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And this is why software sucks. We should focus on educating users, not stooping to their level GUIs of old had a specific design language. Like: File, Edit, W

by tomc1985 7y ago

And this is why software sucks. We should focus on educating users, not stooping to their level GUIs of old had a specific design language. Like: File, Edit, Window, Help in the menubar -- always consistent, always in the same order, and always containing the same thing. Min/max/close buttons in the upper-right. And so on. If one knows the GUI language they can use almost any application for many solutions at a basic level. This knowledge is getting forgotten as "designers" take creative steps to eliminate seemingly all thought that goes along with software usage. Nowadays "user-friendly" software has 100 different ideas about how to accomplish a task and it almost always involves hiding scary things from stupid users. Which also means that when something goes wrong you have no control over fixing it -- you're simply fucked. Unlike the past when there was usually an option checkbox buried in a comprehensive Preferences window, and you could disable/modify the unwanted behavior. Ironically seemingly every app has to insult me with oftentimes unskippable tutorials and announcements just to reveal features that should have been easy to discover, but aren't, because the design language and UI standards have been forgotten and/or ignored. Extensability and control should be WAY more important than catering to the most ignorant users.

js8 7y ago
Also, in really well-designed UI of the past, every menu option had a hint in the status bar, every GUI element had a tool tip, that explained what will happen when you click on it. I find modern applications (especially mobile ones) much harder to discover and use. If you're a teen, you have plenty of time to experiment, but as an adult, I just want to get the work done. Yeah, you could say that I don't want to learn.. but I just want to learn bare minimum to get the job done. The application itself doesn't have to be minimalistic.
- lazyjeff 7y ago
  The original user interface components had a lot of detail, and focused on learnability. Look at the original scroll bars, they do quadruple duty: they tell you how long the document is, where you are in the document, let you jump to the area of the document you want, and let you scroll slowly. Modern scrollbars are a tiny strip that you have to keep poking at to make them visible; how is anyone going to learn to use that unless they already know about them? So many products have a short lifespan now, apps and websites, that it's not worth the time making them amazing. Anything good required someone to improve it over and over. I save links of cool projects I see on Hacker News and half of them stop working after a year. Almost none of them have their full original functionality after 5 years, and are full of broken links, crashing backends, and incompatibilities.
- collyw 7y ago
  Everything is prettier looking, but pretty icons without text are often meaningless.
- bakuninsbart 7y ago
  I think a major difference is also that for the teens of today, these apps are intuitive, if they are well designed. They take like 20 seconds to figure everything out. It is just us oldies who grew up with mouse and keyboard who have these problems.
  - asjw 7y ago
    I think it's just dumbing down the options. It's recognition over recollection. It is well known that recognition is easier, and that's why consistency help so much. But used everywhere, as if it was the only available tool, it makes discoverability less safe, hence it reduces it. If street signs are well positioned I don't need to know the route, if there are no signs and I don't recognize the place, I'm doomed. If an app does one thing, it's easy to remember how to do that one thing. But if another app does the same thing in a different way, now I have to remember two things and recall from memory which one uses which way.
    - whoopdedo 7y ago
      It's always been recognition over recollection. Users don't want to learn how the computer works. They just want to get to their desired solution as quick as possible. So they'll pay attention long enough to learn the correct sequence of buttons to push that achieves that then stop there. Any change to that mechanical process, no matter how innate to the UI it is, will be seen as a disruption. I used to think that UX inertia was a quality for old people not comfortable with computers. I thought that a younger generation which grew up using computers would be more comfortable and not show the same monkey-see-monkey-do habits. I was wrong. I watched a teenager consistently prefer to delete by right-clicking and selecting "Cut" instead of pressing the delete key, even though he knew it was the same thing and would occasionally use the keyboard. But because the "Cut" command was the first thing he learned that made an item disappear that's what he does. This application has different actions if you drag with left-click or right-click; he frequently confuses them. He didn't know that you can select multiple items by holding down the shift key. This is an honors student who has been using computers his whole life. Other than students pursuing a computer career, this is the typical teenage computer user. It's not that the UI is too difficult or opaque. They simply don't care to learn more than a surface level understanding. The objective isn't to create a world of gurus. It's to improve quality of life for everyone. I'd certainly appreciate a computer that allows me to geek out to my hearts content, but I am not the target audience. And the thing about a well designed simplified interface is it's simpler and more efficient for everyone, including the gurus. The catch is a lot of simplified interfaces aren't so well designed.
