5 ms·

This is a very hard rant to read. The examples either aren't factually true or are poorly explained and the "solution" is largely nebulous. I feel like this to

This is a very hard rant to read. The examples either aren't factually true or are poorly explained and the "solution" is largely nebulous. I feel like this topic has merit and with a well written article with real examples (both 2019 and 83) it could be something special, but this isn't that. I'd be interested to know how many upvoted based on the title/what they expected this to be, rather than after having tried to read it. Most of the replies from the older thread are about the title alone (or being critical of the content).

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
I found the list great and it fit the twitter format well. I usually don’t like twitter but it is what it is and this seems like what it is good for. I disagree about mice but everything else hit the nail on the head for how frustrating it is to be using basically supercomputers and still be sitting around waiting on code bloat.
kibwen 7y ago
I upvoted it, but I have mixed feelings about it. I agree with the overall sentiment that it's ludicrous how much slower everything feels on computers these days: we're able to do more complex things than ever, which is great, but it's hard to rationalize why even the simple things that we've been doing forever have become so sluggish. My first job out of college was to migrate an internal inventory management system from a in-terminal keyboard-based application (which nobody could be hired to maintain, as they stopped teaching IBM-RPG to college grads twenty years before) to a webapp. As part of gathering requirements I learned how to use it, and god damn was it fast. I watched salespeople and warehouse stockers alike fly through the menus so fast that they didn't even need to wait for screens to draw before advancing (and the screens were snap-quick to draw!), they just conjured the paths they needed from muscle memory and batched up a dozen keypresses and boom, done. I felt awful imposing this new laggy webapp on them, though I did make sure to at least leave the familiar keyboard shortcuts. But at the same time I think the author is somewhat overselling the idea that keyboard interfaces are just as intuitive as mouse interfaces. To use the application above as an example, when we showed the new webapp to people who only had cause to use this system occasionally, they were able to navigate it more easily and professed to prefer it over the old one. Contrast this with people who used the system all day, who grumbled at the loss of productivity and need to re-learn things. Keyboard shortcuts are great for power users who have cause to master an application thoroughly. For occasional users who don't need to master it and don't want to learn anything, a mouse will get them up and running faster. And, of course, there's still no excuse for how much lag and slowness we willingly endure in our modern UIs.
- feanaro 7y ago
  I feel like a large part of the unintuitiveness of keyboard interfaces is not actually an intrinsic quality of keyboard interfaces since they're so often conflated with command-line or TUI interfaces. There might be an alternative but yet undiscovered paradigm which combines the best of both worlds: keyboard control and intuitive, beautiful, graphical widgets. To motivate this with a somewhat blunt example, what if we had a typical GUI but named each control (button, field, etc) with a short code (1-2 letters), in the style of Vimperator/Tridactyl/Vimium? You lose none of the intuitiveness and discoverability, but suddenly you can select the control much more quickly and precisely than clumsily trying to point a mouse pointer onto it. And that's just a silly example I came off the top of my head now. There may be much better keyboard-centric yet intuitive paradigms.
  - naravara 7y ago
    >To motivate this with a somewhat blunt example, what if we had a typical GUI but named each control (button, field, etc) with a short code (1-2 letters), in the style of Vimperator/Tridactyl/Vimium? Excel basically does this. If you hold down alt it hovers the companion hotkey above each function on the ribbon. It is very handy for learning your way around. I think this is actually the big challenge with keyboard interfaces is that there is a learning curve. The advantage of mouse (or even mores touchscreens) is that a literal monkey can figure it out. But they're also limited in what they can do and how quickly they can do it. Meanwhile, keyboard based inputs take some time to learn but become extremely powerful once you're adept at them. But for non-power users who aren't that comfortable navigating a computer, it can feel like trying to learn a musical instrument for them. We nerds can flit from one interface to another because a lot of the general mechanics and muscle memory can carry over. But for people who haven't trained that skill it's much harder to learn these things, similar to playing video games. People who have never done it have no clue what they're doing when you put a controller in their hands.
    - feanaro 7y ago
      I mostly agree with your point: keyboard interfaces are often harder to learn than the standard graphical mouse interface. But I'd like to argue that a mouse also takes a bit of time to grok when you first encounter it. A simple interface like "each thing on the screen has a two-letter code; type the code to select it" doesn't sound intrinsically harder to explain to me than teaching someone how to use a mouse the first time. Especially when you consider that there's often a lot of subtlety in when to use the right or the left button. I find this is something that often trips up people that are encountering a mouse for the first time.
sannysanoff 7y ago
I upvoted it because I wrote and spoke this last 20 years. Keyboard buffer. You know what is keyboard buffer?
- ptx 7y ago
  It's the thing that used to let me connect to a network in Windows 7 by rapidly typing win, s, n, f to open the start menu -> settings -> network -> Foobar Example VPN – without having to wait for Windows to catch up between the steps. The commands are buffered as you type and executed when the system is ready. Of course, this doesn't work anymore in Windows 10. Now you have to wait for each bit of mysterious UI to load before you can click on to the next step.
horsawlarway 7y ago
