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Is there a growing sense that our GUI/UI paradigms took a wrong step somewhere in CS history and we've pushed the current UI path as far as it will go? Is it o

Is there a growing sense that our GUI/UI paradigms took a wrong step somewhere in CS history and we've pushed the current UI path as far as it will go? Is it only because I myself am building an alternate OS interface or has this become a popular subject of conversation?

jandrese 5y ago
I've had the feeling that back in the 80s through the 90s there was a lot of formal design study of UI and UX. Actual scientific studies were taken of what makes for the most efficient and economical graphical UI. And then the designers came and threw away so much of that knowledge because they wanted to make something that looks good in screenshots. Visible controls are ugly they said, so all buttons and controls get hidden away under some nondescript icon that doesn't even look like an interactive element (maybe 3 lines in the corner or something). Scrollbars are uncool so now they disappear immediately and you just have to know where to look for them. White space is visually pleasing so just fill the screen with it. Old rules about making buttons look like buttons are completely ignored so the screenshot is pretty. Sure you have to hunt around like a blind person in an alley trying to make things actually work, but it sure looks nice doesn't it?
- bob1029 5y ago
  I feel like every front-end engineer should be required to read The Design of Everyday Things and pass a quiz before being handed a job. Building shitty UI because it looks cool in your marketing materials is doing a criminal disservice to your users and ultimately your business.
  - elliotec 5y ago
    Most front end engineers don't get to decide how the UI looks, typically product and design will dictate that maybe with the exception of really small teams or products where design is apparently not priority.
- Benjammer 5y ago
  I kind of disagree, I think this was more based on ad-tech taking over and pages optimizing for SEO and session-length and things like that. The metrics changed when the customer changed as we moved to free software.
  - jandrese 5y ago
    It seems kind of a cheat to increase session length by making your page so hard to use that people will spend extra time just trying to figure out the controls.
    - shredprez 5y ago
      I don't think that's what GP is referring to. Ad-tech and similarly myopic business pressures are frequently at odds with usability, and those business pressures ultimately determine what solution makes it to (or remains in) production. Less usable websites and tools are frequently "better performing" when measured by a metric leadership is beholden to, and usability is easily sacrificed if faith in its value doesn't extend to the very top of a company. I know this is HN and it's fun to pick on incompetent designers, but there are a lot of parallels with the lack of care for security that frequently tops the news on here. Poor usability often reflects company values, not designer capability.
      - Benjammer 5y ago
        Yes, I meant that priorities and metrics changed, not that they intentionally sabotaged one metric in order to "cheat," and directly boost another metric, it just wasn't a priority anymore to optimize for usability. In fact, when you look at it from a market/systems level instead of any individual product or company, it doesn't even need to be one designer or product or company moving A-to-B from "usable" to "moar white space." It could be a totally different company who never optimized for usability who comes in and steals lunch. >there are a lot of parallels with the lack of care for security Absolutely, 100%. Same idea.
- coliveira 5y ago
  I believe there is space for great looking design that is also functional. The problem is that achieve this balance takes time and knowledge, and the software industry has a very short term focus, so you end up with non-solutions that are supported purely by hype.
  - TuringTest 5y ago
    Also, UI design has traditionally used visual styles from minimalism and the Bauhaus, mainly because the very low-resolutions where it was created (desktops first, later mobile screens) didn't support anything more ornate that would be still visually appealing. I long for the day when more elaborate and luxurious art-deco-based interfaces become fashionable in UI design.
    - coliveira 5y ago
      But minimalist design is not unique to software. If you look everywhere in our industrial society you'll see that. Even buildings follow this trend nowadays. It is a trend that derives from industrialization, where the goal is to make the simplest designs that still retain their utility.
