10 ms·

Software should convey a sense of calm

236 points by pajuc 5y ago

dgb23 5y ago
Related: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology - https://calmtech.com/book.html https://calmtech.com/book.html
- haskellandchill 5y ago
  Does the "calm tech" movement have much to say? I feel like a theory of learning for software is more important. Of course it should be done in a pleasant way but I wasn't able to get much actionable insight out of calm tech writings.
  - dgb23 5y ago
    First, there are parallels to some Software Design heuristics. The focus on simplicity, complexity hiding, graceful error handling, generalizing and reducing the surface of interfaces etc. come to mind. So the way you structure and write your code has very much to do with wanting to reduce the mental taxation of the reader (you included). In the UI, UX and HCI world the concept has obviously a lot to say as well.
quadcore 5y ago
I absolutely believe the importance of this specifically because the desktop is failing at that in todays standard. In other words, maybe there is an apple or microsoft to be created around turning android or ios devices into work stations. I think that would require a new vm, i dont think you can code html 5 app on such a device for example.
- zubspace 5y ago
  The thing is, most software starts simple and easy to use. It's the introduction of new features and edge cases which slowly kills usability over time. And this applies to desktop, web, mobile and commandline applications as well. A tool needs a strong focus of it's maintainers and the courage to say 'No!' to things which are out of scope or not user friendly. This seems to be quite rare.
ruchin_k 5y ago
Absolutely agree. We probably spend more time looking at and interacting with software than the real world! Love apps like Superhuman which prioritize calmness and serenity in the user's experience
question002 5y ago
Who is seriously clicking on this headline? Really? Come on , it's bots.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jimmaswell 5y ago
> I want to find the same things in the same places How else will designers justify their jobs? I wonder if designer should be reworked to be a seasonal or consultancy job only, to only hire them when you're making a new product/big feature or there's a drastic need to change things but never otherwise. Having them as permanent staff leads to our present usability and accessability nightmare of everything constantly being redesigned and completely changed around for no good reason other than padding designers' resumes.
- dtjb 5y ago
  I'm sure there are designers making parallel arguments about developers :)
  - bitwize 5y ago
    Indeed, this is how game developers work: hired in legion strength to push a game to release, then laid off once it's released.
    - Transfinity 5y ago
      I've heard that DLC has made this less of a problem in recent years. Since there's a stable, predictable revenue stream and delivery channel for new content, iit's much easier to justify keeping devs, designers and artists on full time. Presumably this varies by studio / publisher / genre, but my impression is it's much better than it was.
  - sodapopcan 5y ago
    Yeah, there is certainly a parallel argument to be made about constantly introducing new tech even if the currently used tech is GoodEnough.
- ysavir 5y ago
  Assuming for the sake of argument that this is at all true, is the problem that designers are out to justify their jobs, and making changes as a consequence, or that designers are being put in a position where they have to justify their jobs, and are making changes to satisfy their managers? If anything, the problem in this scenario is that culturally we need everyone to be contributing all of the time, even for positions that may experience occasional downtime. Let's not assign blame to a particular group when they're simply responding to the pressures put on them.
phailhaus 5y ago
> Words like simple or intuitive are misleading here. They can be attributed to a solution in retrospect, but they don’t form a principle from which clear recommendations for action can be derived. Fantastic nugget of wisdom here. Saying that you want a product to be "intuitive" or "simple" is as useful as saying that you want it to be "good, not bad."
- quelltext 5y ago
  I disagree. A product might be visually appealing, serve hundreds of functions, be inexpensive, be sturdy, etc. These are all things that affect whether a product could be perceived as good vs. bad. Importantly, intuitiveness is not relevant for some products, or not what makes it good or bad. The tradeoffs between other aspects of your product could be such that trying to achieve intuitiveness would actively reduce value. Identifying intuitiveness as something you can optimize for or not is not pointless. I'd also argue that intuitiveness can be measured and strategies for more intuitive designs/patterns can be formed.
  - phailhaus 5y ago
    > These are all things that affect whether a product could be perceived as good vs. bad. Yes, and it is actually useful to say "I need this product to be inexpensive", rather than "I want this product to be good." That's what the author is getting at. Just saying "I want the product to be intuitive and simple" is worthless. You have to actually define what that means and what properties the product has to be considered "intuitive". But too often, "I want it to be intuitive" is about as far as they get.
Stampo00 5y ago
I find reading this in a web browser to be ironic. But then I immediately shared it with people via Slack, too, so...
agumonkey 5y ago
Calm Oriented Development, why not In festina lente
amelius 5y ago
That's probably why we get a blue screen, as opposed to a red screen.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
Sounds like fairly bog-standard Usability. Folks like Jakob Nielsen have been calling this kind of thing out for decades. They have not always been popular. I think a lot of this depends on the target audience. If it is a wide-distribution consumer application, then I like the "swimming duck" analogy, where it looks smooth and calm, above water, but is paddling like hell, underneath. That's what I strive for, myself, in my standard consumer-level apps. Many of my apps look quite "boring," but actually have a lot of moving parts, invisible to the user. Selecting a screen may result in multiple server transactions, and the user only sees a throbber for a half second. No progress report. The other side, is that, if you are marketing to engineers, or specific types of professionals (not all "pros," though. That's a wide net), you may want to present a very complex and "raw" UI. I have done this for admin dashboards.
