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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 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.
  - digi_owl 8y ago
    IMO, intuitiveness is overrated. As one snarky joke goes: only the nipple is intuitive, everything else is learned.
    - taeric 8y ago
      And as anyone with children can tell you, the nipple is far from intuitive.
      - mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
        Explain.
    - apatters 8y ago
      That's a hilarious joke, made me LOL. If you want your product to be used though you have to think about what users already know how to do and try to build off of that. This is why baby bottles and skeumorphic design are popular and effective.
    - projektir 8y ago
      Since when does intuition exclude learned information? It's very much relevant to, say, what interfaces people have used before. You might be thinking of instinct.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    I wouldn't compared all GUIs with the car; the car is more like a particular type of GUI, say, of word processors. Plus, the basics may be standard, but everything else (mainly the dashboard) is still quite a mess. I wouldn't say it's solved at all.
  - gmueckl 8y ago
    If you know how to drive cars, you will still not be able to drive trucks, motorcycles or tractors. Software in general us more diverse than the types of vehicles that are in existence. If you want to make a car analogy, then you should compare cars to browsers. And these have very similar UIs, the underlying stupefying complexity nonwithstanding. So we seem to create standardized interfaces for certain common classes of user interfaces over time. I think that people tend to think in terms of discrete and dedicated appliances because this is how the real world is structured. Being faced with a small box with the overbearing set of capabilities of a swiss army jackhammer (atomic bombs included) ends with confusion unless lot of time is devoted to trying to discover and learn all the magic spells to which that infernally picky and annoying thing will respond meaningfully.
sleepyams 8y ago
Will we ever solve UI? UI is the meeting place of tech and user, and in a sense it is THE problem for humanity right now. UI informs how we tend to use the internet, and for example we are currently involved with UIs that tend towards consumption (e.g. discovery mechanisms, feeds, etc). To solve UI would imply a certain optimal way to live our lives, if that exists. I agree with you that UI is unsolved and extremely complex, but I don't think it something to be solved as much as it is the political heart of technology.
- mikeryan 8y ago
  There’s an inherent dichotomy in UI in that the most “efficient” interfaces generally have the steepest learning curve. You can be really efficient in a terminal or VIM. But figuring those out take a lot of work. When we design interfaces we try to make them have a short learning curve but expose greater ability as you use them but it’s still hard.
  - sleepyams 8y ago
    That makes sense, for example Reddit has a very simple concept with the upvote/downvote, but also more advanced features if you need them. But I would also argue that UIs also implicitly convey a preference for how data on the web should be organized, and that affects usage. For example the feed, besides being a UI pattern, also claims that content on the web is for consumption and not exploration, and so we remain stationary on these aggregation platforms instead of 'browsing' the web as we used to. This is efficient but politically bad for society, and we would need to introspect on how we use the internet in tandem with the development of new tech like decentralized platforms.
    - 0x445442 8y ago
      Duckduckgo David Galernter and Lifestreams. He predicted the feed over 20 years ago but his vision accounted for the exploration aspect as well.
  - angleofrepose 8y ago
013a 8y ago
I think that's absolutely fair. The pace at which the industry is starting to solve really big, hairy problems in standard ways is ever accelerating; the devops space right now is undergoing massive solidification under the Cloud and Kubernetes. UI is one of those problems I hope we're humble enough to admit that we got horribly wrong with HTML/CSS, and maybe we need to go back to square one. But at the same time, lets pick on Slack. There's no good reason that it needs to take more than 5 seconds per team to load. Maybe its Electron, HTML, and CSS. Maybe they're loading too much data at the start. Maybe their Ruby servers are a little slow. All of that could be true, but one thing is definitely true: There's a Product Manager or an Engineering Lead somewhere in San Francisco who looked at what their engineers had built and said "Yup, this lives up to the quality our users expect, ship it." Jira is the same way. Its dog slow. Its full of UI bugs and inconsistencies. But people still buy it, and someone at Atlassian has to have said "we'll worry about this UI bug later, we have more reports for middle management we want to add to the product." Our best minds will solve the tremendously difficult UI problem one day. But today, the best thing most of us can focus on is the People problem. Expect and Pay for better. Reach out to leaders at these companies on Twitter. A core problem in the software purchasing process is that, often, the people who buy the software aren't the people who have to use it day-in day-out, and often there's obvious lost productivity between the feature bullets on the marketing page and an engineer on an old PC her company won't upgrade for another year.
daleco 8y ago
The process to get there takes time. A clever simple solution always look easy to come up with. Creating Intuitive interfaces has been solved, you need a design centered culture, a good design system, and implementing user centered methodologies (look into human factors, cognitive engineering...) It takes more investment upfront, but it’s worth it in the long run.
0x445442 8y ago
I've mentioned his name elsewhere in this thread but Aza Raskin had some very interesting thoughts on this subject. One of his main assertions was a big problem is the whole app paradigm. The whole notion of silod apps bound to native widget tool kits is very limiting and that the host platform should really just provide a facility for running commands.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
huntie 8y ago
>UI is hard How many people are actually putting effort into their UIs? How many people do usability tests? I know Microsoft has done them before, but what about Slack? There are a lot of complaints here about their UI. I'm sure not many free software projects do usability tests. You can't just slap things together and hope for the best, you need to have tests, and you need to run the tests again when you make changes. We've already learned this with the software itself. I've been reading "Designing User Interfaces for Software" by Joseph Dumas from 1988. It enumerates common usability issues at the time, but many of them are still common. Inscrutable error messages, inconsistent terminology, unexpected interactions, the list goes on. These are solvable problems by they require a departure from "worse is better". I'm not sure that UI is hard, it seems like it just requires effort to be put forth.
- c-smile 8y ago
  > I know Microsoft has done them before And they added toggle switches to UWP (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/controls-and-patterns/controls-by-function#toggle-switch https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/controls...) that are usability disasters IMO. When such switch used alone you cannot tell in what state it is - you need to remember that "on the right - is on" (yet what about RTL environment?). While there is no such problem with old plain checkboxes.
- b0rsuk 8y ago
  I designed a very convenient interface for my otherwise extremely simple Chess program. In most chess games, keyboard interface works like this: one axis has labels 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; the other has a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h. Then you movie pieces by inputing stuff like b4 d5. This is AWFUL. You have to look at the border of of the chessboard to see which row and column your chess piece is in. It wasn't designed for humans to play, it was for keeping records of matches and tournaments. My interface works differently: each of your pieces having valid moves is assigned a key on keyboard. For example rooks could be labeled 1-8, others a-h. You select a piece to move simply by inputing its symbol. When that happens, spaces reachable with legal moves become labeled with symbols... You see where that goes. You look at a piece you want to move, read its symbol, then read the symbol of the place you want to move to. In each case you look at pieces or spaces that interest you, not at X and Y axis.
techbio 8y ago
Building UI/UX demands designing an API for people to use not people's code to implement. The developer must take into account the "existing libraries" available to their end users (people or code) and the human equivalent of "libraries" is generally unspecified, varies greatly, and is slow to teach and learn.
thomastjeffery 8y ago
I think that one of our biggest problems with UI is that it is immutable. Users can't really change most UI. Developers have to make one ultimate one-size-fits-all UI for all of their users.

