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Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces

• DannyB2 8y ago
  What is a console? Definition: Console: (verb) To comfort someone in a time of grief because they are forced to use the command line. Oh, wait. You thought console was a noun?
  • rhencke 8y ago
    It is a noun as well. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/console https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/console Specifically: 3b. a combination of readouts or displays and an input device (such as a keyboard or switches) by which an operator can monitor and interact with a system (such as a computer or dubber)
• lxe 8y ago
  Last year's discussion when it was posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13733777 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13733777
• juancampa 8y ago
  > We need a reboot. We need toolkits that produce interfaces that are fast, consistent, bug free, and composable by default I would add to this list "programmable" so that automation is possible without being too disconnected from the GUI. Imagine clicking on an element in the page and being able to see (and use) the API behind it. This is one of the premises behind our project (shameless plug alert: https://membrane.io https://membrane.io) "Bug free" though...
• analog31 8y ago
  >>> These powerful devices should be propelling our workflows forward with us gangly humans left barely able to keep up, and yet, almost without exception we wait for our computers instead of the other way around. We’re conditioned ourselves to think that waiting 30+ seconds for an app to load, or interrupting our workflow to watch a half second animations a thousand times a day, are perfectly normal. In addition, the GUI has conditioned us to think that in order to make a computer do work for us, we have to perform precise manual labor to guide it through a lengthy series of tiny discrete steps. "I have seen the computer, and he is us." In addition to making those steps quicker, we should also be thinking about how to eliminate them altogether by having the computer understand natural language.
  • makecheck 8y ago
    This extends to how people think about teaching others about computers. I would get so frustrated with E-mails that consisted of about 9 “steps” to walk through when using a WEB site, instead of posting a direct link to the final target! The progress animations are out of control too. Every time I see one, I imagine the engineering hours it took to animate and wondered if they could have just spent hours optimizing the code instead. The weirdest thing about a lot of progress indicators is that developers don’t even get the point: your indicator has to be in sync with the activity! It has to give meaningful updates, it can’t just be a background animation that looks alive even when the server has died and isn’t coming back.
    • analog31 8y ago
      Indeed, I've seen installation instructions that come with hardware accessories or software, where it's page after page with pictures of dialogs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one. And they don't apply to your version of the OS. The instructions for installing the same thing on Linux is just a series of commands that you copy and paste into your console.
  • krylon 8y ago
    On the one hand, a voice interface would be really great. Think of a car - you could control things (open/close the windows, turn the AC on/off, change the radio station, ...) just by talking without ever taking your eyes off the road. This might actually prevent a few accidents.[0] On the other hand, imagine the office where I work, one room, four people, and imagine them talking to their computers instead of typing or mouse clicking. [0] I have no idea how many accidents are caused by drivers looking at their radio, AC control, whatever. I am conviced the number is greater than zero, but I suspect it is only small fraction of the overall number of traffic accidents. But still.
• jwr 8y ago
  Yes! I am so glad somebody called out the UI animations! The one in 1Password bugs me every time, I don't use Spaces because it takes too long for the animations to play out. There are more examples. Every time a programmer adds an animation, a settings option should also be added to "disable animations". Advanced users will love you for it!
  • jasonkostempski 8y ago
    I have a Wells Fargo auto loan. Their site is separate from the main Wells Fargo site. They have no animations (not even spinners) and basic web forms. The site feels so fast compared to other sites it's jarring. I often feel the need to double check that what I just did actually got applied because it feels like someone is presenting a mock UI demo with static images.
  • eridius 8y ago
    It would not surprise me in the least if the 1Password unlock animation is a deliberate attempt to hide the time it takes 1Password to decrypt your password list.
    • juancampa 8y ago
      Stating that they are decrypting (and it takes time) would probably change users' opinion from "this is slow" to "this is secure"
    • npunt 8y ago
      I seem to recall reading this when I investigated before. Article is shooting the messenger in a way, the animation is not the problem. Agilebits (the co who makes 1password) generally aren't the types to introduce superfluous elements.
    • kenneth 8y ago
      It's not the decryption process that is slow (computers can do AES really really fast these days), it's the deliberate slowness introduced by PBKDF2, which attempts to thwart brute force attacks.
  • 8y ago
• justamus 8y ago
  I absolutely agree that aesthetics shouldn't come at the expense of efficiency, but I don't think it's practical to expect every user to be a power user. There are some products and programs, like the Adobe Suite and a bunch of terminal programs, that are marketed for and should be designed with power users in mind. But I'd say the majority of programs we use every day aren't designed with professionals in mind - they're designed for a standard computer user. And having something that "just works" rather than something that is tailored for a power user is absolutely valuable to the billions of people out there that aren't going to be power users. Slack, like I'm thinking a lot of applications, falls in a middle ground where lots of users are power users, but many use it just a couple times a day, or less. It should be fast for those users, but those users shouldn't have to climb a steep learning curve to get value out of the product. An ideal interface would be easy for a newcomer and powerful for an experienced user, but that's a difficult challenge for a designer, and tradeoffs need to be made.
  • juancampa 8y ago
    In an ideal world everyone would get a UX specifically tailored to their expertise level. Software must be a LOT cheaper to build for this to ever happen though.
  • unwabuisi 8y ago
    Yes, I agree here and you would not be losing much with the added effort. power users are already more likely to dig into most software/s and tweak settings so it is a win-win
• GlenTheMachine 8y ago
  <Slow clap> I'm switching away from macOS to Linux with the i3 window manager for precisely this reason. But all of his criticisms of terminals are spot on: no multimedia, no support for anything other than monospaced fonts, etc. Lord, somebody give me a terminal program that produces laid-out text and can show inline video.
  • swiley 8y ago
    If you use mlterm (and supposedly xterm with the right compile flags) you can have inline pixelmaps via DEC -regis- sixel escapes.
    • digi_owl 8y ago
      Actually i think REGIS is for vector graphics, SIXEL (six pixels pr character) is the pixel graphics. I seem to recall that at least one terminal browser can pull some tricks to insert images into the window in X as well.
      • swiley 8y ago
        Oops, you're right. The browser you're thinking of is w3m.
    • stevefolta 8y ago
      mlterm also works great with non-monospaced fonts (but doesn't, to my knowledge, have a way to switch between fonts within terminal output, which seems to be what the OP wants).
  • tjr225 8y ago
    I've always wondered what a tiling window manager provides over tmux. This isn't a rhetorical question, I've never used a tiling window manager. Anyway, a separate space with full-screened iterm2 + tmux on macos is my preferred way to work. I can swipe left to check slack, browser and then swipe right to go back to my terminal.
    • 8y ago
• micheljansen 8y ago
  I recently got gifted an old Commodore PET. It boots straight into BASIC, so anything you type can be a command or a program, but what’s even cooler is the way the console (they call it “monitor”) works. If you press “up”, rather than scrolling through past commands one by one like in Bash, DOS etc. the cursor simply goes up the screen. You can modify anything you see and hit return to commit. This can be a previous command, a line of code or even the contents of the system’s memory (!). It’s a really interesting form of direct manipulation that I have only ever seen matched by “document” style interfaces like Matlab, R etc. If anyone is interested, I’ll do a write up later with some videos or something.
  • GlenTheMachine 8y ago
    IIRC all Commodore machines did this. The C64 did. That's how you edited a program: you LIST'ed it, and then scrolled up and changed the lines on the screen. When you hit ENTER the new line overwrote the original one. The C64 did not have any way to directly show or edit system memory, though. That's cool.
