8 ms·

> At recent user interface conferences, several speakers have lamented that the human interface is stuck. We seem to have settled on the WIMP (windows, icons, m

> At recent user interface conferences, several speakers have lamented that the human interface is stuck. We seem to have settled on the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) model, and there is very little real innovation in interface design anymore. Alternately, you can say that UX design stabilized on a known good pattern. This reminds me of how some people will refer to stable software projects that only receive the occasional security patch as "abandoned". They're not abandoned, they're just stable.

nappy 6y ago
This comment is full of wisdom
burnte 6y ago
I completely agree. The design of a hammer hasn't changed much in centuries because it's already designed well for its purpose. Same thing with sharks, I don't hear biologists say "there hasn't been much innovation in sharks for millions of years."
- suyash 6y ago
  I consider myself one of those people who would comment about the design of hammer being stuck and more people should, that is how we innovate. The real world is always changing and evolving with time, so are technologies be it for computers - UI that allowed for the desktop GUI paradigm in the 90's to today where Alexa, Siri can help us do lot of those tasks just by commanding over voice. We need to certainly move on and innovate the user interface for desktop GUI or for other devices.
  - wruza 6y ago
    What is new proposal for a hammer, may I ask?
    - blinkeer 6y ago
      Pneumatic press, nail gun, screwdriver, impact wrench, seems like these could work, while maybe not a direct dirivative. Some things persist, and are stable as others have noted. A cool thing about innovation is that the ideas are often things people didn't know they wanted until they see it.
      - wruza 6y ago
        These are not improvements of a hammer design, but completely different things. Screws do not play well with deformation, but let’s ignore that: you’ll probably have both a hammer and one of these things in your toolbox, and you’ll miss a hammer if it’s not there. It is a general-purpose hit-force tool for hitting anything, not only nails. A better design for a hammer itself could include a claw or new hitting surface geometry, handle amortizer and so on, which are successfully done in variety, despite gp thinks that it’s “stuck”. First, it’s not, we just waited for better materials, advanced tasks, etc. Second, it is not much to do with hitting something with inertia-accumulated force. Anyway my point is that if you change all hammers in the world overnight (like software does) you better have done a good job of century-testing your changes in all situations. If your reasoning is just “it gets old”, well, this site’s rules do not allow me to express what I think of that.
    - cameron_b 6y ago
      Instead of whamming in a pointy cylinder, that stress and vibration might work it out back against the force of our whamming, we TWIST in a similar bit of hardware, only we wrap an inclined plane around the cylinder so that it cuts as we twist, making a walled channel that resists working out backwards under vibration.
      - na85 6y ago
        Witty, but nails and screws serve different use-cases. Nails have better shear properties, for example.
    - suyash 6y ago
      Ok, let's play do this imaginative exercise - Hammer looks simple but actually if you're few inches off while slamming it down, you can seriously injure yourself if you're holding the nails with your other hand. I'm sure we have all experienced that. How about a sensor that always drives the motion in the right location, it can be done by having sensors that feel your muscle twitches and angle then recalibrate using camera to the right angle and nails it in (pun intended). Another idea is a Swiss army knife but something that combines hammer, screwdriver, wrench into one design design offsetting the need to by separate tools.
  - dmitriid 6y ago
    > where Alexa, Siri can help us do lot of those tasks just by commanding over voice How "many of these tasks" can they reliably help you do? They screw up even the simplest tasks like setting a timer.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- brownjohnf 6y ago
  The design of a hammer has actually changed substantially over time. More recently, there's been a trend towards specialization in the framing hammer alone. 100 years ago most hammers looked like the classic hammers I remember from childhood: relatively small, sharply curved claws, a smooth face. As production framing exploded in the US after WWII, framers were pushing for more efficiency. The framing hammer got heavier with a longer handle, broader face, straighter claw, and waffled face better for gripping nails (also why most loose framing nails have a cross-hatched pattern: so they can mate with the hammer face). From there, materials science really kicked in, and we saw steel-handled models, followed by fiberglass and other composite handles. The latest developments (that I'm aware of) are products like the Stiletto (http://www.stiletto.com/p-80-ti-bone-iii-hammer-with-milled-face-and-18in-curved-handle.aspx http://www.stiletto.com/p-80-ti-bone-iii-hammer-with-milled-...), which leverage materials like titanium to reduce weight while maintaining driving power, and include a replaceable steel face to prolong hammer life and allow using different faces for different applications. Modern hammers with advanced material properties and functions can cost hundreds of dollars, but deliver much higher efficiency with less fatigue and a longer life. I compare that with the Sears hammer in my grandfather's garage and see a whole new generation of evolution. There's a great article about hammer history at Fine Homebuilding: https://www.finehomebuilding.com/project-guides/framing/hammered-the-history-of-hammer-design https://www.finehomebuilding.com/project-guides/framing/hamm... edited: Fix link formatting.
  - Osiris 6y ago
    The think this supports the OPs argument that we're refining, not inventing. Everything you've said here is about refining, it's not a completely new way to attach materials together.
