4 ms·

> Most people would stop using it if a "UX Designer" tried to simplify it. That’s true, I completely stopped using this type of calculator when the UX designer

by tobr 7y ago

> Most people would stop using it if a "UX Designer" tried to simplify it. That’s true, I completely stopped using this type of calculator when the UX designers behind Calca, Soulver and their ilk came up with a much simpler and better design.

msla 7y ago
The better design for a scientific calculator is Maxima, or some other keyboard-driven system where the primary UI is a command line. Why? Because you're communicating information-dense messages (equations, arithmetic problems, functions) and text remains the only way we have to do that. The command line is also the least discoverable UI imaginable. It has absolutely no obvious affordances beyond typing something into it and hoping you typed something the program understood. Even the error messages are going to be opaque unless you have some prior knowledge. There is no "just pick it up and go" with this. On the gripping hand, however, a command line is the most fluent UI short of the Emacs/ITS affinity for keystroke bindings. Once you know how to do something, you can get amazingly fast. It actively rewards muscle memory and familiarity, as opposed to menus and progressive disclosure, which are precisely as clunky on day one thousand as they are on day one. Speaking as an HP-48GX owner, a good button array with shift keys and some context-dependent buttons can be nearly as fast as a command line, but it's inherently more limited. My point is this: Discoverability is in tension with fluency, meaning that designing for experts is inherently different for designing for newbies, or people who use the software so rarely they're effectively always newbies. Removing functionality to unclutter an interface is newbie design thinking, as a command line is never cluttered. (Which isn't to say you can't do both. The Emacs GUI is newbie-friendly unless a newbie is in the habit of jamming odd key combinations at random.)
- strokirk 7y ago
  There's certainly big differences in command line apps and terminals though. Features like tab completion with inline docstrings, fish-style autocomplete, history with search-as-you-type, infinite scrollback, semantic colors, consistent interfaces, good help pages, dry-running and more all help to increase ease of use, discoverability and quicken the learning curve.

by tobr 7y ago

msla 7y ago

The better design for a scientific calculator is Maxima, or some other keyboard-driven system where the primary UI is a command line. Why? Because you're communicating information-dense messages (equations, arithmetic problems, functions) and text remains the only way we have to do that. The command line is also the least discoverable UI imaginable. It has absolutely no obvious affordances beyond typing something into it and hoping you typed something the program understood. Even the error messages are going to be opaque unless you have some prior knowledge. There is no "just pick it up and go" with this. On the gripping hand, however, a command line is the most fluent UI short of the Emacs/ITS affinity for keystroke bindings. Once you know how to do something, you can get amazingly fast. It actively rewards muscle memory and familiarity, as opposed to menus and progressive disclosure, which are precisely as clunky on day one thousand as they are on day one. Speaking as an HP-48GX owner, a good button array with shift keys and some context-dependent buttons can be nearly as fast as a command line, but it's inherently more limited. My point is this: Discoverability is in tension with fluency, meaning that designing for experts is inherently different for designing for newbies, or people who use the software so rarely they're effectively always newbies. Removing functionality to unclutter an interface is newbie design thinking, as a command line is never cluttered. (Which isn't to say you can't do both. The Emacs GUI is newbie-friendly unless a newbie is in the habit of jamming odd key combinations at random.)

strokirk 7y ago
There's certainly big differences in command line apps and terminals though. Features like tab completion with inline docstrings, fish-style autocomplete, history with search-as-you-type, infinite scrollback, semantic colors, consistent interfaces, good help pages, dry-running and more all help to increase ease of use, discoverability and quicken the learning curve.