    • dsnuh 8y ago
      Are you forgetting about POKE and PEEK?
      • GlenTheMachine 8y ago
        No. But an actual monitor was a much easier way to directly access system memory.
    • micheljansen 8y ago
      The C64 was indeed one of the only Commodore machines that did not ship with a Machine Language Monitor. You could however install one: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Machine_Code_Monitor https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Machine_Code_Monitor
      • GlenTheMachine 8y ago
• rini17 8y ago
  Happy KDE Plasma user here(with KDEPIM/KMail too), on 10y old AthlonII desktop with 5y old GPU. All GUI animations are configured to my taste, inobtrusive and smooth, on 4K monitor.
• KirinDave 8y ago
  So to sum up, Terminals Are So Responsive & Fast Users Always Feel It [1]. Animations are bad because they take too long but add no value [2], and terminals render non-english characters super well [3]. I've been researching for a bit, and actually research on how to make a "good" and "accessible" terminal interface is pretty thin on the ground. You can find a lot of opinions but very few with any data backing them. [1]: They're not. https://danluu.com/term-latency/ https://danluu.com/term-latency/ [2]: They do add value in helping direct user attention. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/animation-usability/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/animation-usability/ [3]: Right-to-left is still poorly supported by shells, and the installation and support process for custom glyphs in terminals is often extremely complicated.
  • rconti 8y ago
    What does "accessible" mean? Screen readers sure work better on text than on GUI elements, for one.
    • madeofpalk 8y ago
      How do screen readers work with curses interfaces? Genuinely curious.
      • KirinDave 8y ago
        Generally you fool them into spitting raw text and carefully crafted menu summaries into a socket that speaks text at high speed.
      • mwcampbell 8y ago
        Poorly, IMO. This became clear to me when I had to talk a blind Windows user through installing Red Hat Linux with the Speakup screen reader in early 2001, using Red Hat's text-mode installer. That was when I realized that Windows had actually become more usable with a screen reader than screen-oriented text-mode UIs in a terminal.
        • 8y ago
• antome 8y ago
  The first thing I do when I get a new Android phone, or update the OS, is disable all animations. As a consequence, my Nexus 5X is in some respects more responsive than many flagship phones today. Sometimes animation can feel nice, but after using a piece of software more than a few times, I'm much more interested in responsiveness.
• transfire 8y ago
  Yes.
• arg84 8y ago
  Ironic that the author uses up 2/3 of valuable screen space for the title of the article when a much smaller size would have sufficed. It took me extra time to scroll down to the main content. This just goes to show that aesthetics have more value than perhaps the author is conscious of.
  • juancampa 8y ago
    An article, something you use once, is different from an application, which you use continuously for long periods of time
    • arg84 8y ago
      Following that logic would mean that the more time we spend interacting with the medium the less important aesthetics/gestalt is, and that the medium should instead be focused solely on function. I think one thing the low level tech focused individual can sometimes overlook is that it is humans interacting with these interfaces, and humans are varied, and as such interfaces need to incorporate many different methods of engaging the user.
      • juancampa 8y ago
        Aesthetics are always welcome as long as they don't compromise usability. What I've noticed is that the more you look at something, the more normal it tends to look, regardless of whether initially you thought it was beautiful or ugly. Not sure why it happens but aesthetics stop being as important as time passes.
        • arg84 8y ago
          I agree. I just think we shouldn't be too quick to write off things that seem frivolous or maybe slow down the power user. For example a fade animation may seem like it's wasting time, but used properly it creates a visually pleasing transition, while at the same time possibly allowing for work to be done in the background while the UI would be otherwise unresponsive. However, I have also seen this abused as well. I think it's best that we continue to call it into question like this article does, but also try and stay balanced and not ignore some of the other considerations.
• kayoone 8y ago
  I think you can get pretty close by investing a lot of time into configuring your perfect linux desktop, but hardly anyone is willing to do that as OSX or even Windows is good enough for most people.
• bichiliad 8y ago
  I think this article points out some very valid problems (I relate a lot with Slack's loading, OSX spaces taking too long to switch between, etc), but the conclusions may be a little misguided. To address specific examples first: 1. Slack is slow to start, and, as others have pointed out, uses animations to remind the user that it's working and not just frozen. The fix here is to improve the application's performance, but there will never be 0 network lag. 2. Animations are good here so that you remain spatially aware of a "space" relative to other spaces. I agree that the animations are too long, and I myself have shortened their duration. My biggest disagreement is with this quote: "We should stop babying our users and try to raise beginners and the less technical to the bar of modern day power users rather than produce software that’s designed for the lowest common denominator." I think the best software is intuitive to use for novices, yet leaves room for people to improve. I'm learning how to use OSX's Logic right now, and I've been really happy with the amount of guidance it gives me. There are options to expose advanced controls, and there are a fleet of really convenient shortcuts, but I have no problem getting around.
  • mbreese 8y ago
    I think another example of this would be using something like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. Switching between tools can be accomplished by clicking an icon, a drop down, or some other GUI element. However, once you get to a certain level of skill, it becomes faster to just use the keyboard shortcuts. For a novice, it's more forgiving. But for the expert, it's possible to be very efficient. It's also possible to go too far the other way too. Not to date myself too much, but an old example of too much "expert" levels was back in the DOS days with Word Perfect. Keyboard shortcuts were the only way to do things (like formatting). So you either learned the magic codes (with three extra/meta operations per code) or you kept a cheat sheet on the keyboard itself. That was a learning curve to get to 'power-user' status.
    • ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
      I still use cheat sheets, but I design my own into wallpapers that fit my desktop perfectly, than have them rotating randomly every hour. Keeps my refreshed on shortcuts in my popularly used programs, and adding a new one to the rotation is a great way to learn all the shortcuts for a new program. It's not like I ever leave my desktop visible for a pretty wallpaper to matter. My nice ones are on my lock screen.
• fhood 8y ago
  "UIs that are pretty and friendly are nice to have, but the true values of a good interface should be speed and efficiency to make their users as productive as possible." Nonononononono! Both. I want both. The biggest problem with terminal interfaces is that very little of the functionality is obvious from the outset.
  • amiga-workbench 8y ago
    Ease of use and utility/efficiency seem to exist on the opposite ends of a continuum. The more common "easy to use" software is designed to be up-front and intuitive but because of its nature it is hobbled from a maximum utility/efficiency standpoint. The interface usually relies on interaction modes that are severely limited in bandwidth (poking things with a pointer). And the stuff on the other end is designed to be as useful and efficient as possible, but because of this its functions aren't immediately obvious and it requires the user to actually read the manual instead of fumbling their way around the interface. Once you actually put the time and effort in and learn the program you will be working far faster with this than the friendlier software. There is one piece of software that comes to mind which seems to exist in a happy medium, the nano text editor can be extremely powerful once you learn the hotkeys but it meets you half way and gives you a heads up of all the main functions without you asking.
• LeoPanthera 8y ago
  On macOS, SysPrefs > Accessibility > Display > Reduce motion will disable some of the unnecessary animations. I don't know if third party apps can read this setting and also comply.