    - brownjohnf 6y ago
      Yeah, probably should have clarified that I intended no comment on the OPs comment about innovation in computer UI. Just wanted to point out that there's actually a surprising amount of evolution in design of the hammer. Something that seems to be so simple, and has existed for thousands of years, can still be made better. I'm not a professional carpenter, but I've used a hammer a lot to do things like framing, and can confirm that many of these innovations are meaningful in function, not just form.
- Nition 6y ago
  On the other hand, sometimes it's just that people get so used to something, they don't take a close look at how it could be improved. Bows stayed much the same for centuries until the compound bow appeared in the 1960s.
- neokrish 6y ago
  The hammer analogy has its limitations here. When the task is simple (hitting a nail), a simple and good design lasts. When the task(s) is/are complicated, depend on context, are tied to human understanding, knowledge or training in using machines, then design could benefit from both refinements as well as radical and creative thinking. I also don’t think that just because we have a good design, even for a hammer, we should stop people from challenging norms and thinking in bold ways. Here’s a contrasting example to hammers - chairs. The objective is simple, to sit on it. The design innovations still continue to this day, on how a chair can be structured. There have been interpretations of chairs that challenge the very notion that chairs need legs.
  - paulryanrogers 6y ago
    And yet being a shorter person I still have to hunt far and wide for a chair that doesn't leave my feet dangling or cut into my thighs. Lately I've taken to cutting things down or upcycling to get a reasonable fit.
- laurent92 6y ago
  It’s sad that things got so interconnected that I expect hammers to require security updates any time now. I hope there will be a counter-trend. It is feature bloat scaled to the extreme, at industry level.
- Turing_Machine 6y ago
  Even if that were true (which it doesn't appear to be... see other comments) I'm not sure that would apply to a field as broad, and as new, as software. Software does radically different things, things as different as, say, hammering and opening cans. It is difficult for me to believe that the WIMP interface as we know it is actually optimal for all those different software tasks. I mean, sure, you could probably open a can with a claw hammer, if you used some care, and you might be even able to drive a nail with a can opener. You wouldn't want to, though. Note that we still drive cars by using steering wheels and foot pedals. We haven't gone to some "click on the menu item" interface, even though such an interface could easily be written for many modern cars. Put me in the camp that believes that UIs are stuck in a rut, and need to be fundamentally rethought. Raskin's humane interface had some interesting ideas, though it does not seem to have caught on.
- hhas01 6y ago
  Nailgun.
fbelzile 6y ago
I agree, these new metaphors survived the test of time. Probably because of it's flexibility and ability to change to user requirements. Flat design is kind of like an extreme version of this. It's easy to build and change when needed.
h0l0cube 6y ago
If you read the article, much of criticisms about the state of the art at the time (mid-90s) has been addressed, and to great benefit. To take just one example, the use of natural language via voice commands to allow the user to discover new commands beyond what can be expressed with a visual UI - but there are many more examples.
- angus-prune 6y ago
  The discoverability of voice commands is terrible. I have no idea how to find out what I can do with Alexa, or which particular magic phrasing Alexa will understand. My personal biggest issue, as means of illustration, is that I have no idea how to play the latest episode of something on the BBC app, rather than continuing from where I left off. I'm sure there is a way, but none of my "natural language" attempts are recognised, and I can't find any way to find out what the true commands might be. Given that I mostly listen to news shows while doing something else (and hence rarely finish a particular episode) this makes the whole system near useless. I may be missing something basic, or if you have any tips on the discoverability of Alexa commands, I'd be very grateful. But in my experience, the discoverability of voice commands is the worst I've ever come across; at least with CLI you have man pages, and with a GUI, even in the worst case of no documentation and obscure icons, there are buttons to explore through trial and error.
  - h0l0cube 6y ago
    It's a problem that will be solved better and better as technology improves. GPT-3 is holding a lot of promise in taking input from one domain (language) and generating an outcome in a different domain (commands). Not sure how bad/good Alexa is, but everyone (myself included) in my household are talking to Google and Siri all the time to do tasks that would have taken multiple clicks on a screen, and a bunch of typing. A huge reduction in friction. The state of the art isn't perfect, but as it improves, it's undoubtedly taking UX in a direction that is popular and desirable to consumers.
msla 6y ago
> Alternately, you can say that UX design stabilized on a known good pattern. Or maybe known-good-enough: We evolved this specific design through a path-dependent fashion, so it could have been different had other designs survived, but nobody else has come up with a new UX paradigm which is sufficiently better to displace it yet. Various kinds of large dinosaurs were dominant for millions of years, and birds still exist.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
slmjkdbtl 6y ago
Does anyone know any interesting attempts of alternative models to WIMP? Everytime I think about it WIMP just makes more sense to me (productivity wise), it's really hard to think outside the box for this one..
- SilasX 6y ago