- bmitc 5y ago
  Do you know of any good (presumably old) resources like books or articles that cover efficient economical GUIs and GUI frameworks?
  - Torwald 5y ago
    Ask Tog https://www.asktog.com https://www.asktog.com
  - mixmastamyk 5y ago
    There were the original Apple and Gnome HIG (human interface guides). Also Ask Tog, and nngroup.com for web stuff.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      Windows also had one. And they are all ultimately derived from IBM CUA, so that's a good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
      - mixmastamyk 5y ago
        The classic Mac interface is a couple of years older, although most of these seminal works were published in the late 80s.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    Brad Myers. All the Widgets (Fixed v2) - 1990. This was made in 1990, sponsored by the ACM CHI 1990 conference, to tell the history of widgets up until then. Previously published as: Brad A. Myers. All the Widgets. 2 hour, 15 min videotape. Technical Video Program of the SIGCHI'90 conference, Seattle, WA. April 1-4, 1990. SIGGRAPH Video Review, Issue 57. ISBN 0-89791-930-0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw Also by Brad Myers: Taxonomies of Visual Programming (1990) [pdf] (cmu.edu) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26057530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26057530 https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/papers/VLtax2-jvlc-1990.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/papers/VLtax2-jvlc-1990.pdf Updated version: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/papers/chi86vltax.pdf http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/papers/chi86vltax.pdf
- agumonkey 5y ago
  the context of GUI use has also changed dramatically.. UIs were used to manipulate semi complex to complex formal documents in 2D, people were trained, it was all very important .. nowadays we can bring it down to swipe and tap over floating selfies. I'm sure nobody in the mainstream would ever use an 80s application no matter how good/better it is.
  - azornathogron 5y ago
    There's still plenty of office work to do. The selfies haven't displaced spreadsheets, they're a new category.
    - agumonkey 5y ago
      true but i have a feeling that for the next years to come, good old 2d static abstractions will be out of the picture (replaced by fully fluid animated UI paradigms)
  - goatlover 5y ago
    People use Office and Adobe products. Sometimes you need a lot of functionality in your application which goes beyond simple swipe UIs.
- jart 5y ago
  They were probably formally studying people who had never seen or used a GUI before. Visible controls were a great crutch that helped get us to the point where we don't need them anymore. Because at the end of the day, content is king. For example, Netscape Navigator 4.0 had a big button labeled Find with a little binoculars icon. Today, everyone knows about CTRL+F. So we can use that screen space for the thing we care about, which is content. We still have much further to go. My main display doesn't have a single UI element on it. It's a terminal in full screen mode. Except devoting 100% of the display to content wasn't enough for me. I wanted a third dimension of content. So I modified the terminal software so that I could control transparency by shift + scroll wheeling which means I can play movies in VLC running in full screen mode underneath the full screen terminal. That's my design. Terminal and television. The most important use cases of the most important devices of the twentieth century.
  - flukus 5y ago
    > Today, everyone knows about CTRL+F. Not everyone knows that, I don't even think to try it unless there's a corresponding control or menu item. It's also not universal, outlook is one of the most heavily used GUIs in the world and ctrl-f means forward in that. Then you've got the ubiquity of touch screens where ctrl-f isn't even an option. > They were probably formally studying people who had never seen or used a GUI before Everyone's seen a GUI, but that doesn't mean they've seen the particular GUI they're trying to use at any given time.
  - johannes1234321 5y ago
    This leads to the Safari version Apple presented this week: even the "reload" button is gone now. I think it is true that people learn and we can assume other things now. But still there must be discoverability of such features.
- secondcoming 5y ago
  What's up with the war on scrollbars!? I don't understand it.
bsder 5y ago