- Double_a_92 7y ago
  I've read somewhere that to some degree apps do that on purpose. The users feel a sense of "pride" when they figure everything out which reduces incentive to switch to a competitor app. Also users can bond over the app while they explain eachother how it works and what little tricks there are. I think Snapchat was the example used in the article that I read.
  - brokenmachine 7y ago
    That's an interesting take. It would certainly lessen the incentive to switch apps if it was difficult to learn the one you know.
gen3 7y ago
> And this is why software sucks. We should focus on educating users, not stooping to their level Some users just don't want to learn. It's the reason why I always get a phone call when [Thing I've tried to sit down and teach to grandma] needs to be done. You're on to something when talking about consistency and following design language. Building a good UI takes skill and thought into making the design intuitive enough that if it comes to it, anyone can figure it out. I think you can have a UI that is both usable for both sides of the bell curve, it just takes skill and testing.
- alpaca128 7y ago
  > Some users just don't want to learn. 100% agree. It took my grandma about two weeks with a tablet to figure out by herself how to look up oil prices in the web browser. It was the first device she ever used that was more powerful than an old Nokia mobile phone and her first contact with the internet. We never taught her what a web browser was or how to use it. Meanwhile my mother used a laptop and smartphone for years with everything that goes with it, and uses these devices mainly to complain about how they don't do exactly what she wants. It just has to work the first try or the computer is broken, there's no inbetween for her.
  - RhysU 7y ago
    > ... how to look up oil prices in the web browser. Grandma usually trades oil contracts by phone? Or Grandma heats with oil and needs a refill? Or Grandma has a salad dressing factory? Or...
    - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
      So many possibilities!
    - journalctl 7y ago
      I was also wondering that! I’m imagining my own grandmother: “No, I said 3,000 barrels of West Texas Intermediate, dammit! Make it happen or it’ll be your ass! slams down rotary phone”
xmprt 7y ago
The solution isn't to put things in preference windows either because even smart users will find that cumbersome. There's an interesting pair of videos (if you have some time) that goes over the UI of two competing music scoring software and why one is bad and the other good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A
- reacweb 7y ago
  A video to teach me about UI ! It is well known that text is a lot more effective than watching video.
- wirrbel 7y ago
  interesting, of course partially subjective. I switched to lilypond for typesetting music, I guess it may not be the right option for those who actually compose (I mostly typeset classical pieces to add fingering and obtain a better quality than the cheaply layouted scores that are published today have, unfortunately guitar sheet music is way behind the standards that are set in classical piano music, and just retyping things in lilypond improves the quality by A LOT).
EliRivers 7y ago
I learned very thoroughly that the software version details were under "Help -> About". If it's not there, I'm not only stumped; I'm genuinely angry. That doesn't have to be logical; emotional reactions happen by themselves. Making me angry with your software is not good for sales. Running on my desktop this very second; Postman. "Help" has no about. It has a "Check for Updates", but that doesn't tell me my current version. Only what new version is available. My response; a genuine feeling of frustration and anger.
- mruts 7y ago
  Yeah postman is the worst. I hate that pos with a passion.
  - nrb 7y ago
    I didn't notice how unhappy I was with Postman until I switched to Insomnia https://insomnia.rest/ https://insomnia.rest/
    - johnchristopher 7y ago
      I can't imagine how Postman must be infuriating as I am already unhappy with some of insomnia UI quirks. Although maybe it's fixed now.
  - Nextgrid 7y ago
    Paw is a good alternative.
- throwaway744678 7y ago
  On a related note, on Windows, double-checking the top left corner of a window used to close it (same behavior as the top-right X, but sometimes closer to the cursor) even if no icon were displayed. It gets annoying when nothing happens because the developer thought it would be nice to replace the default frame.
- userbinator 7y ago
  Newer versions of MS Office (with that ribbon) have the same problem. There is an About dialog, but getting to it is a process that I still can't remember after having to do it a few times. Yet Help->About is still in my mind after all these years, despite not using it all that much. The idiotic full screen save menu that forces you to click a few more times to save on the computer instead of a cloud service (I'm sure that's some sort of dark pattern...) is even worse, however. Edit: here's a good rant about that latter one: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/11058/save-me-from-shit-ui-you-can-t-be-saved https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/11058/save-me-from-shit-u...
_the_inflator 7y ago