  Instead of pointer, you can do keyboard-everything, which some UX enhancements go for, like the browser extension Tridactyl. If you look at a lot of interfaces that are built for a specialized power user (e.g. cashiers), they avoid pointers and have keys for everything. Also, AutoCAD, the last I used it, looked to be centered around command-line primacy.
  - andreareina 6y ago
    Sadly, POS terminals these days seem to be going in the direction of high-latency touch interfaces. Those old curses-based terminals were so fast to get things done in. Magit[1] is another modern example of a TUI done right: discoverable, good dwim[2] inference that doesn't get in the way of experts, plus an escape hatch for typing out the exact git commands for those 5% usecases. [1] https://magit.vc/ https://magit.vc/ [2] do what I mean
    - astrange 6y ago
      The research done for the original Macintosh UI showed that keyboard users aren’t actually faster than mouse users, but think they are because they lose track of time while concentrating.
      - andreareina 6y ago
        Do you have a link? I suspect there's some asterisks there. I used to operate a photo minilab and could process a roll's worth of photos in 1-2 minutes. That's 4 seconds at the outside to evaluate a photo, make brightness and color corrections, next photo. No way I'd be able to sustain the same rate by having to mouse around and click at least four different targets, bouncing from brightness to magenta/green to blue/yellow back to magenta/green to cyan/red before giving brightness a final tweak. Fitt's Law[1] is death to speed for all sorts of workflows. I'm not saying that keyboard-based operation is superior in all cases, but a good keyboard-centric interface can eliminate the need to acquire a target (e.g. menu/toolbar item) for the most common operations because there's a hotkey. Well-understood operations can go almost at the speed of thought (either the operator's or the machine's). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law
vincentmarle 6y ago
“There is no such thing as a dysfunctional system, because every system is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it gets” - Ronald Heifetz
sergeykish 6y ago
Just look at browsers — no more status bar, title bar reused for tabs or controls, hidden menu bar. Web does not value menus and window manipulations either. I don't get it too, tiling window manager optimizes geometry, multiple desktops available by shortcut. Shell is a manual mode of automation tool. It stores history, I can easily call previous command, combine several commands into new one.
hhas01 6y ago
Not good, just “good enough”. UX, like evolution, once it goes down one particular path, tends to get stuck there, fiddling with the details at best. Radical innovation becomes really hard to effect: in evolution’s case because any new feature can only extend/adapt what is already there; in UI’s case because users tend to reject anything that doesn’t fit into what they already know. It’s the distinction between stability and stagnancy. Stability is good in that it’s predictable; its benefit vs cost ratio is known. Stagnancy is not so hot: that ratio cannot (or will not) improve. WIMP is both stable and stagnant; trapped by its own early success with no obvious path forward. . Very relevant: after an early 8-bit dalliance I cut my adult teeth on Macs. Some of WIMP’s productivity gains were significant, but in other aspects it was just the same (or more!) drudge work in a cutsier skin. it wasn’t until I taught myself automation (via frustration and AppleScript) that I really put a decent dent in the latter. And these were automations that built on my existing understanding of WIMP applications (unlike, say, the nix CLI which ignores all that knowledge and invents a whole new unrelated world entirely from scratch). All the Models were exactly the same; all my knowledge of how to manipulate my data in those apps was fully transferrable, not to mention all my existing documents. The only difference was the View-Controller I was using: RPC vs GUI. And whenever I got to a point in my workflow where it was easier/necessary to do something manually, I could freely switch back and forth between those two UIs. Achieving 10x productivity gains over WIMP on frequent repetitive tasks is embarrassingly trivial* with even modest automations. The hard part is creating an automation UX that’s efficient and accessible to the large majority of less/non-technical users (AppleScript failed, but at least it tried). . When will we see another attempt? Dog knows. Voice tech like Siri is obviously trying, but is starting from the hardest end of the problem and trying to work back from there. I believe there’s much quicker, easier pickings to be had by revisiting the AppleScript strategy—“server” applications exposing multiple View-Controllers for different interaction modes, and a really simple, textual “client” command language along the lines of Papert’s Logo (which 8 year-olds could learn how to use and compose), combined with modern auto-suggest, auto-correct, auto-complete to provide the transparency and discoverability that traditional CLIs fail so hard at. The written word has 10,000 years of learning and practice behind it. And the most powerful word in the world is the word that expresses exactly what you want to say, whenever you want to say it. If that’s not an opportunity for some smart young coders with a desire to make a better world for all, I don’t know what is. You just gotta know history is all. -- “It’s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don’t learn from our successes.” – Keith Braithwaite
ObscureScience 6y ago
Im not of the opinion that we've found the "best" user interface. I think the biggest hurdle is that "best" is so different to different people. One part is familiarity, as many power users know, your setup would be utterly useless to an unfamiliar person. I guess the current paradigm is a local maxima of the convergence of discoverability and efficiency and still working on our diverse device specifications (display sizes, input devices and performance).
Siira 6y ago
They are local maxima for normal people. No reason to believe better global maxima don’t exist, or that they can’t be improved to work better for more people (e.g., better accessibility features).