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.
- digi_owl 8y ago
  IMO, intuitiveness is overrated. As one snarky joke goes: only the nipple is intuitive, everything else is learned.
  - taeric 8y ago
    And as anyone with children can tell you, the nipple is far from intuitive.
    - mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
      Explain.
  - apatters 8y ago
    That's a hilarious joke, made me LOL. If you want your product to be used though you have to think about what users already know how to do and try to build off of that. This is why baby bottles and skeumorphic design are popular and effective.
  - projektir 8y ago
    Since when does intuition exclude learned information? It's very much relevant to, say, what interfaces people have used before. You might be thinking of instinct.
- icebraining 8y ago
  I wouldn't compared all GUIs with the car; the car is more like a particular type of GUI, say, of word processors. Plus, the basics may be standard, but everything else (mainly the dashboard) is still quite a mess. I wouldn't say it's solved at all.
- gmueckl 8y ago
  If you know how to drive cars, you will still not be able to drive trucks, motorcycles or tractors. Software in general us more diverse than the types of vehicles that are in existence. If you want to make a car analogy, then you should compare cars to browsers. And these have very similar UIs, the underlying stupefying complexity nonwithstanding. So we seem to create standardized interfaces for certain common classes of user interfaces over time. I think that people tend to think in terms of discrete and dedicated appliances because this is how the real world is structured. Being faced with a small box with the overbearing set of capabilities of a swiss army jackhammer (atomic bombs included) ends with confusion unless lot of time is devoted to trying to discover and learn all the magic spells to which that infernally picky and annoying thing will respond meaningfully.

sleepyams 8y ago

Will we ever solve UI? UI is the meeting place of tech and user, and in a sense it is THE problem for humanity right now. UI informs how we tend to use the internet, and for example we are currently involved with UIs that tend towards consumption (e.g. discovery mechanisms, feeds, etc). To solve UI would imply a certain optimal way to live our lives, if that exists. I agree with you that UI is unsolved and extremely complex, but I don't think it something to be solved as much as it is the political heart of technology.