> GUIs of old had a specific design language. Like: File, Edit, Window, Help in the menubar -- always consistent, always in the same order, and always containing the same thing. Min/max/close buttons in the upper-right. Mistake #1: Windows != GUI Apple has/had another design language. But Apple got it more right. Ironically Steve Jobs fulfilled Bill Gates mission (~a computer in household) with the iPhone. Mistake #2: "If one knows the GUI language they can use almost any application for many solutions at a basic level." No and no. It becomes clearer that this is exactly the hard part: figuring how to provide value to users without telling them they are too stupid to use our software and we need to educate them first. If you build the iPhone it really would be just another Windows device. ;) > Which also means that when something goes wrong you have no control over fixing it -- you're simply fucked You are not. In the end, all a user tries to do is changing a value in a database.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Nit pick: Bill Gates achieved his mission of a computer in every household long before iPhone. Jobs just changed the paradigm to a computer in every pocket.
- agent008t 7y ago
  A Linux/Windows computer in a household is a device that allows both consuming and creating. Many, if not most of us got into creating using a computer just by having access to one and being curious. An iPhone or an iPad is just a device for consumption. It completely hides, if not locks you out of, the underlying workings of the device, meaning that you learn nothing and you create nothing.
  - Angostura 7y ago
    You should have a play with Shortcuts on the iPhone - or Swift Playground, or any other the plethora of 3rd party coding platforms that run on iOS.
    - agent008t 7y ago
      By being given an iPhone/iPad and clicking around, you wouldn't even learn about what a filesystem is, let alone about anything else in terms of how your device works. On a PC, just by being bored you can learn quite a bit about how the OS works; you can access devtools from a browser; you can learn tons and tons by trying to get some old/obscure game to work; you can google "how to make a game" which would probably lead you to a download page for python, which you could install and start writing some scripts; you could easily stumble upon Blender and some tutorials and start 3D modelling.
blunte 7y ago
I have tried for years to educate users on basic tasks. A small percentage get it and use it; some basically get it and use it sometimes, forgetting other times; but some obviously pretend to watch the demonstration but actively refuse to think and commit to memory what they have just seen. In some cases I have worked with the same people for years, guiding them (IT-wise), being friends with them, watching them do domain-specific things that require good mental abilities... but also watching them misuse or fail to use software despite my repeated efforts to train them. If you want to reach the greatest audience and also reduce support time/cost, then we _should_ be catering to the most ignorant users. But as I say elsewhere, we should have two interfaces - one for normal/advanced users, and one for the really low performing users.
- Anthony-G 7y ago
  > some obviously pretend to watch the demonstration It’s easy to watch a lesson or demonstration and think you get it only to discover some time later that you didn’t really understand what was being shown. A much better approach is to walk people through performing the task themselves rather than passively watch it being done. They will be much more likely understand the task and to remember how to carry out the task – and retain that knowledge for a longer time.
cm2187 7y ago
Agree but the current fashion is unstructured, non hierarchical UI. Amazon Music and iTunes on Windows are the poster children, where is it always unclear to me how I got to a screen and how to get back there if I want.
johnchristopher 7y ago
Personal pet peeve of mine is the Visual Studio Code and Windows Terminal Preview configuration. The first one has a JSON flat file to store settings and you have to dig the documentation or compare the original file to change something (this level of discoverability is akin to reading the source code but it's an electron map, not dwm). Later on they bolted some kind of semi-automatic UI on top of it but it doesn't help me figuring out shortcuts and whatever settings I want to change/find. The Windows Terminal Preview config opens another flat JSON file in notepad. At least in VS I can used the editor to navigate the file :D. I thought the preferences menu under the edit menu vs under the tools menu in linux/windows was ridiculous but those two examples are worse.
- anieberry 7y ago
  I absolutely love the VSC way of doing things, it means you can backup all your settings in a single JSON file. The UI they've built on top of it seems to work well enough too and is quickly searchable.
  - zbentley 7y ago