• ken 8y ago
  The animations serve a valuable purpose, though, especially for new users. They show what's happening. Lots of old UIs (like those running in VT100 emulators) had instant wipes from one view to another, but made it impossible to tell what had happened, or why. Even when I wish animation was faster (like with Spaces, sometimes), I rarely wish it didn't exist at all. I often have people watching me, and with animations they say "you're working fast!", while in environments with no animation (like Emacs), it's just "I have no idea what you did". I want computers to seem efficient, not unapproachably magic. What if animations started at a slightly slower speed, and gradually increased in speed the more you used them? We shouldn't need to pick one animation speed for all users, but we also shouldn't make expert users tweak it manually. And I definitely want to see full animations for new applications that I'm not familiar with yet, but not those in old applications which I've seen 1000 times.
  • dllthomas 8y ago
    I still think we should let expert users tweak it manually, but as a default I think that's a great idea!
  • westoncb 8y ago
    > What if animations started at a slightly slower speed, and gradually increased in speed the more you used them? That's an interesting idea. Or how about if the initiation of a new animated action forced already running animations to rapidly complete? Then if you're doing a bunch of things that trigger animations in rapid sequence, then they would all effectively just be running at higher speeds, in proportion to your specific speed of working.
  • daleco 8y ago
    A good animation should be barely perceptible. If it’s too slow, the application feels sluggish. Too fast, you may not know what happened. It reminds a UX talk from Airbnb, where they have this one guy that focus only on animations. It’s a good idea to provide the ability to skip the transition with the press of a button. It’s reminds me how one can skip the dialogues in video games.
    • 8y ago
• neeasade 8y ago
  Everything the author describes lacking in the end exists in emacs. Come on in, the water is fine.
  • yourapostasy 8y ago
    Are there Emacs-based terminal UI libraries? Looking at how insanely fast competent line staff are with terminal interfaces like in retail POS settings, I sometimes wonder if Emacs would be fast enough to keep up with them. If so, instead of using a browser as the base UI framework, would a terminal-screened Emacs (that is, in console mode or perhaps inside xterm, and not the graphical Emacsen) with an appropriate text UI library be feasible? It can't possibly be worth the effort unless the text UI in the code is the only presentation layer, I'd imagine. But if you have to go down that route, it might be faster and easier than rolling your own termcap-based text UI, especially with all the elisp goodness within. The only extensive text UI I knew of was Vermont Views' product, which has since disappeared off the Net and was closed source anyways. There are some open source libraries, but none with nearly the power that came with that closed source offering, and all still quite low level.
  • 0x445442 8y ago
    I love emacs but I just can't get the terminal/shell options it provides to work as smoothly as I can with a proper terminal emulator. What would be perfect is if you could duplicate a terminal buffer for stdout/stderr but have the command line/stdin be in the mini buffer so as to leverage helm or ivy. To me, this would be nirvana.
• alkonaut 8y ago
  I think it's probably easier to make a web app or desktop app as fast/bare/responsive/etc as an old terminal app, than it is to add good rendering of mixed fonts images etc into terminals. So what he's arguing for is simpler, faster traditional non-terminal apps. Because those are good.
• Posibyte 8y ago
  I get the idea, and I agree in general. However, I've always struggled with DE's like i3 because they were so barren with visual information up front. I respect the power they present, but I appreciate a nice balance. Animations, more than anything, just need to be paced appropriately. They help a lot in easing a user into a flow within an app. Slack for me does this perfectly. It doesn't feel kludgy, slow, nor does it feel like everything pops up in your face loud and obnoxiously. The interface and animations helped me feel like I was getting down a flow, and when I learned the hot keys and patterns, it felt like playing an instrument well.
• stevebmark 8y ago
  please, god no. i've watched so many "terminal gurus" painfully hold left or right keys to jump to editing text (I use vi mode, but it still sucks). i've watched them fumble with !! to do something they think is efficient, but really slows them down. i've watched them write unreadable buggy awk scripts over the course of hours that end up not getting the job done. terminals are a classic example of fundamentally bad design.
  • thestoicattack 8y ago
    I'm not understanding what awk has to do with your other points.
  • LyndsySimon 8y ago
    Could this be because people who are in the process of learning things like that are more apt to use them and show them off?
• cnasc 8y ago
  A related sort of idea, which has been posted to HN before but never gotten a huge amount of attention is the Arcan project [1]. Basically an interesting implementation of a display server and desktop environment being worked on by a lone dev as far as I know. Really impressive stuff, and in the author's own words: it is keyboard dominant, building a better and more efficient CLI than the flaccid terminal emulators of yore [1] https://arcan-fe.com/ https://arcan-fe.com/
  • crazyloglad 8y ago
    lone dev here, and thanks for noticing - so this is where the traffic came from :-) The lack of attention (and releases, not representative of the half a million lines of C code and about 100k of Lua it entail) is mostly by design - to a large extent, I prefer obscurity to the point that productivity dips and lethargy sets in around release bursts, it opens up old mental war wounds from academia (also - getting a ph.d wasn't worth it). The posts etc. so far is much in the terms of documentation, not dissemination or politics. Coming soon: "Arcan vs. Xorg - far beyond feature parity" and "The Divergent Desktop"; that will show how these things fit together. The latter expands a lot on some of the ideas in this article.
    • deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    • carapace 8y ago
      Well, it's pretty awesome. Good work.
    • cnasc 8y ago
      I think it's a fantastic project! Seems like a lot of what I want in a desktop. Looking forward to the new posts.
• hkon 8y ago
  I like animations. The blinking cursor for instance.
  • arg84 8y ago
    That's a great point of how animations communicate an idea to the user
• SteveJS 8y ago
  Visidata seems like an example of the kind of UI this author thinks would be better. http://visidata.org/ http://visidata.org/ A former coworker used this as his project while on sabbatical at the recurse center. It is mostly GPL v3, except for MIT license on the core UI. From the Visidata GitHub page: The innermost core file, vdtui.py, is a single-file stand-alone library that provides a solid framework for building text user interface apps. It is distributed under the MIT free software license, and freely available for inclusion in other projects.
• perishabledave 8y ago
  I wonder if the 1Password animation only seems egregious to me because I'm not the crowd that it'll add value to. I understand on some level what 1Password does when I enter in my password. If I were to get my parents to use 1Password however, the visual effect of the vault unlocking could help them understand what 1Password does. I think we may be too quick to judge these things within our own context rather than in the broad range of users which these user systems were designed for.
• skookumchuck 8y ago
  One of the failures of modern GUI design is exemplified by the calculator app on the iphone. It looks exactly like the old stand-alone desktop calculators. What could be wrong with that? Have you ever used a calculator, and wondered if you'd punched in the operands correctly? I have. And so I do the calculation again. With a scrolling terminal, you can see (and check) the operands on the previous line(s).
  • ytjohn 8y ago
    It's for macOS instead of iOS, but numi is a great scratchpad calcualtor. https://numi.io/ https://numi.io/ Never tried it, but Soulver looks like a good solution for iphone: https://acqualia.com/soulver/ https://acqualia.com/soulver/ and CalcNote on Android - just installed this and its' just like numi. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.burton999.notecal.pro&showAllReviews=true https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.burton999....
• ProfessorLayton 8y ago
  I highly disagree that the animations are superfluous for the vast majority of users. Yes, they can be superfluous, but that's not by their nature of existing. History shows us that consumers value good UX, of which animation is a key component. The iPhone wasn't the first smartphone, but it was the fist one to take UX as seriously as the hardware. As for the examples: - Slack: Yes, it takes forever to load and I hate that, the real problem is performance, not the animation. Would it be better if no animation happened and didn't inform the user about about what's going on? Keep in mind that the animation also serves to inform the user that it hasn't "frozen", so a still interstitial would be a regression. - Spaces: The animation tells the user what is going on! Having the entire screen change instantly would be confusing for the vast majority of users. I do value choice though, so perhaps there should be a setting for power users to disable/minimize them.
