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I remember the days when CLIs had a HELP command built in and accurate enough. Oh and when people read instruction manuals. A decent manual beats a "discoverab

I remember the days when CLIs had a HELP command built in and accurate enough. Oh and when people read instruction manuals. A decent manual beats a "discoverable" GUI almost always.

xg15 8y ago
> Oh and when people read instruction manuals. A decent manual beats a "discoverable" GUI almost always. Sorry, but nope. You can rant about GUIs all you want, but UX research did yield a lot of actual insights about how people interact with systems and learn usage. From a learning standpoint, RTFM is enormously inefficient and error-prone. You can learn about usage of an application a lot faster if you can use existing knowledge (e.g., leveraging standard UI widgets or menu items) and if the application gives you feedback loops, so you can evaluate what a command did or will do (ideally before it does anything consequential)
- oblio 8y ago
  What do you mean by that? Didn't you also learn about balls by someone giving a 100 page dissertation into spheroids? After all, all the info you needed was in there!
  - PurpleRamen 8y ago
    I think most people couldn't read yet when they learned about balls. A better example would be games. Remember how thick the manuals were 20-30 years ago? Remember when you last time read a manual for a modern game?
    - oblio 8y ago
      I'm perfectly fine not having to read manuals for games...
- boomlinde 8y ago
  I don't think that this is a question with an absolute answer. Standard UI widgets and current design conventions aren't always great or even good ways to tackle the problem in terms of productivity and efficient use. For a complex productivity application that I'll use daily for a long time, learning the basics is always a relatively small initial hurdle whether it takes an hour or a week. It's much more important that its application of standard UI widgets doesn't get in the way of productivity later on when I am at a stage of learning where I can perform the basic operations from muscle memory. For such an application, say a music sequencer, 3D modelling software or CAD software, I'd much rather have a terse UI and a manual in a binder than standard UI widgets that are worse than specialized solutions that take into account every aspect of the problem.
johnalamos 8y ago
troll ?
chuckdries 8y ago
I don't think it's reasonable to expect the average computer user to go digging through man pages to figure out how to do literally everything they use a computer for. My mom relies on information and actionable instructions being presented in the context which it is used. I once discovered that she didn't know what a button did because there was a delay between pressing that button and the change it made, the delay was enough to break the cause and effect relationship in her mind. You and I have spent our entire lives training on, memorizing UX metaphors and computer patterns. We go into a problem knowing generally how we want to solve it, so we know what to look for when reading a man page. My mom methodically reads every option in the context menu when she right clicks on a file in an email before choosing save, because nothing is obvious and if she didn't have that she'd be writing down explicit, context sensitive, step-by-step instructions for how to save an attachment (I know because before I taught her to read the menus that's literally what she did)
- misnome 8y ago
  This is really a really good description of the problem. People use computers in ways that seem bizarre to us. Another e.g. I have lots of scientific colleagues (I don’t think any of our teams programmers) who still don’t know when to single click vs double click, OS vs Browser. All they know and care is that double click works almost everywhere.
- adventured 8y ago
  This can be made even more simple as a contrast. Hand an average consumer an iPad. Then hand them a laptop with no interface except for a command line. Watch what happens. We already know exactly what happens. The average consumer absolutely detests the CLI. The iPad GUI is so trivially easy to immediately learn to use that children in third world villages with zero formal education and zero knowledge of modern technology can instantly pick it up and begin using it without training.
  - chuckdries 8y ago
    and, importantly, they can still pick up the metaphors even if they don't understand english (or the language of preference) very well. MAN pages often require really really good language skills in the given language to understand.
izacus 8y ago
> I remember the days when CLIs had a HELP command built in and accurate enough. Oh and when people read instruction manuals. Those days never existed. Support stories of exasperated developers are in abundance from 1970s.

I remember the days when CLIs had a HELP command built in and accurate enough. Oh and when people read instruction manuals. A decent manual beats a "discoverable" GUI almost always.

xg15 8y ago

> Oh and when people read instruction manuals. A decent manual beats a "discoverable" GUI almost always. Sorry, but nope. You can rant about GUIs all you want, but UX research did yield a lot of actual insights about how people interact with systems and learn usage. From a learning standpoint, RTFM is enormously inefficient and error-prone. You can learn about usage of an application a lot faster if you can use existing knowledge (e.g., leveraging standard UI widgets or menu items) and if the application gives you feedback loops, so you can evaluate what a command did or will do (ideally before it does anything consequential)

oblio 8y ago
What do you mean by that? Didn't you also learn about balls by someone giving a 100 page dissertation into spheroids? After all, all the info you needed was in there!
- PurpleRamen 8y ago
  I think most people couldn't read yet when they learned about balls. A better example would be games. Remember how thick the manuals were 20-30 years ago? Remember when you last time read a manual for a modern game?
  - oblio 8y ago
    I'm perfectly fine not having to read manuals for games...
boomlinde 8y ago
I don't think that this is a question with an absolute answer. Standard UI widgets and current design conventions aren't always great or even good ways to tackle the problem in terms of productivity and efficient use. For a complex productivity application that I'll use daily for a long time, learning the basics is always a relatively small initial hurdle whether it takes an hour or a week. It's much more important that its application of standard UI widgets doesn't get in the way of productivity later on when I am at a stage of learning where I can perform the basic operations from muscle memory. For such an application, say a music sequencer, 3D modelling software or CAD software, I'd much rather have a terse UI and a manual in a binder than standard UI widgets that are worse than specialized solutions that take into account every aspect of the problem.

johnalamos 8y ago

troll ?

chuckdries 8y ago

I don't think it's reasonable to expect the average computer user to go digging through man pages to figure out how to do literally everything they use a computer for. My mom relies on information and actionable instructions being presented in the context which it is used. I once discovered that she didn't know what a button did because there was a delay between pressing that button and the change it made, the delay was enough to break the cause and effect relationship in her mind. You and I have spent our entire lives training on, memorizing UX metaphors and computer patterns. We go into a problem knowing generally how we want to solve it, so we know what to look for when reading a man page. My mom methodically reads every option in the context menu when she right clicks on a file in an email before choosing save, because nothing is obvious and if she didn't have that she'd be writing down explicit, context sensitive, step-by-step instructions for how to save an attachment (I know because before I taught her to read the menus that's literally what she did)

misnome 8y ago
This is really a really good description of the problem. People use computers in ways that seem bizarre to us. Another e.g. I have lots of scientific colleagues (I don’t think any of our teams programmers) who still don’t know when to single click vs double click, OS vs Browser. All they know and care is that double click works almost everywhere.
adventured 8y ago
This can be made even more simple as a contrast. Hand an average consumer an iPad. Then hand them a laptop with no interface except for a command line. Watch what happens. We already know exactly what happens. The average consumer absolutely detests the CLI. The iPad GUI is so trivially easy to immediately learn to use that children in third world villages with zero formal education and zero knowledge of modern technology can instantly pick it up and begin using it without training.
- chuckdries 8y ago
  and, importantly, they can still pick up the metaphors even if they don't understand english (or the language of preference) very well. MAN pages often require really really good language skills in the given language to understand.

izacus 8y ago

> I remember the days when CLIs had a HELP command built in and accurate enough. Oh and when people read instruction manuals. Those days never existed. Support stories of exasperated developers are in abundance from 1970s.