it unaffordable for regular peopl…

Desktop is all about collaboration and interaction with other apps. The ideal of every contemporary SaaS is that you can never download your "files" so you stay locked in.
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