I read the whole thing. I thought it was a pretty trash rant. My thoughts while reading roughly went:: "Everything was blindingly fast in the 80s!" - Yes you fuckwad, it was the 80s and the vast majority of content was local to your machine, or your machine was really just a terminal wired to a nearby mainframe. Do I need to link the "latencies every programmer should know?" article yet again? https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_latency.html https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_l... The delay is not some UI designer out to get you, it's a fact of life when the data you want lives on a machine that is remote. Sadly RTT is still bound by the speed of light. That's why there's a freaking spinner. Your computer and the UI has SO much time to kill waiting for the network that they can render a happy little dancing spinner for you. "The mouse is a terrible invention" - Oh really? I think it's actually a great tool for pointing and clicking on things. I grew up playing video games on computers. The mouse is first class input device that works incredibly well. Better yet, its use doesn't vary all that much based on specific context and application. Yes, you had memorized your POS system well enough you can do it blind! Great, now fuck off. I use my computer across hundreds of applications every day. I have no desire to become a master of the hotkeys of each of those applications. I'd like to reserve the space in my head for things that matter. "I want to clarify that I am literally talking about the future of the human race and I am deadly serious about this. It's not about me." - No, I actually rather think it is exactly "about you". The author has failed to acknowledge the INCREDIBLY VAST expansion of a computer users reach over the last 30 years. I vividly remember playing my first multiple computer game. I was 10 and the computers had to be wired together with an old DB9 COM cable (branded a "gaming cable" at the time). Now I can literally watch webcams on the other side of the world from my house. I can click a few buttons (on my shiny mouse, I might add) and start a chain of events that leads to direct action on the other side of the world, from shipping me cheap shit or to planting trees. I can work from my house and still do my job just as well as if I were in the office. I can have a coworkers who live in Ukraine, Spain, Netherlands, Germany, etc. Not only can we be productive, we can laugh and chat online, or using video calls. BUT FUCK! How dare they add some latency in the process of getting you all that.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >"Everything was blindingly fast in the 80s!" - Yes you fuckwad, it was the 80s and the vast majority of content was local to your machine, or your machine was really just a terminal wired to a nearby mainframe. Do I need to link the "latencies every programmer should know?" article yet again? No, fuckwad, that's not it. Totally local UIs are much slower too, as often are local actions of remote UIs (e.g. typing, before anything is sent to the internet for that latency to be involved). There's the added latency of modern OS, hardware, and application layers (e.g.: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/). Plus, of course, fuckwad, there are tons of apps that could be local, but are just made either remote, or with slower web layers like Electron, just because (it might be easier or more convenient to port, but the author's point still remains: it's less responsive). P.S. Did you enjoy being called fuckwad? If not, don't calls other that.,
asdfman123 7y ago
I appreciated his complaints, but not his solution. Only a programmer would think that going back to keyboards is a good idea. Most people are happy waiting for a few seconds for their webpage to load, if it means they can do it without learning anything new. Programming is a profession, and we design software for people who have other interests than software. Many of us would be better off if we got better at empathizing with people who are not like us.
- mlyle 7y ago
  > Only a programmer would think that going back to keyboards is a good idea. He goes too far and his suggestions are nebulous. But it sure would be nice to go back somewhat to the keyboard. There are so many apps with broken tab-orders; so many common operations without common shortcuts; so many badly tuned completion engines; bad interactions with autofill, etc. There's a whole lot of stuff that I could do faster on the keyboard, but I am being constantly trained to not dare assuming I can fly through and the right things will happen. In any application that I am not positive will do the "right things", I am slow and tentative. It's bad for accessibility, too. A vision deficit or dexterity deficit impacts mouse use harshly. We need to go back to making the keyboard experience good. Not just in individual applications, but across the board. While we're at it, we should realize that being too free in design choices has negative impacts to user. There was a time that Apple really cared about this stuff, for instance, and usability on Apples excelled because you knew that there was a lot of effort in the developer community to do the right things and conform to common standards.
  - hindsightbias 7y ago
    And you have to have 3 browsers because 2 of them are broken on some field. I wonder how often updates cratered green consoles back in the day. Curses could be tricky at times. The path for many commercial UIs seems to be to map out complex processes into the most linear common path so that anyone off the street could do it. All that mouse action kneecaps productivity, and as soon as you come to an exception you enter a hell of popups or bazaar of UI elements. Then of course they chop out all the keyboard ahortcuts. Great UX is sort of like fusion, it’s always 30 years away.
ryandrake 7y ago
A better rant is “24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse” [1]. The thing I want to say when I hear programmers ranting about software performance is: Dude, you’re part of the problem! It’s like the guy who complains about traffic while sitting in his car on the freeway. You’re part of the problem and can help fix it. Everyone who put a spinner in rather than fix the underlying performance issue is part of the problem. Everyone who chose a slower interpreted language to sacrifice runtime speed for development speed is part of the problem. Everyone making a web request for something they can cache or compute faster locally is part of the problem. Anyone who makes their web site 2MB of Javascript around 20K of content is part of the problem. Collectively we are all doing this to ourselves little by little, and as experts and programmers we have the power to correct it, so do your part and correct it in your own software rather than just complaining! 1: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and-i-cant-move-my-mouse/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and...