  • tonysdg 8y ago
    > Spaces: The animation tells the user what is going on! Having the entire screen change instantly would be confusing for the vast majority of users. That's an interesting point, and it makes me wonder if there's a level of nuance to be found here. For example, animations are acceptable iff they do not extend the time required to perceive the requested action. In other words, it's already going to take me some fraction of a second to perceive any change; animations within that fraction of a second are perfectly fine. Anything that extends the change past that fraction of a second, however, is eating into my productivity (or at least, so the author would claim).
    • nicoburns 8y ago
      When i upgraded my phone gro a nexus 5 to an S7 i was initially confused that my new (3 years newer, higher end) phone seemed sluggish compared to my old one. It turned out that I'd enabled an option to double animation on the old phone. Enabling the same option on the new phone made everything as fast as expected. That said, I really appteciate the (faster) animations. I wouldn't want to do a without them at all.
  • ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
• aphextron 8y ago
  I had sort of an "aha" moment reading a non-technical co-workers conversation on Slack the other day. Someone built a Slackbot to show the menu for whatever food truck is outside our building that day, and people could use it just by typing "/foodtruck". They were blown away and loved it. Rather than opening a browser and navigating some disparate menu pages, they could simply fire off a command in their "console". I realized that people love Slack because it has introduced them to the CLI paradigm of computing for the first time. CLI is so much more efficient and powerful if users can somehow be incentivized to put in the time and effort to become productive, which Slack has focused on a lot. As inefficient and silly as it may seem to us developers, Slack with it's endless command based integrations has succeed wildly at that where nothing else has so far.
  • ericpsimon 8y ago
    Has Slack innovated in the last 5 years?
    • j88439h84 8y ago
      I dunno. Do you think that's important? Why?
      • theelous3 8y ago
        Buggy mobile client (andriod) and dumpster tier performance are two areas they have been dropping the ball on since release, and requires innovation in some sense of the word. Those are both very important. Innovation is generally important and I'm half curious as to why you ask.
        • boomlinde 8y ago
          > Buggy mobile client (andriod) and dumpster tier performance are two areas they have been dropping the ball on since release, and requires innovation in some sense of the word. Making your program meet what really should be a minimum acceptable standard is considered innovation now? Multimedia chat clients that performed well and weren't crippled by bugs existed in the 90s. > Those are both very important. Innovation is generally important and I'm half curious as to why you ask. Has Slack's attraction ever been that it's an innovative product? My understanding is that it's all about convenience. It's like IRC+bouncer with some shiny things and without the hassle.
• TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  There are very few web apps where users need - or want - to do any kind of intelligent, complex text editing. Most web apps are virtual paper forms with pre-filled menu options and - usually - a bread crumb trail so users can change their choices and/or their minds. Animations are largely irrelevant to the user experience. The best way to speed up this kind of web app is to iterate over and over to find the sticking points empirically, and then nuke them from orbit. That means minimising the number of menus, making sure they have useful defaults, and spending extra time on problematic elements like date and time selectors. The user should type as little as possible and click as little as possible to get the job done. Beyond that, "productivity" does not apply as a concept. Users do not need composability or grep-like text manipulation options. It's also handy if a page looks good, because this makes an impression on many users and is one factor that can persuade them to come back. So no - I do not think there's anything of value in the OP, except perhaps as another example of "Developers want to turn everything into a emacs and a build system, because that makes them happy, even though it's 100% inappropriate for non-developers."
  • chj 8y ago
    I think the value of the OP is the proposal that we can have web-like "terminal" that accepts text commands. It's very unlikely that clicking is the best way for human to communicate with machines.
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    I disagree on several aspects. I do agree that "most web apps are virtual paper forms with pre-filled menu options (...)", but that doesn't mean they don't need productivity improvement. First of all, many people use those "forms" for work, not just casual browsing. It's one thing when you're putting up some old book you found on eBay, it's another when you have to manage hundreds of such auctions each day. Suddenly, the difference between old and new web design trends is measured in 10x increase of time spent on task. I know because I sometimes help my SO do her work tasks faster, and usually get 10x-100x speedup with clever application of web scraping, regular expressions and batch processing in command line. Another thing - people don't "fill in forms" in isolation. Each webapp being a productivity-hostile silo causes pain whenever a task involves more than one of them. Often, users do in fact need "composability or grep-like text manipulation options", they just don't get them, so they suffer (or delegate to a friendly programmer, who can force a webpage to have some semblance of interoperability, whether its authors want it or not). > So no - I do not think there's anything of value in the OP, except perhaps as another example of "Developers want to turn everything into a emacs and a build system, because that makes them happy, even though it's 100% inappropriate for non-developers." It's not that - though I do believe that Emacs presents a much better UI paradigm than the one accepted in the mainstream (due to flexibility, interoperability and consistency). It's just that present day software - web apps in particular - are ridiculously hostile to productivity. The perfect solution is not doing everything from CLI, but it's also not shiny, animated web UIs exposing as little functionality as possible while still being able to sell the product. Someone upthread mentioned the concept of threshold and ceiling. Emacs and CLI tools are high-threshold, high-ceiling. Webapps and mobile apps are low-threshold, low-ceiling. Perfection would be low-threshold, high-ceiling - that is, something accessible to beginners, but designed so that they can level up and become power users, if they need/want to.
• npunt 8y ago
  Agree with author that desktop UIs could be quite a bit better, and web tech gives devs enough rope to hang themselves with, which most do. Rest of the article sort of reads like a general annoyance with a grab bag of various apps and UIs tho. The most revealing part of the article is that the author states current UI philosophy is making things legible and intuitive, but that UIs should be about speed and efficiency. These aren't really either/or, good UI/UX should explore the frontiers of both, and pitting them against each other feels off. I think speed/efficiency are proxies for something deeper that the author is really getting at - many apps focus on approachability so much that they become superficial when they should be powerful. There are, however, approachable apps that are powerful. For example, Airtable is quite intuitive and approachable, but ultimately its a tool that helps users manage complexity, not avoid it. This class of tools is what we need more of, and I think the author is looking to fixing frameworks when deep down the problem is actually having better apps (e.g. this feels like category error). Also, the author is asking for a reboot, but has failed to look at the most important UI reboot in the last decade - iOS UIkit. A junior dev can make a passable app just by following iOS Human Interface Guidelines that is accessible, responsive, intuitive, etc. Personally, I like terminals for their show your work ledger aspect and the 'I know exactly what I want' factor, but just about everything else they're terrible at UI-wise. And in improving them, I'm not seeing anything in this piece that makes me think the same mistakes won't be repeated over again.
• 394549 8y ago
  I few months ago, I changed a developer-options configuration on my Android phone to increase the speed of the animations to the maximum. My phone felt so much more responsive, it was like I got a major processor upgrade. IMHO, two big curses in UX today are unnecessary animations and webfonts that render ugly when font smoothing is off.