nappy 6y ago

This comment is full of wisdom

burnte 6y ago

I completely agree. The design of a hammer hasn't changed much in centuries because it's already designed well for its purpose. Same thing with sharks, I don't hear biologists say "there hasn't been much innovation in sharks for millions of years."

suyash 6y ago
I consider myself one of those people who would comment about the design of hammer being stuck and more people should, that is how we innovate. The real world is always changing and evolving with time, so are technologies be it for computers - UI that allowed for the desktop GUI paradigm in the 90's to today where Alexa, Siri can help us do lot of those tasks just by commanding over voice. We need to certainly move on and innovate the user interface for desktop GUI or for other devices.
- wruza 6y ago
  What is new proposal for a hammer, may I ask?
  - blinkeer 6y ago
    Pneumatic press, nail gun, screwdriver, impact wrench, seems like these could work, while maybe not a direct dirivative. Some things persist, and are stable as others have noted. A cool thing about innovation is that the ideas are often things people didn't know they wanted until they see it.
    - wruza 6y ago
      These are not improvements of a hammer design, but completely different things. Screws do not play well with deformation, but let’s ignore that: you’ll probably have both a hammer and one of these things in your toolbox, and you’ll miss a hammer if it’s not there. It is a general-purpose hit-force tool for hitting anything, not only nails. A better design for a hammer itself could include a claw or new hitting surface geometry, handle amortizer and so on, which are successfully done in variety, despite gp thinks that it’s “stuck”. First, it’s not, we just waited for better materials, advanced tasks, etc. Second, it is not much to do with hitting something with inertia-accumulated force. Anyway my point is that if you change all hammers in the world overnight (like software does) you better have done a good job of century-testing your changes in all situations. If your reasoning is just “it gets old”, well, this site’s rules do not allow me to express what I think of that.
  - cameron_b 6y ago
    Instead of whamming in a pointy cylinder, that stress and vibration might work it out back against the force of our whamming, we TWIST in a similar bit of hardware, only we wrap an inclined plane around the cylinder so that it cuts as we twist, making a walled channel that resists working out backwards under vibration.
    - na85 6y ago
      Witty, but nails and screws serve different use-cases. Nails have better shear properties, for example.
  - suyash 6y ago
    Ok, let's play do this imaginative exercise - Hammer looks simple but actually if you're few inches off while slamming it down, you can seriously injure yourself if you're holding the nails with your other hand. I'm sure we have all experienced that. How about a sensor that always drives the motion in the right location, it can be done by having sensors that feel your muscle twitches and angle then recalibrate using camera to the right angle and nails it in (pun intended). Another idea is a Swiss army knife but something that combines hammer, screwdriver, wrench into one design design offsetting the need to by separate tools.
- dmitriid 6y ago
  > where Alexa, Siri can help us do lot of those tasks just by commanding over voice How "many of these tasks" can they reliably help you do? They screw up even the simplest tasks like setting a timer.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
brownjohnf 6y ago
The design of a hammer has actually changed substantially over time. More recently, there's been a trend towards specialization in the framing hammer alone. 