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago

I found the list great and it fit the twitter format well. I usually don’t like twitter but it is what it is and this seems like what it is good for. I disagree about mice but everything else hit the nail on the head for how frustrating it is to be using basically supercomputers and still be sitting around waiting on code bloat.

kibwen 7y ago

I upvoted it, but I have mixed feelings about it. I agree with the overall sentiment that it's ludicrous how much slower everything feels on computers these days: we're able to do more complex things than ever, which is great, but it's hard to rationalize why even the simple things that we've been doing forever have become so sluggish. My first job out of college was to migrate an internal inventory management system from a in-terminal keyboard-based application (which nobody could be hired to maintain, as they stopped teaching IBM-RPG to college grads twenty years before) to a webapp. As part of gathering requirements I learned how to use it, and god damn was it fast. I watched salespeople and warehouse stockers alike fly through the menus so fast that they didn't even need to wait for screens to draw before advancing (and the screens were snap-quick to draw!), they just conjured the paths they needed from muscle memory and batched up a dozen keypresses and boom, done. I felt awful imposing this new laggy webapp on them, though I did make sure to at least leave the familiar keyboard shortcuts. But at the same time I think the author is somewhat overselling the idea that keyboard interfaces are just as intuitive as mouse interfaces. To use the application above as an example, when we showed the new webapp to people who only had cause to use this system occasionally, they were able to navigate it more easily and professed to prefer it over the old one. Contrast this with people who used the system all day, who grumbled at the loss of productivity and need to re-learn things. Keyboard shortcuts are great for power users who have cause to master an application thoroughly. For occasional users who don't need to master it and don't want to learn anything, a mouse will get them up and running faster. And, of course, there's still no excuse for how much lag and slowness we willingly endure in our modern UIs.