- np_tedious 5y ago
  Adjusting information density to the desired audience is a very real thing. I've also had a lot of success (and fun!) with internal tools that display a lot of stuff but would be terrible for consumer software
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
I actually think the mid 1990's Mac and Windows GUI programs were much better at fulfilling this ideal. We have regressed from there. I am most familiar with Windows, so I will speak from that perspective. Because software was an application, and the path of least resistance was to use the OS provided controls and menus, there was a sense of uniformity in how you accessed features. Keyboard shortcuts just worked and were pretty much the save (Ctrl-S, saved the document, etc). OLE provided a uniform way to embed documents into other applications. Cut and paste worked consistently. There were also a limited amount of frameworks (bare Win32, MFC, OWL, Visual Basic, and Delphi probably covered 95%+ of apps). It seemed that most user interfaces at the time were actually made by programmers and not graphic designers. In addition, for the most part there was a lot of continuity from version to version in how a program looked. Now it seems that every web app wants to look different for the sake of looking different. People want to change how an app looks on a regular basis, often for no other reason than that it needs to look "fresh.". There are a myriad of every changing front-end JS frameworks. It seems that UI is driven by graphic designers looking to make something unique and standout and not programmers that just want to make a standard, low friction way the user can access the functionality and be done with it. Also, all you data is siloed a lot more because it is stored in the "cloud". Whereas before you could easily have access to the raw output from all your programs (and if they supported OLE embed documents from one program in a completely different one), now it is somewhat of a pain if you want to get raw access to your data. Web based apps do have a lot of advantages, but I feel we have given up a lot when we went from native desktops apps to web based.
- quelltext 5y ago
  A lot of the user interfaces we use today are "better" than what we had in the old days. The old generic windows and buttons and whatnot don't work on a finger touch input. Switching apps via gestures, visual cues by animation, use of space, effects to bring things in and out of focus, a lot of things have been refined and evolved over the years. Yes, things are not perfect but claiming that designers are making everything difficult while programmers would have just made everything better albeit not as pretty looking is really not a fair assessment. I mean, preference and general nostalgia, I get it, but it's a bit much. Getting raw access to your data also wasn't a breeze in the past with program often having their own binary formats and not exposing any programmatic interface at all to get data in or out. Not sure how this relates to the cloud.
discordance 5y ago
Going back a bit further, Mark Weiser came up some principals around 'calm computing' [0]. As we transitioned into the ubiquitous computing age, computers were supposed to disappear. I wish that were the case but we seemed to have designed them to need more attention than ever. 0: http://quicksilver.be.washington.edu/courses/arch498cre/2.Readings/2.Theory/CalmTech(Weiser%20&%20Brown,%201996).pdf http://quicksilver.be.washington.edu/courses/arch498cre/2.Re...
- jd3 5y ago
  "The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it." Calm Technology is "that which informs but doesn't demand our focus or attention." for those unfamiliar with Weiser/"Calm Technology": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology http://web.archive.org/web/20180604010109/http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/calmtech/calmtech.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20180604010109/http://www.ubiq.co... https://people.csail.mit.edu/rudolph/Teaching/weiser.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rudolph/Teaching/weiser.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20141022035044/http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html https://web.archive.org/web/20141022035044/http://www.ubiq.c... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Weiser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Weiser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jwLWosmmjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jwLWosmmjE https://web.archive.org/web/20080905233018/http://www-sul.stanford.edu/weiser https://web.archive.org/web/20080905233018/http://www-sul.st... https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=51 https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=51
throwaway09223 5y ago
I remember decades ago building a menu system for a homebrew media center to launch game emulators and so on. I wanted it to have a loud arcade style feel. All menu text was rendered in 3d and would bounce and vibrate. Lots of flashing lights, noise, music and high energy. Functionally, it was just a simplified file explorer. It was very fun to use. I agree with most of the opinions in this article, but I don't like the idea that all software should convey calm, or the conflation between a simplified intuitive interface and calm. Video games are a great example of simplified, intuitive interfaces which are often the polar opposite of calm. Elements like calm and intuitive are also extremely subjective. I find emacs calm, intuitive and extremely accessible. People with different context will have a comically different response. Humans need interfaces that cater to their different experiences.
- varikin 5y ago