100 years ago most hammers looked like the classic hammers I remember from childhood: relatively small, sharply curved claws, a smooth face. As production framing exploded in the US after WWII, framers were pushing for more efficiency. The framing hammer got heavier with a longer handle, broader face, straighter claw, and waffled face better for gripping nails (also why most loose framing nails have a cross-hatched pattern: so they can mate with the hammer face). From there, materials science really kicked in, and we saw steel-handled models, followed by fiberglass and other composite handles. The latest developments (that I'm aware of) are products like the Stiletto (http://www.stiletto.com/p-80-ti-bone-iii-hammer-with-milled-face-and-18in-curved-handle.aspx http://www.stiletto.com/p-80-ti-bone-iii-hammer-with-milled-...), which leverage materials like titanium to reduce weight while maintaining driving power, and include a replaceable steel face to prolong hammer life and allow using different faces for different applications. Modern hammers with advanced material properties and functions can cost hundreds of dollars, but deliver much higher efficiency with less fatigue and a longer life. I compare that with the Sears hammer in my grandfather's garage and see a whole new generation of evolution. There's a great article about hammer history at Fine Homebuilding: https://www.finehomebuilding.com/project-guides/framing/hammered-the-history-of-hammer-design https://www.finehomebuilding.com/project-guides/framing/hamm... edited: Fix link formatting.
- Osiris 6y ago
  The think this supports the OPs argument that we're refining, not inventing. Everything you've said here is about refining, it's not a completely new way to attach materials together.
  - brownjohnf 6y ago
    Yeah, probably should have clarified that I intended no comment on the OPs comment about innovation in computer UI. Just wanted to point out that there's actually a surprising amount of evolution in design of the hammer. Something that seems to be so simple, and has existed for thousands of years, can still be made better. I'm not a professional carpenter, but I've used a hammer a lot to do things like framing, and can confirm that many of these innovations are meaningful in function, not just form.
Nition 6y ago
On the other hand, sometimes it's just that people get so used to something, they don't take a close look at how it could be improved. Bows stayed much the same for centuries until the compound bow appeared in the 1960s.
neokrish 6y ago
The hammer analogy has its limitations here. When the task is simple (hitting a nail), a simple and good design lasts. When the task(s) is/are complicated, depend on context, are tied to human understanding, knowledge or training in using machines, then design could benefit from both refinements as well as radical and creative thinking. I also don’t think that just because we have a good design, even for a hammer, we should stop people from challenging norms and thinking in bold ways. Here’s a contrasting example to hammers - chairs. The objective is simple, to sit on it. The design innovations still continue to this day, on how a chair can be structured. There have been interpretations of chairs that challenge the very notion that chairs need legs.
- paulryanrogers 6y ago
  And yet being a shorter person I still have to hunt far and wide for a chair that doesn't leave my feet dangling or cut into my thighs. Lately I've taken to cutting things down or upcycling to get a reasonable fit.
laurent92 6y ago
It’s sad that things got so interconnected that I expect hammers to require security updates any time now. I hope there will be a counter-trend. It is feature bloat scaled to the extreme, at industry level.
Turing_Machine 6y ago
Even if that were true (which it doesn't appear to be... see other comments) I'm not sure that would apply to a field as broad, and as new, as software. Software does radically different things, things as different as, say, hammering and opening cans. It is difficult for me to believe that the WIMP interface as we know it is actually optimal for all those different software tasks. I mean, sure, you could probably open a can with a claw hammer, if you used some care, and you might be even able to drive a nail with a can opener. You wouldn't want to, though. Note that we still drive cars by using steering wheels and foot pedals. We haven't gone to some "click on the menu item" interface, even though such an interface could easily be written for many modern cars. Put me in the camp that believes that UIs are stuck in a rut, and need to be fundamentally rethought. Raskin's humane interface had some interesting ideas, though it does not seem to have caught on.
hhas01 6y ago
Nailgun.