• ChuckMcM 8y ago
  I don't think the 'terminal' model of UI gets enough attention. I don't know why that is, perhaps it is a feeling that it is the "old" way to do things and so not a source of good ideas. Xerox's XDE had a very nice terminal. It could use proportional fonts and you still had precisely formatted text for code. It was not as fast as a VT100 or an xterm which relied on monospaced fonts. But that was the root of the issue. Terminals conflate "formatting" and "content" in the worst way possible, there is content that "is" formatting (whitespace). This closely mimicked how typewriters did it but they did it that way not because it was "best" but because it was "possible" given the mechanics of building lines of type without a bunch of lead letters. It is insidious how that in band content/formatting mixing of ASCII and then later ISO-Latin-x drove compromises in editor and text manipulation tool design. But here we are. I wrote a pretty printer for come code once that pulled apart the format from the content and it would print out source code with a nice proportional font (I think a2ps(1) could do this too at some point) and I admit that the code "looks wrong" in that form but I also have to admit that it only looks wrong because I'm not used to seeing it in that form. It is harder to read when things like parenthesis fade into the text because they are so much thinner, but this is again the design vs eyeball sorts of trade-off. When I read this bit what I heard was "Gee, it would be really awesome if some designer could capture the flow of terminals with a modern set of capabilities." But that XDE terminal? Dave Curbow, who was with Xerox Business Systems, once tracked down how many function calls had to be made before the glyph ever hit the screen and it was a lot. It made it hard to run efficiently on the hardware of the time (great when you can code new microcode, less useful on CPUs without that capability).
• fpgaminer 8y ago
  I wrote a comment under a different post just a few days ago. My comment got _way_ out of hand and wasn't as articulate as I had hoped. But the salient point I made with it is simple and applies equally well to this article. UI is hard. User interfaces seems really simple. Every programmer I know has looked at a UI and thought to themselves "I can code that in an hour!" and then ended up spending weeks, sometimes _months_ building the UI. I believe UI is a big, unsolved problem in modern computer science. Just as hard as any other unsolved problem in our field. Right up there with general artificial intelligence and P=?NP. I'm not even joking. We will eventually solve the problem of UI. But there are a thousand and one articles posted every day either A) complaining about existing UI or B) telling everyone the solution (without providing real, concrete new libraries, frameworks, code, etc). No one wants to admit that this stuff is just plain hard and we shouldn't beat ourselves up over the fact that we haven't solved it yet. In other words, it's easy to complain. It's easy to display hubris. It's hard to put forth real, practical solutions. Or at least be humble and admit that we _don't_ have the solution.
  • Asooka 8y ago
    I think a simple data-display UI shouldn't be that hard to code. Every program you run has access to a terminal, which it can use to display and read text. It shouldn't be hard to extend that to displaying and reading structured data. One dream I have is to have a Desktop where each program can send an ioctl to stdout that turns it into a stripped-down browser, so it can then just dump XHTML data and have it be visualised on screen, while stdin feeds you json-serialized user input, e.g. user entered text X in input field Y, or selected file Z. It won't be useful for multimedia or anything like that, but will make building simple one-off UIs much easier.
    • sxates 8y ago
      The difficulty is not just in coding the UI, but crafting one that's easily and intuitively understood by users. We haven't yet established a universal design pattern for GUI's yet, to the parents point, just a bunch of conventions that are often tossed in favor of something new. A 'solved' UI example would be of a car (not the radio, but the operation of the vehicle). Learn to drive one car, and you can pretty much drive any car - same pedals, steering wheel, gear shift, turn signals, etc. I don't know if we'll ever get to something like that for software though.
• masswerk 8y ago
  The single point that I disagree on: > "Let’s dig into it by looking at the aspirational interface concept from a great movie: Minority Report. (…) I think we can all agree that the interface of this prospective future is incredible and desirable" I guess, this single scene of a movie has distracted interface development like no other vision. However, it's just a terrible interface: Working over prolonged stretches of time, gesturing with stretched out arms, would be simply impossible, you had to memorize a complex alphabet of gestures, which made the command set of Wordstar shrink in comparison, not to speak of the visual clutter and the (perceptual) bandwith required. – Please, let's stop speaking about Minority Report in this context. (It's a nice visual effect in a movie, but nothing to aspire to in terms of real life – just as is true for most movie FX scenes.)
  • masswerk 8y ago
    P.S.: If you're looking for inspiration by a movie, have a look at the status screens and their update process in 2001 – A Space Odyssey, which were grossly overlooked for other effects in this movie and didn't have much of a real life impact. (I guess, for the era they came from, the clarity and economy, these are just in line with the article.)
    • juancampa 8y ago
      Relevant: https://ilikeinterfaces.com/ https://ilikeinterfaces.com/
      • masswerk 8y ago
        Interestingly, while the site (which is great BTW – thanks for the link!) features all kind of minor UIs in 2001, the major status screens, which can bee seen in various places and scenes, are not covered in any way. (Again!)
        • MrEldritch 8y ago
          Even more relevant - the Sci-Fi Interfaces blog, which analyzes various science-fictional interfaces in movies from an actual UI/UX standpoint. https://scifiinterfaces.com/category/ghost-in-the-shell-1995/ https://scifiinterfaces.com/category/ghost-in-the-shell-1995...
• sixo 8y ago
  These rants always seem to miss something important. Not everyone thinks like you (seasoned terminal users) do. There are different kinds of intelligence. The only way to get good with a terminal is to RTFM and _play_ with it, until you're used to it and have constructed a mental model of its internal "types", their logic and composability. Software developers are as a group highly predispositioned to construct mental models of this sort, and to learn by reading the docs. Most people aren't. Many more people are very good at building a _spatial_ model of something, and remembering how to do things by _where they are_. Animations, different screens, various OSX ui components, etc, tabs, all do this. For discovering features and learning to do new things, rather than read the manual, you explore of the environment presented to you. While working, instead of writing intermediate state to buffers somewhere (like the pushd stack) you _put_ it somewhere, and when you want to find it again you go look where you put it. I'm personally better at this than at the software way of thinking and generally find that if things move too fast I just get stuck and have to wait for my brain to catch up. This is probably a fault but it's not going to change overnight. I'm also bad at reading manuals, or at least, I don't like to put the time in to read the manual for everything I do, and am very annoyed when an interface exposes its internal model and complexity non-uniformly, ie to do something that I can _think_ about quite simply I have to absorb and model a lot more of how it works than it feels like should be necessary. (That sentence was about git, also a favorite of these advocates. But also bash, and honestly most CLI tools.)
  • worldsayshi 8y ago
    > Not everyone thinks like you (seasoned terminal users) do. There are different kinds of intelligence. The only way to get good with a terminal is to RTFM and _play_ with it, until you're used to it and have constructed a mental model of its internal "types", their logic and composability. Yes, and here's the point I would like to stress that is completely lacking to make the idea of user friendly terminals work: GUI:s are more user friendly than Terminals because of discoverability and limiting affordances. User friendly Terminals might just be possible if you allow users to explore what is possible with clever search and query completion. It should be able to recognize what entities you are likely typing about and suggest commands that use them. Let's call it "Semantic terminal"?
• rcthompson 8y ago
  To the point of animations looking cool the first time and then quickly getting old, Ubuntu actually has a good solution for at least the window minimizing/restoring animation. The first time you minimize a window on a fresh install, the animation plays somewhat slowly. Each time the animation plays after that, it plays slightly faster, until it becomes almost but not quite instant, so you can still see where the window went, but it doesn't waste your time now that you know what to expect.