  > Video games are a great example of simplified, intuitive interfaces which are often the polar opposite of calm. Video games are interesting in terms of usability. I thought a lot about this the past couple years after a UX course. A lot of UX principles are about making things easier, like large clickable areas, not moving clickable areas, contrasting colors, proving plenty of time to react or undo, and making things obvious and as easy as possible. But in a game, many of those principles are flipped. In a shooter, the enemies are smaller and move. They may be difficult to see. Solutions are not always obvious, especially if they are extras or hidden power ups. But at the same time, a lot of the UX principles are very important. An enemy about to attack should telegraph that attack so you have time to react. Menus should be very clear and obvious. Inventory management should not be a chore, the map and HUD should be easy to use.
  - handrous 5y ago
    Valve (in particular) even pioneered UX in level design—if it doesn't improve gameplay, why let the player wander around trying to find the way they're supposed to go (a situation common even in relatively on-rails shooters of the past)? And just putting in HUD arrows sucks, and those can be misleading. Instead, they use lighting, color choices, and level layout to direct the player's attention and direction of movement, while maintaining the illusion that the levels are part of a larger space.
deleted 5y ago
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Wistar 5y ago
I'd prefer a sense of trustworthiness.
rustybolt 5y ago
I don't know if I'm old and bitter, or that software becomes harder to use, but so many software seems to degrade in user experience. HTTP is a relatively easy thing, let's replace it by an overengineered clusterfuck called HTTPS. Good luck implementing THAT on your homebrew OS. (don't get me wrong, it's good thing that it exists, I just don't see why all the sites have to use it) Well, git+github seems to work nicely, lets disable logins using your password! Took me about an hour to take care of this (there is a nice guide for it, but that doesn't mention what your 'github email' is -- there is no such thing, and it doesn't mention that you have to change your remote to an ssh connection, and it also teaches you to copy-paste commands from the browser to your terminal).
- Tainnor 5y ago
  > (don't get me wrong, it's good thing that it exists, I just don't see why all the sites have to use it) Because regular users don't know how to distinguish between the level of trust they need for visiting "Justin's travel blog" vs. their online banking website. If we don't display red error messages if a site they visit has an invalid certificate, they don't know how to tell it's not safe to enter their credentials there. The web was once mainly used by academics, programmers and other geeks, now it's used by marketers, scammers, hackers, and a bunch of other malicious actors. I wish we could go back but that ship has sailed.
- iamstupidsimple 5y ago
  > I just don't see why all the sites have to use it https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140908/07191228453/comcast-using-packet-injection-to-push-its-own-ads-via-wifi-apparently-oblivious-to-security-concerns.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140908/07191228453/comca...
grey_earthling 5y ago
I'm not sure “software” is useful as a category in this context. If you're trying to make a useful tool these principles apply, but if you're trying to farm users for ad money they don't. People will say they want the former, but in practice they often choose the latter (and then grumble about it not being more like the former).
- gnramires 5y ago
  I think it's less users choosing it, but market forces pressuring most tools to turn into ad-ridden nightmares. There are secondary effects like the ad-ridden product may have more money for development and deliver better features. But at this point we're all wondering if there isn't a better funding model that can deliver both good experience and sufficient development funds.
BobBagwill 5y ago
Ideally, software should help you to enter and maintain an activity flow state.
UweSchmidt 5y ago
I'd be glad to check out any examples of software that come close to this ideal.
- layer8 5y ago
  The Windows 2000 user interface. Uniform look and behavior, very discoverable, clearly identifyable controls, “boring” gray.
  - userbinator 5y ago
    Contrast with Windows 11 - inconsistent UI, and adverts and notifications/nags blasting at you from every place they could fit one in. The exact opposite of calm.
- emadabdulrahim 5y ago
  Maybe Tempo comes to mind? a Minimal and calm email app for Mac OS https://www.yourtempo.co/ https://www.yourtempo.co/
  - UweSchmidt 5y ago
    Looks good, thanks.
mdoms 5y ago
A lot of modern software makes me feel stressed, confused and aggravated. When I open Youtube Music I never know what I'm going to get - sometimes Your Favourites is at the top, sometimes Mixed for You, sometimes something else. When I open Netflix it's almost always the case that I want to continue watching something, but will I find that in row 1 or row 4? How long will I need to scroll to find it?
cbanek 5y ago
This just reminds me of the composer Soyo Oka, who did the music for some great games, like SimCity (SNES), SimCity (NES, unreleased), Super Mario Kart (SNES), Pilotwings (SNES), etc. She said that in making the SimCity music she wanted it to feel comfy while building the city, not hectic or frustrating. And god, what a masterpiece of a game and music. I still play it 30 years later.
thedogeye 5y ago
Even Headspace has gotten this 100% wrong. It's so sad.
brundolf 5y ago
I agree with the goal, I have mixed feelings about the listed solutions I'd like to add one: using consistent metaphors. A user of software is constantly trying to form a mental model of how this ethereal, formless thing behaves. A state machine. What can and cannot happen, what will and will not happen after a given action, what can and cannot happen once we're in a different state. The shakier and less scrutable and/or reliable this mental model, the more anxiety is felt. As programmers we're partly insulated from this effect. We may not know the exact inner-workings of a piece of software we didn't write, but we know some general things about software and the way it does and doesn't behave that soften the huge void of scary unknowns. This helps us form our mental model. Physical metaphors of objects, continuity, permanence, locality, persistence, independence, are often used in GUIs for this reason. If I click a tab and then click back to the previous one, I expect to return to the same state I was in. If I change the text in one field, I expect that unrelated fields won't be impacted by that. Etc. This is a good starting point. Desktop platforms and then mobile platforms have built additional semi-consistent UX expectations on top of those largely physical intuitions. This helps too. But your application needs to go beyond that: it needs to present a simplified model of its internal state-machine to the user, and then it needs to hold to that. That mental model, once formed by the user, needs to have predictive power about the way the system behaves under different circumstances.