> Is there a growing sense that our GUI/UI paradigms took a wrong step somewhere in CS history and we've pushed the current UI path as far as it will go? Well, there are two conflated problems here: 1) The GUI and interacting with humans, itself. I don't think we've even scratched the surface here. I'm not a big fan of the Instagram/TikTok "HAH! Everything is hidden, Boomer! If you aren't spending 5 hours a day with our application talking to your friends how to use our application you'll never figure it out." However, at least some stuff is different. 2) The software implementation of the GUI underneath I do think we've gotten lost in a local extremum here. The whole "The GUI must run on the main thread" when we've got gajillions of cores spread across the CPU and GPU is a gigantic problem. We really need a multithreaded UI implementation.
- phist_mcgee 5y ago
  To your point 1. Younger generations don't feel like these features are hidden at all, and wouldn't feel like it's any different from most new apps. What Gen Z are very good at is discoverability inside apps using things like swiping. A younger person will interact with the app by swiping up and down or left or right, where older people might be more trained for button pressing. Having spoken to some younger people, they find some apps like Facebook harder to use, since there are too many buttons, and not enough contextual motion.
  - goatlover 5y ago
    Problem is that's hard to scale to sophisticated apps that typically run on the desktop, which are often used at work or even for school. Even if it's been ported to the browser, it usually more like FB than it is a messaging app. And now that I think about it some more, I have a VR headset, and the UIs are often more complicated than swiping on your phone. It's more like pointing at buttons, menus and links with your controller. That's typically the case for gaming consoles as well. As such, I'm not sure phone apps are still the latest in UI design, it's more that the smaller screen touch interface and apps that typically do one thing well better fit the form factor of smart devices. Granted, the younger generation use their phones for everything, until they put on a VR headset or have to work in a desktop-like program.
coldtea 5y ago
>Is there a growing sense that our GUI/UI paradigms took a wrong step somewhere in CS history and we've pushed the current UI path as far as it will go? Yes. It was called "web UI". This brought a level of casualness and lack of rigor, that infected native UIs as well. In the 90s there was a lot of GUI research, including by major companies like Microsoft and Apple, and lots of innovations. But even more importantly, the standard practices of the main OS makers, favored a uniform look, with clear affordances (e.g. button bevels), and so on. The apex of with would be something like Windows 2000, Mac OS 8, BeOS, NeXT, and the like. Stuff like "mystery meat navigation", "hamburger menus", "invisible scrollbars", huge padding, buttons that look like text, and so on, including "let's make the whole desktop app interface in the DOM" where post-2000 additions, and not for the better.
- walrus01 5y ago
  the latest version of xfce4 is what I would call a really clean, no bullshit modern desktop metaphor. I say that as a person who extensively used kde v1 and v2.x and migrated away from it when they started trying to clone windows vista. In some ways xfce4 reminds me a lot of windows 2000.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    Yeah, but unfortunately xfce4 just covers the desktop manager + some utility apps part. Most of the apps would be an assortment of (non Xfce) Gnome-inspired GTK, Electron (e.g. Slack, VSCode), custom (Firefox, Chrome, Sublime Text), and/or KDE stuff, each with its own warts and "modern" approaches...
  - int_19h 5y ago
    MATE would probably be closer in terms of its feature set.
forgotmypw17 5y ago
I think we just veered off the path a bit, and people like you are helping bring it back. I myself am working on a web-based note-taking system which works with every browser since Mosaic. :)
ryukafalz 5y ago
Personally I think GUIs took a wrong step somewhere between the Alto and the first Macs. Specifically because we've lost this ability: https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=605 https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=605 People say that CLIs are composable and GUIs aren't, and so CLIs are better for power users. They're right, for today's GUIs, but yesterday's GUIs were composable. We've lost that.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  We also lost this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4
- amatecha 5y ago
  Uhhhh... that demo is blowing my mind. Holy crap.
  - ryukafalz 5y ago
    It's one of my absolute favorites. And don't forget, this predates the Macintosh. Imagine where we could be today if this was our starting point in the 70s.