feanaro 7y ago
I feel like a large part of the unintuitiveness of keyboard interfaces is not actually an intrinsic quality of keyboard interfaces since they're so often conflated with command-line or TUI interfaces. There might be an alternative but yet undiscovered paradigm which combines the best of both worlds: keyboard control and intuitive, beautiful, graphical widgets. To motivate this with a somewhat blunt example, what if we had a typical GUI but named each control (button, field, etc) with a short code (1-2 letters), in the style of Vimperator/Tridactyl/Vimium? You lose none of the intuitiveness and discoverability, but suddenly you can select the control much more quickly and precisely than clumsily trying to point a mouse pointer onto it. And that's just a silly example I came off the top of my head now. There may be much better keyboard-centric yet intuitive paradigms.
- naravara 7y ago
  >To motivate this with a somewhat blunt example, what if we had a typical GUI but named each control (button, field, etc) with a short code (1-2 letters), in the style of Vimperator/Tridactyl/Vimium? Excel basically does this. If you hold down alt it hovers the companion hotkey above each function on the ribbon. It is very handy for learning your way around. I think this is actually the big challenge with keyboard interfaces is that there is a learning curve. The advantage of mouse (or even mores touchscreens) is that a literal monkey can figure it out. But they're also limited in what they can do and how quickly they can do it. Meanwhile, keyboard based inputs take some time to learn but become extremely powerful once you're adept at them. But for non-power users who aren't that comfortable navigating a computer, it can feel like trying to learn a musical instrument for them. We nerds can flit from one interface to another because a lot of the general mechanics and muscle memory can carry over. But for people who haven't trained that skill it's much harder to learn these things, similar to playing video games. People who have never done it have no clue what they're doing when you put a controller in their hands.
  - feanaro 7y ago
    I mostly agree with your point: keyboard interfaces are often harder to learn than the standard graphical mouse interface. But I'd like to argue that a mouse also takes a bit of time to grok when you first encounter it. A simple interface like "each thing on the screen has a two-letter code; type the code to select it" doesn't sound intrinsically harder to explain to me than teaching someone how to use a mouse the first time. Especially when you consider that there's often a lot of subtlety in when to use the right or the left button. I find this is something that often trips up people that are encountering a mouse for the first time.

sannysanoff 7y ago

I upvoted it because I wrote and spoke this last 20 years. Keyboard buffer. You know what is keyboard buffer?

ptx 7y ago
It's the thing that used to let me connect to a network in Windows 7 by rapidly typing win, s, n, f to open the start menu -> settings -> network -> Foobar Example VPN – without having to wait for Windows to catch up between the steps. The commands are buffered as you type and executed when the system is ready. Of course, this doesn't work anymore in Windows 10. Now you have to wait for each bit of mysterious UI to load before you can click on to the next step.

horsawlarway 7y ago

I read the whole thing. I thought it was a pretty trash rant. My thoughts while reading roughly went:: "Everything was blindingly fast in the 80s!" - Yes you fuckwad, it was the 80s and the vast majority of content was local to your machine, or your machine was really just a terminal wired to a nearby mainframe. Do I need to link the "latencies every programmer should know?" article yet again? https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_latency.html https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~rcs/research/interactive_l... The delay is not some UI designer out to get you, it's a fact of life when the data you want lives on a machine that is remote. Sadly RTT is still bound by the speed of light. That's why there's a freaking spinner. Your computer and the UI has SO much time to kill waiting for the network that they can render a happy little dancing spinner for you. "The mouse is a terrible invention" - Oh really? I think it's actually a great tool for pointing and clicking on things. I grew up playing video games on computers. The mouse is first class input device that works incredibly well. Better yet, its use doesn't vary all that much based on specific context and application. Yes, you had memorized your POS system well enough you can do it blind! Great, now fuck off. I use my computer across hundreds of applications every day. I have no desire to become a master of the hotkeys of each of those applications. I'd like to reserve the space in my head for things that matter. "I want to clarify that I am literally talking about the future of the human race and I am deadly serious about this. It's not about me." - No, I actually rather think it is exactly "about you". The author has failed to acknowledge the INCREDIBLY VAST expansion of a computer users reach over the last 30 years. I vividly remember playing my first multiple computer game. I was 10 and the computers had to be wired together with an old DB9 COM cable (branded a "gaming cable" at the time). Now I can literally watch webcams on the other side of the world from my house. I can click a few buttons (on my shiny mouse, I might add) and start a chain of events that leads to direct action on the other side of the world, from shipping me cheap shit or to planting trees. I can work from my house and still do my job just as well as if I were in the office. I can have a coworkers who live in Ukraine, Spain, Netherlands, Germany, etc. Not only can we be productive, we can laugh and chat online, or using video calls. BUT FUCK! How dare they add some latency in the process of getting you all that.