    Strongly disagree. I don't want to have to think about structured data or syntactic validity, or trust a magical autocomplete to show me what options are available (and if it doesn't, does that mean it's a freetext preference? Or the autocomplete is broken? Or I invalidated the syntax somewhere else in the file and it no longer knows what I'm trying to do?) when I'm trying to configure software. Configuration is not like building things. Unless I'm truly tinkering for fun, I usually have a goal in mind. Like, sure, I have to mess around with program code and structured data formats all the time. I'm pretty good at it. But when I want to [re]configure something about my IDE or terminal, I want to be in and out as fast as possible and basically not have to think about it; configuration is a brief diversion not an end in itself. I'd be less entitled and ranty if these were CLI/unix internal tools we're talking about. The convention with that ecosystem is config files and manpages to learn how to use them. Given that convention and the resources of the OSS community it would be silly to insist on GUIs there (though some do exist!). But Windows Terminal and VS are graphical programs that are made by a GUI-first software company with basically unlimited resources. Come on. Also, re: backup and restore, "export" or "store configuration at so-and-so path" are far better options--see iTerm2's config export/sync-via-dropbox-or-whatever option; coupled with that terminal's excellent preference UI, it makes config management a breeze, and that software was mostly developed by one person! /rant
ozim 7y ago
"We should focus on educating users, not stooping to their level" Educating users costs money as well. From business perspective, no one is going to spend that money.
AmericanChopper 7y ago
Well first of all, I’d say that good modern interfaces don’t have any of those problems you’ve described. I completely don’t get this romanticization of old apps. Sure there’s plenty of shitty software made today. But complex and inscrutable interfaces were the norm not so long ago, and nobody even had much of a reference point to describe how bad they actually were. Perhaps you just think they were better because you had enough exposure to understand all the peculiar complexities and anti-patterns that were popular back then? But more importantly, educating users is not the job of app developers, and any attempt to make it so will fail miserably. If you want to make an app that people will use, then you need to make one that suits your customers needs. The real ones, who already exist. You can’t make an app that tries to transform customers into something you that want them to be, and expect it to succeed.
- boredinstapanda 7y ago
  I really think that while, interfaces are less complex these days, they're much more inscrutable, especially with the advent of flat interfaces. You can't tell what's a control or action item or not anymore.
aequitas 7y ago
This is why I love macOS. Every application has the menubar at the top with everything in the right place. Apple's design guidelines also dictate that every action should be available as menu item. Preferences can always be summoned using the same keyboard shortcut, File open/save dialogs behave the same. It just works. Except for those few applications that are plainly ported from Windows or Linux without a thought about the native platform they run on. They just don't fit in.
- viklove 7y ago
  Then you want to disable mouse acceleration, and you're humped. Apple's approach to simplicity is just to extinguish user choice. That's not a great approach.
  - chongli 7y ago
    The trick to disabling mouse acceleration is not to move the slider all the way to the left. I believe it’s the position two notches to the right of the lowest setting which gives a linear response. Above and below that point you’re flipping the concavity of the curve.
- tomc1985 7y ago
  Funny enough Office for Mac still has those classic menus with the same layout/options whereas Office for Windows took them out
kube-system 7y ago
I'd agree with you if we're just talking about business users, or even home users with high-educational attainment. But this article is specifically about the broader population. In that context, I think your assessment that 'old GUIs' were more user-friendly is very rose-tinted. Back in the early 90s when those GUIs were everywhere, personal computers came with documentation, usually still on paper, because the devices weren't even user friendly enough that a typical purchaser could power on the computer and view documentation without help. And even then, these purchasers were a tiny subset of the population, typically with high educational achievement. This was a time when public opinion hadn't even yet tilted in the direction of considering computer literacy to be a skill useful outside of an office building. Computer skills were definitely (and even to some degree still is) something people would list on a resume. Consider the introduction of iOS. Windows Mobile had more features, more applications, was available on cheaper phones, and was entrenched in the business market at the time. It even followed traditional Windows design patterns, and applications often had a menu bar, as to your preference. They had plenty of documentation, and a link for 'Help' was always just a click away inside the Start Menu. So, why was iOS so successful? It wasn't because power-users like you and I switched over. Many power-users mocked the device. It wasn't successful for including user documentation, it didn't and still doesn't. iOS was successful because it could be used by people who were unable or unwilling to read and follow documentation before using such a device. Computer literacy is certainly a good academic initiative, but it won't help you make successful software for the mass market. The vast majority of casual computer users won't pursue educational endeavors to use your application. Most will opt for an alternative that doesn't require it, or they won't use it at all. You should always consider the intended audience for your application. In our information bubble we sometimes lose an accurate perspective of the skills of the general public. This is of little consequence for many applications, but if your application is truly intended for the general public, like a government website, it's something that might need to be highly prioritized.

