4 ms·

IMO, The best UX ever made is the book. It invented bookmarks first over 1500 years ago. The cover contains the topic, the author. The first page tells you when

IMO, The best UX ever made is the book. It invented bookmarks first over 1500 years ago. The cover contains the topic, the author. The first page tells you when and where it was published and who inspired it. The contents page tells you the all contents. The index states the topics. The page numbers illustrates where one is and how far they have to go before it's over. Finally, it's UX is so good it hasn't that many updates since Pliny the Elder. https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/02/page-numbers-where-did-they-come-from-and-are-they-even-useful-anymore.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/02/page-numbers-where-...

dwohnitmok 6y ago
I think that's overstating it. For long-form, linear reading of text books are great, but there's a lot of places where I much prefer hypertext or other media. Anything with copious footnotes, references, and appendices is just so much easier to immediately click to the highlighted reference link, quickly scan the reference, and then jump back. Flipping through pages to find the right reference and then flipping back is a rather large context switch in comparison. A bookmark still isn't quite robust enough because I still need to scan to find the exact reference when jumping out from the text. This is why e.g. I read modern hyperlinked PDFs and Wikipedia articles faster and absorb more than their dead-tree equivalents (although I find I read dead-tree equivalents faster for longer linear reads). And that's just non-interactive, text-based media. Video tutorials for quick how-tos are way way more effective for me than the equivalent book. I haven't had quite as much luck with interactive articles, but there have been a few gems that simply wouldn't be possible with a book (e.g. https://ciechanow.ski/gears/ https://ciechanow.ski/gears/).

4 ms·

IMO, The best UX ever made is the book. It invented bookmarks first over 1500 years ago. The cover contains the topic, the author. The first page tells you when

by SCAQTony 6y ago

dwohnitmok 6y ago
I think that's overstating it. For long-form, linear reading of text books are great, but there's a lot of places where I much prefer hypertext or other media. Anything with copious footnotes, references, and appendices is just so much easier to immediately click to the highlighted reference link, quickly scan the reference, and then jump back. Flipping through pages to find the right reference and then flipping back is a rather large context switch in comparison. A bookmark still isn't quite robust enough because I still need to scan to find the exact reference when jumping out from the text. This is why e.g. I read modern hyperlinked PDFs and Wikipedia articles faster and absorb more than their dead-tree equivalents (although I find I read dead-tree equivalents faster for longer linear reads). And that's just non-interactive, text-based media. Video tutorials for quick how-tos are way way more effective for me than the equivalent book. I haven't had quite as much luck with interactive articles, but there have been a few gems that simply wouldn't be possible with a book (e.g. https://ciechanow.ski/gears/ https://ciechanow.ski/gears/).