coldtea 7y ago
>"Everything was blindingly fast in the 80s!" - Yes you fuckwad, it was the 80s and the vast majority of content was local to your machine, or your machine was really just a terminal wired to a nearby mainframe. Do I need to link the "latencies every programmer should know?" article yet again? No, fuckwad, that's not it. Totally local UIs are much slower too, as often are local actions of remote UIs (e.g. typing, before anything is sent to the internet for that latency to be involved). There's the added latency of modern OS, hardware, and application layers (e.g.: https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/ https://pavelfatin.com/typing-with-pleasure/). Plus, of course, fuckwad, there are tons of apps that could be local, but are just made either remote, or with slower web layers like Electron, just because (it might be easier or more convenient to port, but the author's point still remains: it's less responsive). P.S. Did you enjoy being called fuckwad? If not, don't calls other that.,

asdfman123 7y ago

I appreciated his complaints, but not his solution. Only a programmer would think that going back to keyboards is a good idea. Most people are happy waiting for a few seconds for their webpage to load, if it means they can do it without learning anything new. Programming is a profession, and we design software for people who have other interests than software. Many of us would be better off if we got better at empathizing with people who are not like us.

mlyle 7y ago
> Only a programmer would think that going back to keyboards is a good idea. He goes too far and his suggestions are nebulous. But it sure would be nice to go back somewhat to the keyboard. There are so many apps with broken tab-orders; so many common operations without common shortcuts; so many badly tuned completion engines; bad interactions with autofill, etc. There's a whole lot of stuff that I could do faster on the keyboard, but I am being constantly trained to not dare assuming I can fly through and the right things will happen. In any application that I am not positive will do the "right things", I am slow and tentative. It's bad for accessibility, too. A vision deficit or dexterity deficit impacts mouse use harshly. We need to go back to making the keyboard experience good. Not just in individual applications, but across the board. While we're at it, we should realize that being too free in design choices has negative impacts to user. There was a time that Apple really cared about this stuff, for instance, and usability on Apples excelled because you knew that there was a lot of effort in the developer community to do the right things and conform to common standards.
- hindsightbias 7y ago
  And you have to have 3 browsers because 2 of them are broken on some field. I wonder how often updates cratered green consoles back in the day. Curses could be tricky at times. The path for many commercial UIs seems to be to map out complex processes into the most linear common path so that anyone off the street could do it. All that mouse action kneecaps productivity, and as soon as you come to an exception you enter a hell of popups or bazaar of UI elements. Then of course they chop out all the keyboard ahortcuts. Great UX is sort of like fusion, it’s always 30 years away.

ryandrake 7y ago

A better rant is “24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse” [1]. The thing I want to say when I hear programmers ranting about software performance is: Dude, you’re part of the problem! It’s like the guy who complains about traffic while sitting in his car on the freeway. You’re part of the problem and can help fix it. Everyone who put a spinner in rather than fix the underlying performance issue is part of the problem. Everyone who chose a slower interpreted language to sacrifice runtime speed for development speed is part of the problem. Everyone making a web request for something they can cache or compute faster locally is part of the problem. Anyone who makes their web site 2MB of Javascript around 20K of content is part of the problem. Collectively we are all doing this to ourselves little by little, and as experts and programmers we have the power to correct it, so do your part and correct it in your own software rather than just complaining! 1: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and-i-cant-move-my-mouse/ https://randomascii.wordpress.com/2017/07/09/24-core-cpu-and...