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GUIs represent a machine’s internal state, but that representation is often misleading, especially to users who take it literally. Take object persistence. It
by mr_toad 8y ago
GUIs represent a machine’s internal state, but that representation is often misleading, especially to users who take it literally.
Take object persistence. It’s innate to assume that objects don’t go away simply because we can’t see them. Documents don’t vanish in real life simply because you stop looking at them.
Many people don’t understand why a document on a computer screen can vanish, because they don’t understand that that document has to be assembled from data and code every time it’s opened. They don’t understand why it should look different in a different version of word (or worse, in some other program), because objects shouldn’t change when you view them somewhere else.
They don’t understand why you can’t just put a Word document in an email, or a website, or in ‘the cloud’ and edit it in-place. To many people the functionality of the editing is inherently in the document, (not the system) and don’t understand that, without the system, it’s just a series of bytes with no inherent meaning or functionality.
- bitwize 8y agoI did mention that GUIs have limitations in how accurately they can represent machine state. You've done a nice job in elucidating some of these limitations.
- TuringTest 8y ago> GUIs represent a machine’s internal state, but that representation is often misleading, especially to users who take it literally. And that's largely fault of the developers, since they build on layers upon layers of utility libraries, which are not exposed to the user but inevitably pop-up in the form of a broken metaphor or unintelligible error message. User-facing systems should be defined around powerful data&workflow metaphors, and all the layers in system built around supporting those metaphors in coherent ways. There is a tradition of people trying to build user systems around simple concepts, easy to combine (starting with Memex, then Smalltalk, Hypercards, and nowadays with mobile OSs). But there's always been a great deal of friction in adopting them: - first because their experimental nature can't compete with the more polished nature of commercial systems based on legacy conceptual metaphors; - and second, because up until recently, end-user hardware was not powerful enough to support the complex graphical and computational requirements for the heavy environments required to support these novel interfaces. Now that computers are powerful enough to build novel experimental interfaces on top of all the legacy libraries required to run generic hardware, we're starting to see again a lot of experimentation of those system-encompassing alternative metaphors for interaction.
- scroot 8y ago> They don’t understand why you can’t just put a Word document in an email, or a website, or in ‘the cloud’ and edit it in-place. To many people the functionality of the editing is inherently in the document, (not the system) and don’t understand that, without the system, it’s just a series of bytes with no inherent meaning or functionality Hello, OpenDoc.