mikeryan 8y ago
There’s an inherent dichotomy in UI in that the most “efficient” interfaces generally have the steepest learning curve. You can be really efficient in a terminal or VIM. But figuring those out take a lot of work. When we design interfaces we try to make them have a short learning curve but expose greater ability as you use them but it’s still hard.
- sleepyams 8y ago
  That makes sense, for example Reddit has a very simple concept with the upvote/downvote, but also more advanced features if you need them. But I would also argue that UIs also implicitly convey a preference for how data on the web should be organized, and that affects usage. For example the feed, besides being a UI pattern, also claims that content on the web is for consumption and not exploration, and so we remain stationary on these aggregation platforms instead of 'browsing' the web as we used to. This is efficient but politically bad for society, and we would need to introspect on how we use the internet in tandem with the development of new tech like decentralized platforms.
  - 0x445442 8y ago
    Duckduckgo David Galernter and Lifestreams. He predicted the feed over 20 years ago but his vision accounted for the exploration aspect as well.
- angleofrepose 8y ago

013a 8y ago

I think that's absolutely fair. The pace at which the industry is starting to solve really big, hairy problems in standard ways is ever accelerating; the devops space right now is undergoing massive solidification under the Cloud and Kubernetes. UI is one of those problems I hope we're humble enough to admit that we got horribly wrong with HTML/CSS, and maybe we need to go back to square one. But at the same time, lets pick on Slack. There's no good reason that it needs to take more than 5 seconds per team to load. Maybe its Electron, HTML, and CSS. Maybe they're loading too much data at the start. Maybe their Ruby servers are a little slow. All of that could be true, but one thing is definitely true: There's a Product Manager or an Engineering Lead somewhere in San Francisco who looked at what their engineers had built and said "Yup, this lives up to the quality our users expect, ship it." Jira is the same way. Its dog slow. Its full of UI bugs and inconsistencies. But people still buy it, and someone at Atlassian has to have said "we'll worry about this UI bug later, we have more reports for middle management we want to add to the product." Our best minds will solve the tremendously difficult UI problem one day. But today, the best thing most of us can focus on is the People problem. Expect and Pay for better. Reach out to leaders at these companies on Twitter. A core problem in the software purchasing process is that, often, the people who buy the software aren't the people who have to use it day-in day-out, and often there's obvious lost productivity between the feature bullets on the marketing page and an engineer on an old PC her company won't upgrade for another year.

daleco 8y ago

The process to get there takes time. A clever simple solution always look easy to come up with. Creating Intuitive interfaces has been solved, you need a design centered culture, a good design system, and implementing user centered methodologies (look into human factors, cognitive engineering...) It takes more investment upfront, but it’s worth it in the long run.

0x445442 8y ago

I've mentioned his name elsewhere in this thread but Aza Raskin had some very interesting thoughts on this subject. One of his main assertions was a big problem is the whole app paradigm. The whole notion of silod apps bound to native widget tool kits is very limiting and that the host platform should really just provide a facility for running commands.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

huntie 8y ago

>UI is hard How many people are actually putting effort into their UIs? How many people do usability tests? I know Microsoft has done them before, but what about Slack? There are a lot of complaints here about their UI. I'm sure not many free software projects do usability tests. You can't just slap things together and hope for the best, you need to have tests, and you need to run the tests again when you make changes. We've already learned this with the software itself. I've been reading "Designing User Interfaces for Software" by Joseph Dumas from 1988. It enumerates common usability issues at the time, but many of them are still common. Inscrutable error messages, inconsistent terminology, unexpected interactions, the list goes on. These are solvable problems by they require a departure from "worse is better". I'm not sure that UI is hard, it seems like it just requires effort to be put forth.

c-smile 8y ago
> I know Microsoft has done them before And they added toggle switches to UWP (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/controls-and-patterns/controls-by-function#toggle-switch https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/design/controls...) that are usability disasters IMO. When such switch used alone you cannot tell in what state it is - you need to remember that "on the right - is on" (yet what about RTL environment?). While there is no such problem with old plain checkboxes.
b0rsuk 8y ago
I designed a very convenient interface for my otherwise extremely simple Chess program. In most chess games, keyboard interface works like this: one axis has labels 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; the other has a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h. Then you movie pieces by inputing stuff like b4 d5. This is AWFUL. You have to look at the border of of the chessboard to see which row and column your chess piece is in. It wasn't designed for humans to play, it was for keeping records of matches and tournaments. My interface works differently: each of your pieces having valid moves is assigned a key on keyboard. For example rooks could be labeled 1-8, others a-h. You select a piece to move simply by inputing its symbol. When that happens, spaces reachable with legal moves become labeled with symbols... You see where that goes. You look at a piece you want to move, read its symbol, then read the symbol of the place you want to move to. In each case you look at pieces or spaces that interest you, not at X and Y axis.

techbio 8y ago

Building UI/UX demands designing an API for people to use not people's code to implement. The developer must take into account the "existing libraries" available to their end users (people or code) and the human equivalent of "libraries" is generally unspecified, varies greatly, and is slow to teach and learn.

thomastjeffery 8y ago

I think that one of our biggest problems with UI is that it is immutable. Users can't really change most UI. Developers have to make one ultimate one-size-fits-all UI for all of their users.