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Modern UI design is awful. It might work for Joe Moron, who is just scrolling through video clips and short fragments of text, but I can't imagine why you would

Modern UI design is awful. It might work for Joe Moron, who is just scrolling through video clips and short fragments of text, but I can't imagine why you would ever try to apply design principles designed for that case to professional users. Do people really think they can take the complexity out of these inherently complex business systems? I'm not saying that everything has to look like shit, but no amount of dumbing down an interface is going to fix the fact that certain software needs to display an intimidating amount of info, and that the learning curve for that software is going to be pretty brutal. I want to wake up from this nightmare. Software like Bloomberg Terminal and CATIA doesn't need to be beautiful web apps with clean, !minimal! Material design, they need to tear through the issues they're meant to solve as quickly and easily as possible, even the reality of that is a little ugly.

blueboo 8y ago
Well, let's challenge ourselves: what is the best designed (digital) interface with the deepest usability? Or some outstanding interfaces that square that circle? I'm familiar with 3d software suites, and they're (mostly) all highly-configurable, permitting custom layouts, panels, toolbars, and even enabling intermediate users to create UI tools. To your point, they're also ferociously complicated for novices. Bloomberg is a funny example. It's a well-indexed reference, rather than an expressive tool, so mastering its shortcut-dense interface is an affordable cost to professionals of modest technical sophistication. I wonder if TurboTax is in the running; for all its blandness, in 2019 it's exceedingly transparent and clear guide to doing an extremely complicated task. I hasten to acknowledge that's hardly going to be a universal belief. Maybe Gmail? But again the functionality is fairly shallow...
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Gmail is a bad example. It's way too limited, very low-density in default settings, and generally slow. Thunderbird would be better, but it's far from the peak of what's possible. If you redesigned Thunderbird around the principles of terminal or Emacs-based mail apps - in particular the keyboard-first focus and high performance, with Thunderbird's rich content rendering, then it would be much closer to e-mail perfection. 3D software suites like 3DS Max or Blender are perfect examples of software that's a tool, not a toy. The learning curve is roughly proportional to the breadth and complexity of the problem domain, so training is required, but the software itself doesn't waste your time and patience with slow and low-density UIs.

blueboo 8y ago

Well, let's challenge ourselves: what is the best designed (digital) interface with the deepest usability? Or some outstanding interfaces that square that circle? I'm familiar with 3d software suites, and they're (mostly) all highly-configurable, permitting custom layouts, panels, toolbars, and even enabling intermediate users to create UI tools. To your point, they're also ferociously complicated for novices. Bloomberg is a funny example. It's a well-indexed reference, rather than an expressive tool, so mastering its shortcut-dense interface is an affordable cost to professionals of modest technical sophistication. I wonder if TurboTax is in the running; for all its blandness, in 2019 it's exceedingly transparent and clear guide to doing an extremely complicated task. I hasten to acknowledge that's hardly going to be a universal belief. Maybe Gmail? But again the functionality is fairly shallow...

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Gmail is a bad example. It's way too limited, very low-density in default settings, and generally slow. Thunderbird would be better, but it's far from the peak of what's possible. If you redesigned Thunderbird around the principles of terminal or Emacs-based mail apps - in particular the keyboard-first focus and high performance, with Thunderbird's rich content rendering, then it would be much closer to e-mail perfection. 3D software suites like 3DS Max or Blender are perfect examples of software that's a tool, not a toy. The learning curve is roughly proportional to the breadth and complexity of the problem domain, so training is required, but the software itself doesn't waste your time and patience with slow and low-density UIs.