• goldenchrome 8y ago
  You can only have success in building interfaces if you first understand who your users are, and what problem you're solving for them. The author compares the benefits of flashy, spread-out interfaces and CLI. The truth is that both have incredible value in the right contexts. The tricky part is making an interface that is easy to pick up, but powerful enough for power users. If you deeply understand your users you can build adaptive user interfaces[0]. LayerVault experimented[1] with the idea of progressive reduction—stripping down UI elements as the user becomes more familiar so they can work more efficiently. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_user_interface [1]http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/42361566927/progressive-reduction http://layervault.tumblr.com/post/42361566927/progressive-re...
• mbrock 8y ago
  I was once annoyed with the slowness of Lynx, the terminal web browser. Poking around in the source code, I noticed that it literally called sleep() several times while loading a page. I removed every sleep call in the code and suddenly Lynx was a lot faster. Try it!
• dionna767675 8y ago
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• ArtWomb 8y ago
  That "Composability" bullet point rang so true for me just now. There are command line tasks for which I can just be 10x productive. And it usually comes down to the simple portability of stream IO. Cloud functions may create a set of standard libraries or tasks that can be ported to any interface. You can get a sense here from this snapshot from a recent Google Cloud Next talk: https://imgur.com/a/RghGkQE https://imgur.com/a/RghGkQE Many of the libraries are multimedia related. But its easy to see how the set can also include Cloud ML functions for pre-trained scene recognition. Another welcome development is an anecdotal renaissance in IRC. Slack and Discord are killing it due to the ease with which new users can come onboard. But the communities forming around mission critical infrastructure, chaos engineering and SRE seem to rely on the old tried and true minimal ircd configurations from last generation. There is no reason for web application entropy to make sites unusable. Modern browsers have high performance timers, request animation frame, gpu acceleration, background workers, and of course access to low level instructions via web assembly. It comes down to investing in the web again.
• z3t4 8y ago
  If "terminals" was improved to support fonts, images, videos, etc it would basically become a web browser.
• daguire 8y ago
  I couldn't find a date on this article, but the author clearly isn't using the latest (rebased) version of 1pass which still has the animation, but it's very smooth and quick.
• fermienrico 8y ago
  I totally agree with this article and if the author is reading this comment, please do one about touch based interfaces. I am sick and tired of touch interfaces in Cars, home appliances and laptop screens. I want a billion knobs and switches. About the only place they make sense is an hand held phone. Every designer needs to read this article. I am just so angry at what is being taught in graphic design schools and the sheer incompetence that graduates from UX/UI courses.
• nicodjimenez 8y ago
  I like this article. In the future everyone will be "a developer", and apps that are developer centric will go mainstream - at least that's my prediction.
• carapace 8y ago
  If you're interested in good UI design read Jef Raskin, "Humane Interface"[1]. You should also study the Oberon OS. You would have to read up[2] on it to use it[3], but it's a high point of UI elegance that has never been equaled since. (Specifically the base system plus the "Gadgets" UI extensions.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface [2] http://www.projectoberon.com/ http://www.projectoberon.com/ [3] Live in-browser Oberon system from original source code, via JS emulator for the underlying RISC CPU: https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/ https://schierlm.github.io/OberonEmulator/ ------ edit: And if you want to read a book that fell through a wormhole from thirty years in the future read: "Computers as Theatre" by Brenda Laurel.
• iamwil 8y ago
  I had thought the author meant airport terminals, and was waiting for an insight to come that never did.
• jstewartmobile 8y ago
  The sorry state of UIs is more of a marketing thing than a computer science failure. There is a trade-off between gloss and performance. Gloss is the easier sell. Let a little of the web doodaddery in, and users will not let up until you bring the rest of it. At that point, we just took the long trip back to Electron. Also, learning from terminals to make better UIs--especially if the big selling points are speed and composability--is developer Stockholm syndrome. The speed is only there because the user-facing I/O is very limited, and rich media is out-of-the-picture. The composability is only there because we have 40+ years of command flags to format and reparse every single ad-hoc format into something the next command can understand. Interfaces like Jupyter and Mathematica did a decent job integrating rich media. Symbolics Genera--and probably a few other language-machines--had a better story on composability (by having a common structured data format). Amen to "We should stop babying our users" though. Engelbart called that one from the outset--with something to the effect that if we're going to be using these things all our productive lives, most learning curves are going to be worth it--as long as the feature isn't garbage.
• pech0rin 8y ago
  I think this stems from a problem of companies hiring visual designers over interaction designers. They are two completely different skill sets and yet when a UX & Interaction Designer applies for a job they are required to submit visual designs as well. I have a colleague going through this process right now. They are in the final stages of the interview process and are rejected because they can't put together a visually perfect design. The world needs more User Experience designers and yet it seems like no one is hiring them (even if they say they are).
  • westoncb 8y ago
    Yep, that's been a huge problem for me too. I've put lots of time into thinking deeply about interaction design issues, and implementing solutions to them (mostly in the context of developing new kinds of programming tools). I've studied a good bit of psychology, and learned some from my dad who worked in HCI for > 30 years. However, whenever I try describing to folks the kind of design where I have some ability and accomplishments, they seem unable to disentangle the problems I'm talking about from visual design. I've even regularly ended up falling into rolls at work where I'm consulted on interaction design issues—but no one knows the name for this or anything, just that when a problem comes up about, "how can we make this easy for people to do?" I tend to have useful ideas. But I won't be hired for it initially, and there won't be anything once I leave the job or work with new people there which says that's something I contributed.
  • daleco 8y ago
    Indeed, not a lot of people know the difference between UI and UX designer, even in tech. To add to the confusion, the profession title is now shifting to “Product Designer”.
• westoncb 8y ago
  Reading this reminded me of my parents sitting on their patio, complaining about the neighbor's air-conditioning unit. I wouldn't even notice the sound it was making until they said something—but for for them, being so tuned into it and having it already on their mind as 'a problem,' it was a prevalent part of their experience. There are two regularly occurring situations times where I'm delayed by the slowness of interfaces: 1. At work, waiting for our web app to reload after I've made some changes to the source. This is actually a problem and eats up a significant amount of time and makes me lose focus. 2. I'll occasionally come across a slowly loading webpage. And I stress 'occasional' here—it's maybe once every couple of days when I open an article on HN or something and it's some site with a tons of ads and stuff. It's a non-issue—easily less than 5 minutes per week. Aside from those delays, I basically never find myself waiting for whatever software interface I'm interacting with, and that's on a 2014 macbook pro.
• SteveJS 8y ago
  Jef Raskin's book "The Humane Interface" is basically the book-length version of this article.
• malkia 8y ago
  https://github.com/ocornut/imgui https://github.com/ocornut/imgui
• dfox 8y ago
  One thing I found out the lazy way is that for single purpose UI as part of some overall process (Point of sale, Order picking and what not) TUI really works because the set of actions is constrained by what Fx key you can press and what barcode you can read. For convention front office (cash/voucher/pre-order converted into event ticket) I ended up with UI that mimicks IBM's ISPF built on top of Python's urwid. Previous versions were straight readline (which worked well for the happy path) and GUI thing which confused the operators.
• sebringj 8y ago
  I think animations that you don't notice as animations are the most useful. Take scrolling and scroll locking an element to fixed when a threshhold is reached. A slide down of a section opening, a zooming of an image, a swipe left... these are useful gestures that are not noticed but rather feel as though they should be part of the experience naturally. Focus on useful animations that add to the experience but we are not going to the stark days of command lines ever again although as a programmer I love them and can't stand probing for settings deep in UIs or navigating nested trees via clicking. We are not normal though.