- qmmmur 5y ago
  Well written and a nice way to conceptualise the problem and zoom out a bit.
- bob1029 5y ago
  > If I click a tab and then click back to the previous one, I expect to return to the same state I was in. If I change the text in one field, I expect that unrelated fields won't be impacted by that. Etc. This is a good starting point. This is such a huge fucking deal. I could not hope to overstate the importance of UI flow & proper state management. It took us 7 years of mistakes & learning to figure out how to do this correctly. We had to learn to listen to the customer and not give in to our inner lazy developer. We now have total confidence in our ability to back-navigate through complex workflows, or arbitrarily switch between instances of them. Without breaking things. It is so intuitive to our users to be able to think "oh wait no i need to go back and change XYZ" or "I need to put this on hold so I can help this customer real quick". In our target market, the work is very complex and error-prone, so you are usually editing your previous inputs and double checking the new output. Every screen in our application has a back button & next button in exactly the same spots on the screen. I watch some of our users go back by muscle memory 3-4 screens within a second or 2. Mapping the users' brains to your UI is crucial. Really helps if you don't play RNG with the coordinates. It's really easy to paper over these things, especially if you are doubling down on a sub-par solution. Getting your users to want to use your app is really important in most situations. Even in a B2B setting, we hear our customers complain about bad UX in some of their other solutions and how this causes trouble for training & adoption. Even if you are getting paid for it, you still don't want to use trashy software. I have used software that you literally could not pay me to suffer with on a daily basis.
bgibson 5y ago
He's basically writing about discoverability in UI/UX. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=UI%2FUX+discoverability https://duckduckgo.com/?q=UI%2FUX+discoverability There's also the Calmtech movement, somewhat related to the post: https://calmtech.com/ https://calmtech.com/
jameshart 5y ago
Nonsense. Software should meet its design goals. A ground proximity warning software system should absolutely not “convey a sense of calm”. An online PvP battle arena game should not convey “a sense of calm”. I’m not sure a sense of calm is necessarily appropriate for a chat app, an ad blocker, or a to do list. Do you even want a sense of calm from your compiler? > calmc main.calm Compiling… please relax… Okay, now, are you sitting down? Y/n> Y Okay, I have some bad news about line 27, but I don’t want you to panic
- LukeShu 5y ago
  > Software should meet its design goals. OK, so interpret the title as "the design goals should include conveying a sense of calm". > A ground proximity warning software system should absolutely not “convey a sense of calm”. In the sense of "convey a sense of calm" described in the article, it absolutely should. The user shouldn't be freaking out because of the software, thinking "oh shit did I click the right thing?" or being confused about what is being indicated. If they're going to freak out, it should be because of the aircraft's situation, not because of the software. Moreover, in an emergency situation it is important to stay calm; the software should not make that harder to do; it should convey urgency, but not a sense of panic. > I’m not sure a sense of calm is necessarily appropriate for a chat app, an ad blocker, or a to do list. Again, you seem to be ascribing a different meaning to what the author describes. In the first paragraph, they describe calm as "I, as a user, should know what I can do with it and what I can’t do. I always know what’s happening, where I am and what is next. Everything comes easily to me. I don’t get stuck, never feel lost or stressed out." Regardless of what's said in the chat app, the app itself shouldn't convey non-calm; you wouldn't say that the user should be confused about what the app is doing, or that the chat app should be hard to use, or that they should feel lost navigating the app. Conveying a sense of calm absolutely is appropriate for each of those apps.
  - jameshart 5y ago
    I just find the entire post reductive and limiting in terms of its view of what software is or should be capable of. It is describing a philosophy applicable for software that has a particular purpose - mostly productivity desktop applications, it seems - which is just a very long way from all software. "I, as a user, should know what I can do with it and what I can’t do. I always know what’s happening, where I am and what is next. Everything comes easily to me. I don’t get stuck, never feel lost or stressed out." This is clearly not a reasonable design goal for a puzzle game. It’s not a good goal for a call center queue management system. It’s not even a reasonable design goal for a search engine! Oh, but you’ll say the author only means within the bounds of the tool’s interface the user should understand what options they have, not be burdened with additional stress of trying to figure out how to interact with it, etc. Which is just.. yes, obviously, you shouldn’t build software to just screw with people (oh, but… puzzle game?). But overall, taking responsibility for a user’s stress/calm and placing the burden on all software to try to “exude calm” into any situation is… it’s an opinion, but it’s not a particularly interesting one?
cgrealy 5y ago
Unless it's DOOM, in which case if the user is calm, you've failed. :)
akacia 5y ago
It’s all about making money. Almost nobody in business department cares about the quality of software and its actual usefulness as long as its selling. It’s possible to sell shitty software and get high returns through manipulation and marketing.

