8 ms·

I think your criticism misses the mark. [1] You're answering an article that starts with a 45-second video of Slack opening (surely the worst offender among mo

I think your criticism misses the mark. [1] You're answering an article that starts with a 45-second video of Slack opening (surely the worst offender among modern apps) with something about latencies measured in thousandths of a second. [2] As Nielsen is focused on web apps and applications, this advice is less applicable to UI provided by the OS that you interact with all day in presumably familiar ways. Note that generally "directing user attention" isn't necessary in a shell: output always comes at the bottom. However, be sure to read the "Frequency: Don’t Get in the User’s Way" heading that includes almost verbatim the OP's points against animations that slow the user down. [3] Yes, internationalization is still hard. At least for Terminal.app, this is basically a solved problem, but of course it's possible for terminal apps (ncurses etc) to need custom support. The situation with web tech is about the same, these things are solved for you if you stick with the basic technologies, but if you get fancy you may need more explicit support.

KirinDave 8y ago
[1]: Maybe you should read the article and see subsequent videos (e.g., animation jank) where we are in this time domain rather than skipping that part? TBF: the videos didn't play for me without opening them in a different tab. I'm not sure how they accomplished this, since typical embedding tags don't have this problem. [2]: > As Nielsen is focused on web apps and applications, this advice is less applicable to UI provided by the OS that you interact with all day in presumably familiar ways. Multiple interactions were offered in the article that were native apps that had animation. Principles of UX are not exactly the same between local and web, but the principles of how animation guides user attention and context are more universal than you make them out to be. For example, I love to make fun of the 1pass animation but I think it does serve a valuable purpose: making sure the user has realized the environment is now authenticated as a result of password entry. A unique cue for that is a good idea. > Note that generally "directing user attention" isn't necessary in a shell... This is fantastically wrong! We have a long history of working to make sure that user attention is directed in shells! From guidance on how to do a menu with highlighting (folks have settled on doing the chosen option in a select menu with inverse text and an extra glyph to keep degenerate cases like 1-tuples and 2-tuples from being ambiguous) to ongoing refinements to midnight commander. Another example in a more command-line domain is silver searcher's bash integration, which makes history search a lot better. And there is a whole world of UI around log aggregation, search and UI that extends onto the console and has seen rapid evolution over the last 5 years. [3]: > Yes, internationalization is still hard. At least for Terminal.app, this is basically a solved problem It's really not. Lots of tooling breaks. > he situation with web tech is about the same, CSS makes this dramatically better on the web side, and we haven't even gotten to support for folks with physical differences that make precise keyboard input or traveling eyesight easy. The web is WAY more accessible to non-english-speaking people, people with physical differences, and people with issues focusing in the way terminals must demand you do.
- Karrot_Kream 8y ago
  > The web is WAY more accessible to non-english-speaking people, people with physical differences, and people with issues focusing in the way terminals must demand you do. A bunch of people (including Kay and Victor) have talked about this, but accessibility is only one part of the interface. Pieces of software that are productivity related should be easy to get started with and be accessible, but also allow you to become more productive. A lot of tools (like 1Password) focus on the former (accessibility to the lay user) but don't focus on the latter. This isn't some sort of unattainable ideal though: Excel and Powerpoint are great examples of tools that make it easy to just play around with as a beginner, but also to really reward power users.
  - KirinDave 8y ago
    And in the spirit of fairness and inclusivity to the console, Lotus 123!
gav 8y ago
> 45-second video of Slack opening (surely the worst offender among modern apps I hate to defend Slack as it's far from snappy, but comparing it to a console app seems hardly fair. I wonder how much of it's slowness is due to network requests? I could make the argument that git is slow because when I clone a large repository it takes a while.
- SomeHacker44 8y ago
  I do not see how that comparison is unfair. Terminal IRC clients, for example, accomplish the same exact functionality as Slack in a curses UI in a vastly faster way.
  - gav 8y ago
    But somehow there's all these people that want to use Slack over Irssi.
    - KirinDave 8y ago
      Probably because IRC is an outdated protocol with inferior features to Slack and very few good open source options for connecting. For example: * DCC is still unreliable. * There is no audio connection option, which is quite popular in 2018. * Channel history management is ad hoc * Authentication is done in band, in plain text. * "secured" channels rely on this bad authentication, and if they don't (perhaps electing to manage it themselves) network flaws can completely steal your channel. * IRC isn't even particularly open source, many servers and networks have private patches that are not shared publicly. IRC isn't better than slack. I agree with you that it's confusing why people suggest that it ought to be. Also, most IRC networks are controlled by entities even more inscrutable than Slack's executive team and board. I can go look up who runs slack, I cannot actually find good details on who runs any given IRC network. I have no idea what I'm dealing with or how they're using my data. I have no legal recourse if I do discover bad behavior, and I'm forced by the ossified protocol to keep using their insecure authentication mechanisms which make abuse trivial.
      - 8y ago

