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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]

#91

Post by kvemkon »

fragmede wrote: post #59
sprash wrote: post #21

Unpopular take: Windows 95 was the peak of Desktop UX. GUI elements were easily distinguishable from content and there was 100% consistency down to the last little detail (e.g. right click always gave you a meaningful context menu). The innovations after that are tiny in comparison and more opinionated (things like macos making the taskbar obsolete with the introduction of Exposé).

Heh, the number of points you've probably gotten for that comment, I don't think that it's that unpopular. Win 98 was my jam but it looks hella dated today, but as you said, buttons were clearly marked, but also menus were navigatible via keyboard, soms support for themes and custom coloring, UIs were designable via a GUI builder in VB or Visual Studio using MFC which was very resource friendly compared to using Elec…

> buttons were clearly marked

Recently some UI ignored my action by clicking an entry in a list from drop down button. It turned out, this drop down button was additionally a normal button if you press it in the center. Awful.

> UI creation compared to MFC

Here I'd prefer Borland with (Pascal) Delphi / C++ Builder.

> relative resizable layout that's required today.

While it should be beneficial, the reality is awful. E.g. why is the URL input field on [1] so narrow? But if you shrinks the browser window width the text field becomes wide eventually! That's completely against expectations.

[1] https://web.archive.org/save

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

#92

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

jack_tripper wrote: post #75
linguae wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In the 80s and 90s there was much more idealism than now. There were also more low hanging fruit to develop software that makes people’s lives better. There was also less investor money floating around so it was more important to appeal to end users. To me it seems tech has devolved into a big money making scheme with only the minimum necessary actual technology and innovation.

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

#93

Post by albumen »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #63
immibis wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Phone UIs are still screen UIs, but they are not desktop UIs, and that's not because of the shape of the device.

Tell me how that’s not a phone and a desktop: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPtvpkSExfA/

That's not a phone and a desktop. I feel like I'm stating the obvious here; it's too big to be a phone, for any reasonable definition of 'phone'.

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

#94

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

xnx wrote: post #80
linguae wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. Interoperability is not cool anymore. You need to lock users in

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

#95

Post by porkbrain »

jhhh wrote: post #72

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 l…

Text selection used to be frustrating on mobile for me too until Google fixed it with OCR. I get to just hold a button briefly and then can immediately select an area of the screen to scan text from, with a consistent UX. Like a screenshot but for text.

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

#96

Post by mc32 »

jack_tripper wrote: post #75
linguae wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Things like hypertext, search, email and early social networks (chat networks connecting disparate people) and also the paperless office (finally). Images and video corrupted everything as they now became that which addicted eyeballs.

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

#98

Post by vortext »

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…

KDE? It has great performance, it's highly configurable, and it's been improving. Many people don't seem to like GNOME 3, but it has also been getting better, in my view. I agree Windows and macOS have been getting worse.

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

#100

Post by ChuckMcM »

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!

I think you did a great job of bringing fairly nuanced problems into perspective for a lot of people who take their interactions with their phone/computer/tablet for granted. That is a great skill!

I think an fertile area for investigation would also be 'task specific' interactions. In XDE[1], the thing that got Steve Jobs all excited, the interaction models are different if you're writing code, debugging code, or running an application. There are key things that always work the same way (cut/paste for example) but other things that change based on context.

And echoing some of the sentiment I've read here as well, consistency is a bigger win for the end user than form. By that I mean even a crappy UX is okay if it is consistent in how its crappy. Heard a great talk about Nintendo's design of the 'Mario world' games and how the secret sauce was that Mario physics are consistent, so as a game player if you knew how to use the game mechanics to do one thing, you can guess how to use them to do another thing you've not yet done. Similarly with UX, if the mechanics are consistent then they give you a stepping off point for doing a new thing you haven't done but using mechanics you are already familiar with.

[1] Xerox Development Environment -- This was the environment everyone at Xerox Business Systems used when working on the Xerox Star desktop publishing workstation.

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