js8 7y ago

Also, in really well-designed UI of the past, every menu option had a hint in the status bar, every GUI element had a tool tip, that explained what will happen when you click on it. I find modern applications (especially mobile ones) much harder to discover and use. If you're a teen, you have plenty of time to experiment, but as an adult, I just want to get the work done. Yeah, you could say that I don't want to learn.. but I just want to learn bare minimum to get the job done. The application itself doesn't have to be minimalistic.

lazyjeff 7y ago
The original user interface components had a lot of detail, and focused on learnability. Look at the original scroll bars, they do quadruple duty: they tell you how long the document is, where you are in the document, let you jump to the area of the document you want, and let you scroll slowly. Modern scrollbars are a tiny strip that you have to keep poking at to make them visible; how is anyone going to learn to use that unless they already know about them? So many products have a short lifespan now, apps and websites, that it's not worth the time making them amazing. Anything good required someone to improve it over and over. I save links of cool projects I see on Hacker News and half of them stop working after a year. Almost none of them have their full original functionality after 5 years, and are full of broken links, crashing backends, and incompatibilities.
collyw 7y ago
Everything is prettier looking, but pretty icons without text are often meaningless.
bakuninsbart 7y ago
I think a major difference is also that for the teens of today, these apps are intuitive, if they are well designed. They take like 20 seconds to figure everything out. It is just us oldies who grew up with mouse and keyboard who have these problems.
- asjw 7y ago
  I think it's just dumbing down the options. It's recognition over recollection. It is well known that recognition is easier, and that's why consistency help so much. But used everywhere, as if it was the only available tool, it makes discoverability less safe, hence it reduces it. If street signs are well positioned I don't need to know the route, if there are no signs and I don't recognize the place, I'm doomed. If an app does one thing, it's easy to remember how to do that one thing. But if another app does the same thing in a different way, now I have to remember two things and recall from memory which one uses which way.
  - whoopdedo 7y ago
    It's always been recognition over recollection. Users don't want to learn how the computer works. They just want to get to their desired solution as quick as possible. So they'll pay attention long enough to learn the correct sequence of buttons to push that achieves that then stop there. Any change to that mechanical process, no matter how innate to the UI it is, will be seen as a disruption. I used to think that UX inertia was a quality for old people not comfortable with computers. I thought that a younger generation which grew up using computers would be more comfortable and not show the same monkey-see-monkey-do habits. I was wrong. I watched a teenager consistently prefer to delete by right-clicking and selecting "Cut" instead of pressing the delete key, even though he knew it was the same thing and would occasionally use the keyboard. But because the "Cut" command was the first thing he learned that made an item disappear that's what he does. This application has different actions if you drag with left-click or right-click; he frequently confuses them. He didn't know that you can select multiple items by holding down the shift key. This is an honors student who has been using computers his whole life. Other than students pursuing a computer career, this is the typical teenage computer user. It's not that the UI is too difficult or opaque. They simply don't care to learn more than a surface level understanding. The objective isn't to create a world of gurus. It's to improve quality of life for everyone. I'd certainly appreciate a computer that allows me to geek out to my hearts content, but I am not the target audience. And the thing about a well designed simplified interface is it's simpler and more efficient for everyone, including the gurus. The catch is a lot of simplified interfaces aren't so well designed.
Double_a_92 7y ago
I've read somewhere that to some degree apps do that on purpose. The users feel a sense of "pride" when they figure everything out which reduces incentive to switch to a competitor app. Also users can bond over the app while they explain eachother how it works and what little tricks there are. I think Snapchat was the example used in the article that I read.
- brokenmachine 7y ago
  That's an interesting take. It would certainly lessen the incentive to switch apps if it was difficult to learn the one you know.