• srazzaque 8y ago
  It's interesting to me that nobody has yet mentioned the Bloomberg terminal, which is basically what the author is describing. It seems Bloomberg "got this" a while back, and dug their heels on for their keyboard-driven terminal-like UI whilst all other shops were going w32, Excel plugins, Web, etc. It's not sexy by any means, looks like it's from the 80s in a mainframe, but it works well for a lot of people. Images, check. Fonts, check. Command-driven, check. Lightning fast, check. Moving traders and other front-office staff away from BBG terminals is next to impossible due to the drop in efficiency and familiarity. Pretty much every "function" (more similar to what devs might call an "app") can be launched via a command typed into their command bar. And it's incredibly well indexed and fast to search. Everything from reading news, checking messages, seeing a quote for AUDUSD (then subsequently purchasing). No mouse required. Edit: typos
  • unit_circle 8y ago
    This is super cool! Are there any OSS like Bloomberg Terminal?
  • guessthejuice 8y ago
    > Moving traders and other front-office staff away from BBG terminals is next to impossible due to the drop in efficiency and familiarity. This is what happens when a technology becomes so entrenched. People get so used to it that it becomes nearly impossible to switch. It's why I laughed when people talked about google docs replacing MS Office. They just underestimate how entrenched Excel is in finance and corporate america overall (especially with the bosses). Hell, even MS Access is entrenched enough that it'll be around for decades longer even though MS is desperate to get their customers to switch to SQL Server.
• blunte 8y ago
  As with debugging, it's important to choose your battles. How often do you start up slack? Is that 45sec once per day or even per hour, or is it per minute? Obviously it's not a frequent occurrence. So that delay, regardless of your computing power, is not an issue. A case where it does matter is with a good mobile phone camera. It must launch and be able to capture an image within one or two (or at least within 5) seconds. But back to the Electron topic... Would you rather a tool exists and isn't perfect, or it does not exist at all? Ok, or maybe it exists but costs $99 per user? I love clean, performant, low latency interfaces. I live in a terminal. But I also understand the value of developer time. Whether tools and frameworks actually make devs more efficient can sometimes be unclear, but often they allow things to be made that otherwise wouldn't be made due to budget (time cost) constraints.
  • 013a 8y ago
    > Would you rather a tool exists and isn't perfect, or it does not exist at all? Ok, or maybe it exists but costs $99 per user? I understand this argument for niche tools. I'm eternally grateful for things like Insomnia (a GraphQL client), NoSQLBooster (MongoDB GUI), etc, all written in Electron. I understand that asking for things like that in native is a recipe for them to not happen, or for them to be Mac-only, or for them to cost $100/year. Slack is not in this category. It is produced by a corporation valued at three billion dollars. It is a product that is completely, totally, and wholly solved. They produce very little that is novel. I expect that experience to be all twenty shades of pixel perfect, because they have no excuses. Let's look at Telegram. Great app. But they wondered if there were ways it could be improved, so they released, simultaneously, Telegram X on the app store [1]. A rewrite, using the same backend and APIs. It's even better. With Slack's resources, they could have done this twenty times over. [1] https://telegram.org/blog/telegram-x https://telegram.org/blog/telegram-x
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > But back to the Electron topic... Would you rather a tool exists and isn't perfect, or it does not exist at all? Ok, or maybe it exists but costs $99 per user? In a winner-takes-all, marketing>quality market of today's web? I'm inclined towards "not exist until it's at least somewhat good". The problem with Slack is that it sucked out air from everything else, and it became a de-facto standard for intra-company communications. It's hard for a better solution to take off, as it now has to fight uphill against a rich corporation and network effects.
• gumby 8y ago
  The other important factor the author neglects to mention is the keyboard -- ctrl-tab is so great because you don't have to take your hands off the keyboard or your eyes from the screen. The place the machine is waiting for the user is when he or she is screwing around with the mouse and then returning their hands to the keyboard.
• devxpy 8y ago
  > compose able by default You're looking for click http://click.pocoo.org/5/ http://click.pocoo.org/5/ It's the best framework across any programming language that I have found for building command line user interfaces. I instantly know how to use an application made using click because it prevents you from making non-obvious GMO interfaces. Even as a developer, I love using it. I often create CLIs for common chores in my projects using click. The applications always come out perfect, with little to no effort. I wish there was something like this for GUI. This makes me want to make a GUI framework like click, where you don't deal with the bare components, but "compose" your UI by just providing data
• auct 8y ago
  I agree that we need more speed. Some websites and apps are too slow. We need faster network and faster websites.
  • sdx23 8y ago
    > We need faster network and faster websites. We need less bullshit on websites, that'd solve both problems. See e.g. https://www.techtimes.com/articles/229533/20180606/thanks-to-gdpr-eu-version-of-websites-are-faster.htm https://www.techtimes.com/articles/229533/20180606/thanks-to...
• jancsika 8y ago
  > Composability: I’m far from a zealot singing the praises of the Unix philosophy, but most terminal apps produce output that I can process in some way to get into another program. Composability within the conceptual framework of the terminal itself (e.g., using a pipe). But suppose I want to shuttle text back and forth across the terminal/GUI domain. Do I even have a reliable way to select and copy text that extends past the viewport of a terminal? Even the method of copying a selection isn't cross-platform in terminals (e.g., among terminals running in Linux/OSX/Windows). Compare that to the holy trinity of <ctrl_or_cmd-a>, <ctrl_or_cmd-c> and <ctrl_or_cmd-v> in any viewport of any web browser. Plus, you can't even depend on a particular feature being available to a terminal of a single platform. Take the example of middle-click selection pasting from the terminal. Can I depend on distros to never bother me by removing that feature? If so, what is the standard that governs the requirement for this feature?
  • TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > Composability within the conceptual framework of the terminal itself (e.g., using a pipe). Personally, I think that operating systems (and browsers) failed in enforcing such a framework, or at least strongly suggesting it. Compare with Emacs, which is a prime example of how interoperable software could be, if it adhered to a common paradigm more. There's a reason people run tasklists, e-mail, IRC, shell, time tracking, invoicing and others straight from it. It's not because they're crazy. It's because the overarching UX principles enable greater productivity and integration than it's possible elsewhere.
• xpaulbettsx 8y ago
  > I think we can all agree that the interface of this prospective future is incredible and desirable, but if we drill into it, what’s its most amazing aspect? This had to make me laugh a little bit. Jaron Lanier actually designed this UI to intentionally be unusable and bad, because the film was described to him at the time as a Dystopian film, so he designed a computer interface to be equally dystopian. Yet, the effects look so cool, that people actually thought it was a good idea
• a2x 8y ago
  agreed - at the end. But a terminal isn't faster per se. It is fast if you are a rapid typer and have all the knowledge to point exactly that command with that param in the right terminal and the right context. Otherwise, it is just a blank piece of paper. ;-)
• JoshMnem 8y ago
  Animation is unnecessary in most cases. Minimal animation can be added where the UI would otherwise be unclear, but other than that it's visual spam. Animation should be like a very thin layer of icing on a cake, but we're getting fed cakes with 4 inches of icing on the top. There is often little aesthetic restraint. Designers should be asking, "how can I remove as much animation as possible?" It spammy and also an accessibility issue[1][2][3], especially when the animation is designed to mimic physical motion (parallax, Material Design, etc.). To try and make computing bearable, I switched to i3wm and turned off all CSS animation in my browsers with Stylus. It's still too much. I also have a suspicion that animation is causing cognitive damage to users by regularly breaking attention. [1] http://simplyaccessible.com/article/animations/ http://simplyaccessible.com/article/animations/ [2] http://accessibility.psu.edu/animations/ http://accessibility.psu.edu/animations/ [3] https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/04/designing-accessibility-inclusion/#lens-animation-effects https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/04/designing-accessibi...