jandrese 5y ago

I've had the feeling that back in the 80s through the 90s there was a lot of formal design study of UI and UX. Actual scientific studies were taken of what makes for the most efficient and economical graphical UI. And then the designers came and threw away so much of that knowledge because they wanted to make something that looks good in screenshots. Visible controls are ugly they said, so all buttons and controls get hidden away under some nondescript icon that doesn't even look like an interactive element (maybe 3 lines in the corner or something). Scrollbars are uncool so now they disappear immediately and you just have to know where to look for them. White space is visually pleasing so just fill the screen with it. Old rules about making buttons look like buttons are completely ignored so the screenshot is pretty. Sure you have to hunt around like a blind person in an alley trying to make things actually work, but it sure looks nice doesn't it?

bob1029 5y ago
I feel like every front-end engineer should be required to read The Design of Everyday Things and pass a quiz before being handed a job. Building shitty UI because it looks cool in your marketing materials is doing a criminal disservice to your users and ultimately your business.
- elliotec 5y ago
  Most front end engineers don't get to decide how the UI looks, typically product and design will dictate that maybe with the exception of really small teams or products where design is apparently not priority.
Benjammer 5y ago
I kind of disagree, I think this was more based on ad-tech taking over and pages optimizing for SEO and session-length and things like that. The metrics changed when the customer changed as we moved to free software.
- jandrese 5y ago
  It seems kind of a cheat to increase session length by making your page so hard to use that people will spend extra time just trying to figure out the controls.
  - shredprez 5y ago
    I don't think that's what GP is referring to. Ad-tech and similarly myopic business pressures are frequently at odds with usability, and those business pressures ultimately determine what solution makes it to (or remains in) production. Less usable websites and tools are frequently "better performing" when measured by a metric leadership is beholden to, and usability is easily sacrificed if faith in its value doesn't extend to the very top of a company. I know this is HN and it's fun to pick on incompetent designers, but there are a lot of parallels with the lack of care for security that frequently tops the news on here. Poor usability often reflects company values, not designer capability.
    - Benjammer 5y ago
      Yes, I meant that priorities and metrics changed, not that they intentionally sabotaged one metric in order to "cheat," and directly boost another metric, it just wasn't a priority anymore to optimize for usability. In fact, when you look at it from a market/systems level instead of any individual product or company, it doesn't even need to be one designer or product or company moving A-to-B from "usable" to "moar white space." It could be a totally different company who never optimized for usability who comes in and steals lunch. >there are a lot of parallels with the lack of care for security Absolutely, 100%. Same idea.
coliveira 5y ago
I believe there is space for great looking design that is also functional. The problem is that achieve this balance takes time and knowledge, and the software industry has a very short term focus, so you end up with non-solutions that are supported purely by hype.
- TuringTest 5y ago
  Also, UI design has traditionally used visual styles from minimalism and the Bauhaus, mainly because the very low-resolutions where it was created (desktops first, later mobile screens) didn't support anything more ornate that would be still visually appealing. I long for the day when more elaborate and luxurious art-deco-based interfaces become fashionable in UI design.
  - coliveira 5y ago
    But minimalist design is not unique to software. If you look everywhere in our industrial society you'll see that. Even buildings follow this trend nowadays. It is a trend that derives from industrialization, where the goal is to make the simplest designs that still retain their utility.
bmitc 5y ago
Do you know of any good (presumably old) resources like books or articles that cover efficient economical GUIs and GUI frameworks?
- Torwald 5y ago
  Ask Tog https://www.asktog.com https://www.asktog.com
- mixmastamyk 5y ago
  There were the original Apple and Gnome HIG (human interface guides). Also Ask Tog, and nngroup.com for web stuff.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    Windows also had one. And they are all ultimately derived from IBM CUA, so that's a good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
    - mixmastamyk 5y ago
      The classic Mac interface is a couple of years older, although most of these seminal works were published in the late 80s.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  Brad Myers. All the Widgets (Fixed v2) - 1990. This was made in 1990, sponsored by the ACM CHI 1990 conference, to tell the history of widgets up until then. Previously published as: Brad A. Myers. All the Widgets. 2 hour, 15 min videotape. Technical Video Program of the SIGCHI'90 conference, Seattle, WA. April 1-4, 1990. SIGGRAPH Video Review, Issue 57. ISBN 0-89791-930-0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw Also by Brad Myers: Taxonomies of Visual Programming (1990) [pdf] (cmu.edu) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26057530 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26057530 https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/papers/VLtax2-jvlc-1990.pdf https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/papers/VLtax2-jvlc-1990.pdf Updated version: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/papers/chi86vltax.pdf http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/papers/chi86vltax.pdf
agumonkey 5y ago
the context of GUI use has also changed dramatically.. UIs were used to manipulate semi complex to complex formal documents in 2D, people were trained, it was all very important .. nowadays we can bring it down to swipe and tap over floating selfies. I'm sure nobody in the mainstream would ever use an 80s application no matter how good/better it is.
- azornathogron 5y ago
  There's still plenty of office work to do. The selfies haven't displaced spreadsheets, they're a new category.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    true but i have a feeling that for the next years to come, good old 2d static abstractions will be out of the picture (replaced by fully fluid animated UI paradigms)
- goatlover 5y ago
  People use Office and Adobe products. Sometimes you need a lot of functionality in your application which goes beyond simple swipe UIs.
jart 5y ago
They were probably formally studying people who had never seen or used a GUI before. Visible controls were a great crutch that helped get us to the point where we don't need them anymore. Because at the end of the day, content is king. For example, Netscape Navigator 4.0 had a big button labeled Find with a little binoculars icon. Today, everyone knows about CTRL+F. So we can use that screen space for the thing we care about, which is content. We still have much further to go. My main display doesn't have a single UI element on it. It's a terminal in full screen mode. Except devoting 100% of the display to content wasn't enough for me. I wanted a third dimension of content. So I modified the terminal software so that I could control transparency by shift + scroll wheeling which means I can play movies in VLC running in full screen mode underneath the full screen terminal. That's my design. Terminal and television. The most important use cases of the most important devices of the twentieth century.
- flukus 5y ago
  > Today, everyone knows about CTRL+F. Not everyone knows that, I don't even think to try it unless there's a corresponding control or menu item. It's also not universal, outlook is one of the most heavily used GUIs in the world and ctrl-f means forward in that. Then you've got the ubiquity of touch screens where ctrl-f isn't even an option. > They were probably formally studying people who had never seen or used a GUI before Everyone's seen a GUI, but that doesn't mean they've seen the particular GUI they're trying to use at any given time.
- johannes1234321 5y ago
  This leads to the Safari version Apple presented this week: even the "reload" button is gone now. I think it is true that people learn and we can assume other things now. But still there must be discoverability of such features.
secondcoming 5y ago
What's up with the war on scrollbars!? I don't understand it.