gen3 7y ago

> And this is why software sucks. We should focus on educating users, not stooping to their level Some users just don't want to learn. It's the reason why I always get a phone call when [Thing I've tried to sit down and teach to grandma] needs to be done. You're on to something when talking about consistency and following design language. Building a good UI takes skill and thought into making the design intuitive enough that if it comes to it, anyone can figure it out. I think you can have a UI that is both usable for both sides of the bell curve, it just takes skill and testing.

alpaca128 7y ago
> Some users just don't want to learn. 100% agree. It took my grandma about two weeks with a tablet to figure out by herself how to look up oil prices in the web browser. It was the first device she ever used that was more powerful than an old Nokia mobile phone and her first contact with the internet. We never taught her what a web browser was or how to use it. Meanwhile my mother used a laptop and smartphone for years with everything that goes with it, and uses these devices mainly to complain about how they don't do exactly what she wants. It just has to work the first try or the computer is broken, there's no inbetween for her.
- RhysU 7y ago
  > ... how to look up oil prices in the web browser. Grandma usually trades oil contracts by phone? Or Grandma heats with oil and needs a refill? Or Grandma has a salad dressing factory? Or...
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    So many possibilities!
  - journalctl 7y ago
    I was also wondering that! I’m imagining my own grandmother: “No, I said 3,000 barrels of West Texas Intermediate, dammit! Make it happen or it’ll be your ass! slams down rotary phone”

xmprt 7y ago

The solution isn't to put things in preference windows either because even smart users will find that cumbersome. There's an interesting pair of videos (if you have some time) that goes over the UI of two competing music scoring software and why one is bad and the other good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKx1wnXClcI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hZxo96x48A

reacweb 7y ago
A video to teach me about UI ! It is well known that text is a lot more effective than watching video.
wirrbel 7y ago
interesting, of course partially subjective. I switched to lilypond for typesetting music, I guess it may not be the right option for those who actually compose (I mostly typeset classical pieces to add fingering and obtain a better quality than the cheaply layouted scores that are published today have, unfortunately guitar sheet music is way behind the standards that are set in classical piano music, and just retyping things in lilypond improves the quality by A LOT).

EliRivers 7y ago

I learned very thoroughly that the software version details were under "Help -> About". If it's not there, I'm not only stumped; I'm genuinely angry. That doesn't have to be logical; emotional reactions happen by themselves. Making me angry with your software is not good for sales. Running on my desktop this very second; Postman. "Help" has no about. It has a "Check for Updates", but that doesn't tell me my current version. Only what new version is available. My response; a genuine feeling of frustration and anger.

mruts 7y ago
Yeah postman is the worst. I hate that pos with a passion.
- nrb 7y ago
  I didn't notice how unhappy I was with Postman until I switched to Insomnia https://insomnia.rest/ https://insomnia.rest/
  - johnchristopher 7y ago
    I can't imagine how Postman must be infuriating as I am already unhappy with some of insomnia UI quirks. Although maybe it's fixed now.
- Nextgrid 7y ago
  Paw is a good alternative.
throwaway744678 7y ago
On a related note, on Windows, double-checking the top left corner of a window used to close it (same behavior as the top-right X, but sometimes closer to the cursor) even if no icon were displayed. It gets annoying when nothing happens because the developer thought it would be nice to replace the default frame.
userbinator 7y ago
Newer versions of MS Office (with that ribbon) have the same problem. There is an About dialog, but getting to it is a process that I still can't remember after having to do it a few times. Yet Help->About is still in my mind after all these years, despite not using it all that much. The idiotic full screen save menu that forces you to click a few more times to save on the computer instead of a cloud service (I'm sure that's some sort of dark pattern...) is even worse, however. Edit: here's a good rant about that latter one: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/11058/save-me-from-shit-ui-you-can-t-be-saved https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/11058/save-me-from-shit-u...