fbelzile 6y ago

I agree, these new metaphors survived the test of time. Probably because of it's flexibility and ability to change to user requirements. Flat design is kind of like an extreme version of this. It's easy to build and change when needed.

h0l0cube 6y ago

If you read the article, much of criticisms about the state of the art at the time (mid-90s) has been addressed, and to great benefit. To take just one example, the use of natural language via voice commands to allow the user to discover new commands beyond what can be expressed with a visual UI - but there are many more examples.

angus-prune 6y ago
The discoverability of voice commands is terrible. I have no idea how to find out what I can do with Alexa, or which particular magic phrasing Alexa will understand. My personal biggest issue, as means of illustration, is that I have no idea how to play the latest episode of something on the BBC app, rather than continuing from where I left off. I'm sure there is a way, but none of my "natural language" attempts are recognised, and I can't find any way to find out what the true commands might be. Given that I mostly listen to news shows while doing something else (and hence rarely finish a particular episode) this makes the whole system near useless. I may be missing something basic, or if you have any tips on the discoverability of Alexa commands, I'd be very grateful. But in my experience, the discoverability of voice commands is the worst I've ever come across; at least with CLI you have man pages, and with a GUI, even in the worst case of no documentation and obscure icons, there are buttons to explore through trial and error.
- h0l0cube 6y ago
  It's a problem that will be solved better and better as technology improves. GPT-3 is holding a lot of promise in taking input from one domain (language) and generating an outcome in a different domain (commands). Not sure how bad/good Alexa is, but everyone (myself included) in my household are talking to Google and Siri all the time to do tasks that would have taken multiple clicks on a screen, and a bunch of typing. A huge reduction in friction. The state of the art isn't perfect, but as it improves, it's undoubtedly taking UX in a direction that is popular and desirable to consumers.

msla 6y ago

> Alternately, you can say that UX design stabilized on a known good pattern. Or maybe known-good-enough: We evolved this specific design through a path-dependent fashion, so it could have been different had other designs survived, but nobody else has come up with a new UX paradigm which is sufficiently better to displace it yet. Various kinds of large dinosaurs were dominant for millions of years, and birds still exist.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

slmjkdbtl 6y ago

Does anyone know any interesting attempts of alternative models to WIMP? Everytime I think about it WIMP just makes more sense to me (productivity wise), it's really hard to think outside the box for this one..

SilasX 6y ago
Instead of pointer, you can do keyboard-everything, which some UX enhancements go for, like the browser extension Tridactyl. If you look at a lot of interfaces that are built for a specialized power user (e.g. cashiers), they avoid pointers and have keys for everything. Also, AutoCAD, the last I used it, looked to be centered around command-line primacy.
- andreareina 6y ago
  Sadly, POS terminals these days seem to be going in the direction of high-latency touch interfaces. Those old curses-based terminals were so fast to get things done in. Magit[1] is another modern example of a TUI done right: discoverable, good dwim[2] inference that doesn't get in the way of experts, plus an escape hatch for typing out the exact git commands for those 5% usecases. [1] https://magit.vc/ https://magit.vc/ [2] do what I mean
  - astrange 6y ago
    The research done for the original Macintosh UI showed that keyboard users aren’t actually faster than mouse users, but think they are because they lose track of time while concentrating.
    - andreareina 6y ago
      Do you have a link? I suspect there's some asterisks there. I used to operate a photo minilab and could process a roll's worth of photos in 1-2 minutes. That's 4 seconds at the outside to evaluate a photo, make brightness and color corrections, next photo. No way I'd be able to sustain the same rate by having to mouse around and click at least four different targets, bouncing from brightness to magenta/green to blue/yellow back to magenta/green to cyan/red before giving brightness a final tweak. Fitt's Law[1] is death to speed for all sorts of workflows. I'm not saying that keyboard-based operation is superior in all cases, but a good keyboard-centric interface can eliminate the need to acquire a target (e.g. menu/toolbar item) for the most common operations because there's a hotkey. Well-understood operations can go almost at the speed of thought (either the operator's or the machine's). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