bsder 5y ago

> Is there a growing sense that our GUI/UI paradigms took a wrong step somewhere in CS history and we've pushed the current UI path as far as it will go? Well, there are two conflated problems here: 1) The GUI and interacting with humans, itself. I don't think we've even scratched the surface here. I'm not a big fan of the Instagram/TikTok "HAH! Everything is hidden, Boomer! If you aren't spending 5 hours a day with our application talking to your friends how to use our application you'll never figure it out." However, at least some stuff is different. 2) The software implementation of the GUI underneath I do think we've gotten lost in a local extremum here. The whole "The GUI must run on the main thread" when we've got gajillions of cores spread across the CPU and GPU is a gigantic problem. We really need a multithreaded UI implementation.

phist_mcgee 5y ago
To your point 1. Younger generations don't feel like these features are hidden at all, and wouldn't feel like it's any different from most new apps. What Gen Z are very good at is discoverability inside apps using things like swiping. A younger person will interact with the app by swiping up and down or left or right, where older people might be more trained for button pressing. Having spoken to some younger people, they find some apps like Facebook harder to use, since there are too many buttons, and not enough contextual motion.
- goatlover 5y ago
  Problem is that's hard to scale to sophisticated apps that typically run on the desktop, which are often used at work or even for school. Even if it's been ported to the browser, it usually more like FB than it is a messaging app. And now that I think about it some more, I have a VR headset, and the UIs are often more complicated than swiping on your phone. It's more like pointing at buttons, menus and links with your controller. That's typically the case for gaming consoles as well. As such, I'm not sure phone apps are still the latest in UI design, it's more that the smaller screen touch interface and apps that typically do one thing well better fit the form factor of smart devices. Granted, the younger generation use their phones for everything, until they put on a VR headset or have to work in a desktop-like program.

coldtea 5y ago

>Is there a growing sense that our GUI/UI paradigms took a wrong step somewhere in CS history and we've pushed the current UI path as far as it will go? Yes. It was called "web UI". This brought a level of casualness and lack of rigor, that infected native UIs as well. In the 90s there was a lot of GUI research, including by major companies like Microsoft and Apple, and lots of innovations. But even more importantly, the standard practices of the main OS makers, favored a uniform look, with clear affordances (e.g. button bevels), and so on. The apex of with would be something like Windows 2000, Mac OS 8, BeOS, NeXT, and the like. Stuff like "mystery meat navigation", "hamburger menus", "invisible scrollbars", huge padding, buttons that look like text, and so on, including "let's make the whole desktop app interface in the DOM" where post-2000 additions, and not for the better.

walrus01 5y ago
the latest version of xfce4 is what I would call a really clean, no bullshit modern desktop metaphor. I say that as a person who extensively used kde v1 and v2.x and migrated away from it when they started trying to clone windows vista. In some ways xfce4 reminds me a lot of windows 2000.
- coldtea 5y ago
  Yeah, but unfortunately xfce4 just covers the desktop manager + some utility apps part. Most of the apps would be an assortment of (non Xfce) Gnome-inspired GTK, Electron (e.g. Slack, VSCode), custom (Firefox, Chrome, Sublime Text), and/or KDE stuff, each with its own warts and "modern" approaches...
- int_19h 5y ago
  MATE would probably be closer in terms of its feature set.

forgotmypw17 5y ago

I think we just veered off the path a bit, and people like you are helping bring it back. I myself am working on a web-based note-taking system which works with every browser since Mosaic. :)

ryukafalz 5y ago

Personally I think GUIs took a wrong step somewhere between the Alto and the first Macs. Specifically because we've lost this ability: https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=605 https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=605 People say that CLIs are composable and GUIs aren't, and so CLIs are better for power users. They're right, for today's GUIs, but yesterday's GUIs were composable. We've lost that.

pjmlp 5y ago
We also lost this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4
amatecha 5y ago
Uhhhh... that demo is blowing my mind. Holy crap.
- ryukafalz 5y ago
  It's one of my absolute favorites. And don't forget, this predates the Macintosh. Imagine where we could be today if this was our starting point in the 70s.