_the_inflator 7y ago

> GUIs of old had a specific design language. Like: File, Edit, Window, Help in the menubar -- always consistent, always in the same order, and always containing the same thing. Min/max/close buttons in the upper-right. Mistake #1: Windows != GUI Apple has/had another design language. But Apple got it more right. Ironically Steve Jobs fulfilled Bill Gates mission (~a computer in household) with the iPhone. Mistake #2: "If one knows the GUI language they can use almost any application for many solutions at a basic level." No and no. It becomes clearer that this is exactly the hard part: figuring how to provide value to users without telling them they are too stupid to use our software and we need to educate them first. If you build the iPhone it really would be just another Windows device. ;) > Which also means that when something goes wrong you have no control over fixing it -- you're simply fucked You are not. In the end, all a user tries to do is changing a value in a database.

cameronbrown 7y ago
Nit pick: Bill Gates achieved his mission of a computer in every household long before iPhone. Jobs just changed the paradigm to a computer in every pocket.
agent008t 7y ago
A Linux/Windows computer in a household is a device that allows both consuming and creating. Many, if not most of us got into creating using a computer just by having access to one and being curious. An iPhone or an iPad is just a device for consumption. It completely hides, if not locks you out of, the underlying workings of the device, meaning that you learn nothing and you create nothing.
- Angostura 7y ago
  You should have a play with Shortcuts on the iPhone - or Swift Playground, or any other the plethora of 3rd party coding platforms that run on iOS.
  - agent008t 7y ago
    By being given an iPhone/iPad and clicking around, you wouldn't even learn about what a filesystem is, let alone about anything else in terms of how your device works. On a PC, just by being bored you can learn quite a bit about how the OS works; you can access devtools from a browser; you can learn tons and tons by trying to get some old/obscure game to work; you can google "how to make a game" which would probably lead you to a download page for python, which you could install and start writing some scripts; you could easily stumble upon Blender and some tutorials and start 3D modelling.

blunte 7y ago

I have tried for years to educate users on basic tasks. A small percentage get it and use it; some basically get it and use it sometimes, forgetting other times; but some obviously pretend to watch the demonstration but actively refuse to think and commit to memory what they have just seen. In some cases I have worked with the same people for years, guiding them (IT-wise), being friends with them, watching them do domain-specific things that require good mental abilities... but also watching them misuse or fail to use software despite my repeated efforts to train them. If you want to reach the greatest audience and also reduce support time/cost, then we _should_ be catering to the most ignorant users. But as I say elsewhere, we should have two interfaces - one for normal/advanced users, and one for the really low performing users.

Anthony-G 7y ago
> some obviously pretend to watch the demonstration It’s easy to watch a lesson or demonstration and think you get it only to discover some time later that you didn’t really understand what was being shown. A much better approach is to walk people through performing the task themselves rather than passively watch it being done. They will be much more likely understand the task and to remember how to carry out the task – and retain that knowledge for a longer time.

cm2187 7y ago

Agree but the current fashion is unstructured, non hierarchical UI. Amazon Music and iTunes on Windows are the poster children, where is it always unclear to me how I got to a screen and how to get back there if I want.

johnchristopher 7y ago

Personal pet peeve of mine is the Visual Studio Code and Windows Terminal Preview configuration. The first one has a JSON flat file to store settings and you have to dig the documentation or compare the original file to change something (this level of discoverability is akin to reading the source code but it's an electron map, not dwm). Later on they bolted some kind of semi-automatic UI on top of it but it doesn't help me figuring out shortcuts and whatever settings I want to change/find. The Windows Terminal Preview config opens another flat JSON file in notepad. At least in VS I can used the editor to navigate the file :D. I thought the preferences menu under the edit menu vs under the tools menu in linux/windows was ridiculous but those two examples are worse.

anieberry 7y ago
I absolutely love the VSC way of doing things, it means you can backup all your settings in a single JSON file. The UI they've built on top of it seems to work well enough too and is quickly searchable.
- zbentley 7y ago
  Strongly disagree. I don't want to have to think about structured data or syntactic validity, or trust a magical autocomplete to show me what options are available (and if it doesn't, does that mean it's a freetext preference? Or the autocomplete is broken? Or I invalidated the syntax somewhere else in the file and it no longer knows what I'm trying to do?) when I'm trying to configure software. Configuration is not like building things. Unless I'm truly tinkering for fun, I usually have a goal in mind. Like, sure, I have to mess around with program code and structured data formats all the time. I'm pretty good at it. But when I want to [re]configure something about my IDE or terminal, I want to be in and out as fast as possible and basically not have to think about it; configuration is a brief diversion not an end in itself. I'd be less entitled and ranty if these were CLI/unix internal tools we're talking about. The convention with that ecosystem is config files and manpages to learn how to use them. Given that convention and the resources of the OSS community it would be silly to insist on GUIs there (though some do exist!). But Windows Terminal and VS are graphical programs that are made by a GUI-first software company with basically unlimited resources. Come on. Also, re: backup and restore, "export" or "store configuration at so-and-so path" are far better options--see iTerm2's config export/sync-via-dropbox-or-whatever option; coupled with that terminal's excellent preference UI, it makes config management a breeze, and that software was mostly developed by one person! /rant