vincentmarle 6y ago

“There is no such thing as a dysfunctional system, because every system is perfectly aligned to achieve the results it gets” - Ronald Heifetz

sergeykish 6y ago

Just look at browsers — no more status bar, title bar reused for tabs or controls, hidden menu bar. Web does not value menus and window manipulations either. I don't get it too, tiling window manager optimizes geometry, multiple desktops available by shortcut. Shell is a manual mode of automation tool. It stores history, I can easily call previous command, combine several commands into new one.

hhas01 6y ago

Not good, just “good enough”. UX, like evolution, once it goes down one particular path, tends to get stuck there, fiddling with the details at best. Radical innovation becomes really hard to effect: in evolution’s case because any new feature can only extend/adapt what is already there; in UI’s case because users tend to reject anything that doesn’t fit into what they already know. It’s the distinction between stability and stagnancy. Stability is good in that it’s predictable; its benefit vs cost ratio is known. Stagnancy is not so hot: that ratio cannot (or will not) improve. WIMP is both stable and stagnant; trapped by its own early success with no obvious path forward. . Very relevant: after an early 8-bit dalliance I cut my adult teeth on Macs. Some of WIMP’s productivity gains were significant, but in other aspects it was just the same (or more!) drudge work in a cutsier skin. it wasn’t until I taught myself automation (via frustration and AppleScript) that I really put a decent dent in the latter. And these were automations that built on my existing understanding of WIMP applications (unlike, say, the nix CLI which ignores all that knowledge and invents a whole new unrelated world entirely from scratch). All the Models were exactly the same; all my knowledge of how to manipulate my data in those apps was fully transferrable, not to mention all my existing documents. The only difference was the View-Controller I was using: RPC vs GUI. And whenever I got to a point in my workflow where it was easier/necessary to do something manually, I could freely switch back and forth between those two UIs. Achieving 10x productivity gains over WIMP on frequent repetitive tasks is embarrassingly trivial* with even modest automations. The hard part is creating an automation UX that’s efficient and accessible to the large majority of less/non-technical users (AppleScript failed, but at least it tried). . When will we see another attempt? Dog knows. Voice tech like Siri is obviously trying, but is starting from the hardest end of the problem and trying to work back from there. I believe there’s much quicker, easier pickings to be had by revisiting the AppleScript strategy—“server” applications exposing multiple View-Controllers for different interaction modes, and a really simple, textual “client” command language along the lines of Papert’s Logo (which 8 year-olds could learn how to use and compose), combined with modern auto-suggest, auto-correct, auto-complete to provide the transparency and discoverability that traditional CLIs fail so hard at. The written word has 10,000 years of learning and practice behind it. And the most powerful word in the world is the word that expresses exactly what you want to say, whenever you want to say it. If that’s not an opportunity for some smart young coders with a desire to make a better world for all, I don’t know what is. You just gotta know history is all. -- “It’s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don’t learn from our successes.” – Keith Braithwaite

ObscureScience 6y ago

Im not of the opinion that we've found the "best" user interface. I think the biggest hurdle is that "best" is so different to different people. One part is familiarity, as many power users know, your setup would be utterly useless to an unfamiliar person. I guess the current paradigm is a local maxima of the convergence of discoverability and efficiency and still working on our diverse device specifications (display sizes, input devices and performance).

Siira 6y ago

They are local maxima for normal people. No reason to believe better global maxima don’t exist, or that they can’t be improved to work better for more people (e.g., better accessibility features).