KirinDave 8y ago

[1]: Maybe you should read the article and see subsequent videos (e.g., animation jank) where we are in this time domain rather than skipping that part? TBF: the videos didn't play for me without opening them in a different tab. I'm not sure how they accomplished this, since typical embedding tags don't have this problem. [2]: > As Nielsen is focused on web apps and applications, this advice is less applicable to UI provided by the OS that you interact with all day in presumably familiar ways. Multiple interactions were offered in the article that were native apps that had animation. Principles of UX are not exactly the same between local and web, but the principles of how animation guides user attention and context are more universal than you make them out to be. For example, I love to make fun of the 1pass animation but I think it does serve a valuable purpose: making sure the user has realized the environment is now authenticated as a result of password entry. A unique cue for that is a good idea. > Note that generally "directing user attention" isn't necessary in a shell... This is fantastically wrong! We have a long history of working to make sure that user attention is directed in shells! From guidance on how to do a menu with highlighting (folks have settled on doing the chosen option in a select menu with inverse text and an extra glyph to keep degenerate cases like 1-tuples and 2-tuples from being ambiguous) to ongoing refinements to midnight commander. Another example in a more command-line domain is silver searcher's bash integration, which makes history search a lot better. And there is a whole world of UI around log aggregation, search and UI that extends onto the console and has seen rapid evolution over the last 5 years. [3]: > Yes, internationalization is still hard. At least for Terminal.app, this is basically a solved problem It's really not. Lots of tooling breaks. > he situation with web tech is about the same, CSS makes this dramatically better on the web side, and we haven't even gotten to support for folks with physical differences that make precise keyboard input or traveling eyesight easy. The web is WAY more accessible to non-english-speaking people, people with physical differences, and people with issues focusing in the way terminals must demand you do.

Karrot_Kream 8y ago
> The web is WAY more accessible to non-english-speaking people, people with physical differences, and people with issues focusing in the way terminals must demand you do. A bunch of people (including Kay and Victor) have talked about this, but accessibility is only one part of the interface. Pieces of software that are productivity related should be easy to get started with and be accessible, but also allow you to become more productive. A lot of tools (like 1Password) focus on the former (accessibility to the lay user) but don't focus on the latter. This isn't some sort of unattainable ideal though: Excel and Powerpoint are great examples of tools that make it easy to just play around with as a beginner, but also to really reward power users.
- KirinDave 8y ago
  And in the spirit of fairness and inclusivity to the console, Lotus 123!

gav 8y ago

> 45-second video of Slack opening (surely the worst offender among modern apps I hate to defend Slack as it's far from snappy, but comparing it to a console app seems hardly fair. I wonder how much of it's slowness is due to network requests? I could make the argument that git is slow because when I clone a large repository it takes a while.

SomeHacker44 8y ago
I do not see how that comparison is unfair. Terminal IRC clients, for example, accomplish the same exact functionality as Slack in a curses UI in a vastly faster way.
- gav 8y ago
  But somehow there's all these people that want to use Slack over Irssi.
  - KirinDave 8y ago
    Probably because IRC is an outdated protocol with inferior features to Slack and very few good open source options for connecting. For example: * DCC is still unreliable. * There is no audio connection option, which is quite popular in 2018. * Channel history management is ad hoc * Authentication is done in band, in plain text. * "secured" channels rely on this bad authentication, and if they don't (perhaps electing to manage it themselves) network flaws can completely steal your channel. * IRC isn't even particularly open source, many servers and networks have private patches that are not shared publicly. IRC isn't better than slack. I agree with you that it's confusing why people suggest that it ought to be. Also, most IRC networks are controlled by entities even more inscrutable than Slack's executive team and board. I can go look up who runs slack, I cannot actually find good details on who runs any given IRC network. I have no idea what I'm dealing with or how they're using my data. I have no legal recourse if I do discover bad behavior, and I'm forced by the ossified protocol to keep using their insecure authentication mechanisms which make abuse trivial.
    - 8y ago