  • pavlov 8y ago
    Animation in UIs is like corridors in architecture. If the user can’t get directly from A to B, you need to have something in between to carry them through the transition. An architect would never dream of adding extra corridors just because they’d be a nice place to display some framed art. Neither should a UI designer add animation for its own sake. I used to work on a UI modeling tool, and users were constantly disappointed to learn that they couldn’t build custom element animations in the tool (i.e. Flash / After Effects style choreographed view layout changes). When we looked at the use cases, inevitably they were looking to add superfluous motion to a view whose data was immediately available and which was displayed in a screen that already had an OS-level standard navigation transition animation applied to it. There was no reason to move things around when the screen was already fully rendered and ready for interactions. But I’m not sure if I convinced anyone: there is a generation of designers currently who want to think of UIs as motion graphics showcases and who assume usability is an intuitive quality that will be automatically be present in their designs.
    • JoshMnem 8y ago
• baxtr 8y ago
  Isn’t one of the most successful companies ever built on that principle? (Google.)
• sriku 8y ago
  One way to think about interface power is in terms of thresholds and ceilings. CLIs are powerful with a somewhat high threshold and high ceiling. In the attempt to lower the threshold, most UIs and OSes significantly lower the ceiling too. I don't recall who originally described it this way. One of Logo's motivations was to have an experimentation environment for kids with low threshold and no ceiling. Perhaps Seymour Papert.
• Kirth 8y ago
  Seeing that 20 second start-up time [of the Slack OS X desktop app] in the video on the site was kind of painful :/.
• arendtio 8y ago
  > We should build networked applications that cache content and make network fetches asynchronously to remote APIs so that humans aren’t waiting for data to come back over the wire while they’re working. I built something like that a year ago and thought that I wouldn't have to bother the user with the sync state. I was wrong. Due to the nature of the mobile connections it happens quite often that for short periods multiple devices aren't synced. Yes I could certainly improve the logic to let this happen less often but in the end the user requires some indication about the sync state (e.g. last successful sync). So when you build something similar don't hide everything from the user just give him as much freedom as possible to allow him to keep working while the sync happens in the background.
• axiomdata316 8y ago
  'Software on the web today takes too long to load, depends too heavily on synchronous calls to slow networks, overemphasizes visual gimmickry, and lacks the refinement that allows mastery by more experienced users to gain huge leverage for productivity’s sake.' This nicely describes the road Intuit has gone down with QuickBooks Online. Slow user interface, and lack of productivity. I wish Intuit would take half the money they spend on Marketing and use it to develop their Desktop offerings of QuickBooks.
• agumonkey 8y ago
  One of my favorite application interaction was an old as400 thing from the 80s at the tax office. I was in college and still a bit into async js + css (in theory). That app had usual terminal screens, but the ergonomics were holistic, no brainer keyboard usage, no latency whatsoever, and the software was helpful. It was such a bliss. Software was never in the way, the only time it bugged you was to actually notify you of important issues (absurd data) and to provide either correct automatic fixes or a few clear suggestions. I realized how much context/paradigm is worth. It was obvious the efforts were spent on logic and not tech for the sake of it. Ironically it was the first wave of web2.0 business fad, so we were introduced to the new reincarnation of the tax UI in html/css and it was subpar in speed and ergonomics, and was of no help.
• OOPMan 8y ago
  I stopped reading when he claimed Minority Report was a great movie, the forecast UI was "incredible and desirable" and confused the technology in the movie with the book on which is was based.
• branislav 8y ago
  I agree with the article in that designers can be too focused on the shiny and non-functional aspects of interfaces. Personally I would treat design as being purely about function and anything superficial is about aesthetics. But I think the author is throwing the baby out with the bathwater by wanting to restrict all animations. Fast, subtle animations, especially in the form of transitions between states/screens are extremely important for keeping the user informed about where they are in the context of the system.
  • collinmanderson 8y ago
    I also think animations are not what’s making slack take so long to load. I don’t think it would load any faster without the animations.
• 131012 8y ago
  My only disappointment working with terminal comes from SQL queries (mostly mysql & postgres). The queries results always come scrambled and absolutely unreadable. Anybody ever heard about 'responsive design' for sql results?
  • pwg 8y ago
    The results likely have lines wider than the screen. Configure your CLI access app to display table results using the "less" pager, then configure your environment variables to include the "-S" option to less. The long lines will be clipped at the screen edge (instead of wrapping) and you can scroll around horizontally and vertically (look into the less man page for how to move around inside of less). edit: typo
• tylerc230 8y ago
  I remember finding TermKit a while back and thinking it had some interesting concepts. Looks like it hasn’t been touched in a while though. http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/ http://acko.net/blog/on-termkit/
• erikpukinskis 8y ago
  I don’t accept that HTML is the reason why Slack is slow. Can anyone explain, in concrete terms, what resource does Slack require a lot of, which is fast to produce on iOS but slow to produce in HTML?
• guessthejuice 8y ago
  Bare bones terminal design is great for power users just like vi is great for power users. The saying is as you get more competent in linux, the more you stay in the shell/terminal with the keyboard and the less you use the mouse. But for ordinary folks ( especially beginners ), they are drawn towards animations, mouse clicking, visual, etc. And most beginners don't advance to the power users stage. My guess is that this pattern will hold in the future.
• ProxCoques 8y ago
  Hi. UX designer here who reads Hacker News as a way of keeping tabs on what geeks are up to :-) I think the article is generally correct when it concludes that we're on the wrong path. But I'd just like to assure the "engineering community" that the "design community" is fully aware of this and has been since about 2003 (mainly due to the effects of Flash at time - remember the loading screens?). Part of the problem stems from the fact that UI design has swung into a bit of a dark age at the moment in terms of usability. Most designers are "visual designers" who don't know much about the history or practice of interaction design as developed by Norman, Raskin, Tognazzini, Nielsen, Cooper and others. With so few interaction designers around it's not surprising that UIs are designed to just look good rather than also work well. Some of the main issues are summarised here: https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-design-a-bad-name https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi... I'd also point out that this means engineers are probably just as confused about the difference between visual design and interaction design, since there are so few people to look to who are practising the latter. So articles like the one at brandur.org will be written as though they are broaching new issues on the topic. In fact, discussions around the advantages of CLUIs are pretty old and nothing in the article is particularly new in that regard. The only thing I'd say after that is a minor point: he says native phone apps are faster and more responsive than web ones. Is that true? The apps I have on my phone mostly use webviews or network API calls for large parts of their UX which is by definition practically the same speed as the web, no? At least, I can't tell any difference between using, say, Amazon's native app to search for and buy something compared to if I go to Amazon with my phone's browser.
• plg 8y ago
  What is the terminal running in the 5th movie? (ThemWare)
• ests_eu 8y ago
  This is why I am loving Alfred, and recommend it to everyone I can.