ozim 7y ago

"We should focus on educating users, not stooping to their level" Educating users costs money as well. From business perspective, no one is going to spend that money.

AmericanChopper 7y ago

Well first of all, I’d say that good modern interfaces don’t have any of those problems you’ve described. I completely don’t get this romanticization of old apps. Sure there’s plenty of shitty software made today. But complex and inscrutable interfaces were the norm not so long ago, and nobody even had much of a reference point to describe how bad they actually were. Perhaps you just think they were better because you had enough exposure to understand all the peculiar complexities and anti-patterns that were popular back then? But more importantly, educating users is not the job of app developers, and any attempt to make it so will fail miserably. If you want to make an app that people will use, then you need to make one that suits your customers needs. The real ones, who already exist. You can’t make an app that tries to transform customers into something you that want them to be, and expect it to succeed.

boredinstapanda 7y ago
I really think that while, interfaces are less complex these days, they're much more inscrutable, especially with the advent of flat interfaces. You can't tell what's a control or action item or not anymore.

aequitas 7y ago

This is why I love macOS. Every application has the menubar at the top with everything in the right place. Apple's design guidelines also dictate that every action should be available as menu item. Preferences can always be summoned using the same keyboard shortcut, File open/save dialogs behave the same. It just works. Except for those few applications that are plainly ported from Windows or Linux without a thought about the native platform they run on. They just don't fit in.

viklove 7y ago
Then you want to disable mouse acceleration, and you're humped. Apple's approach to simplicity is just to extinguish user choice. That's not a great approach.
- chongli 7y ago
  The trick to disabling mouse acceleration is not to move the slider all the way to the left. I believe it’s the position two notches to the right of the lowest setting which gives a linear response. Above and below that point you’re flipping the concavity of the curve.
tomc1985 7y ago
Funny enough Office for Mac still has those classic menus with the same layout/options whereas Office for Windows took them out

kube-system 7y ago

I'd agree with you if we're just talking about business users, or even home users with high-educational attainment. But this article is specifically about the broader population. In that context, I think your assessment that 'old GUIs' were more user-friendly is very rose-tinted. Back in the early 90s when those GUIs were everywhere, personal computers came with documentation, usually still on paper, because the devices weren't even user friendly enough that a typical purchaser could power on the computer and view documentation without help. And even then, these purchasers were a tiny subset of the population, typically with high educational achievement. This was a time when public opinion hadn't even yet tilted in the direction of considering computer literacy to be a skill useful outside of an office building. Computer skills were definitely (and even to some degree still is) something people would list on a resume. Consider the introduction of iOS. Windows Mobile had more features, more applications, was available on cheaper phones, and was entrenched in the business market at the time. It even followed traditional Windows design patterns, and applications often had a menu bar, as to your preference. They had plenty of documentation, and a link for 'Help' was always just a click away inside the Start Menu. So, why was iOS so successful? It wasn't because power-users like you and I switched over. Many power-users mocked the device. It wasn't successful for including user documentation, it didn't and still doesn't. iOS was successful because it could be used by people who were unable or unwilling to read and follow documentation before using such a device. Computer literacy is certainly a good academic initiative, but it won't help you make successful software for the mass market. The vast majority of casual computer users won't pursue educational endeavors to use your application. Most will opt for an alternative that doesn't require it, or they won't use it at all. You should always consider the intended audience for your application. In our information bubble we sometimes lose an accurate perspective of the skills of the general public. This is of little consequence for many applications, but if your application is truly intended for the general public, like a government website, it's something that might need to be highly prioritized.