236 points by pajuc 5y ago

Related: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology - https://calmtech.com/book.html https://calmtech.com/book.html

haskellandchill 5y ago
Does the "calm tech" movement have much to say? I feel like a theory of learning for software is more important. Of course it should be done in a pleasant way but I wasn't able to get much actionable insight out of calm tech writings.
- dgb23 5y ago
  First, there are parallels to some Software Design heuristics. The focus on simplicity, complexity hiding, graceful error handling, generalizing and reducing the surface of interfaces etc. come to mind. So the way you structure and write your code has very much to do with wanting to reduce the mental taxation of the reader (you included). In the UI, UX and HCI world the concept has obviously a lot to say as well.

quadcore 5y ago

I absolutely believe the importance of this specifically because the desktop is failing at that in todays standard. In other words, maybe there is an apple or microsoft to be created around turning android or ios devices into work stations. I think that would require a new vm, i dont think you can code html 5 app on such a device for example.

zubspace 5y ago
The thing is, most software starts simple and easy to use. It's the introduction of new features and edge cases which slowly kills usability over time. And this applies to desktop, web, mobile and commandline applications as well. A tool needs a strong focus of it's maintainers and the courage to say 'No!' to things which are out of scope or not user friendly. This seems to be quite rare.

ruchin_k 5y ago

Absolutely agree. We probably spend more time looking at and interacting with software than the real world! Love apps like Superhuman which prioritize calmness and serenity in the user's experience

question002 5y ago

Who is seriously clicking on this headline? Really? Come on , it's bots.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jimmaswell 5y ago

> I want to find the same things in the same places How else will designers justify their jobs? I wonder if designer should be reworked to be a seasonal or consultancy job only, to only hire them when you're making a new product/big feature or there's a drastic need to change things but never otherwise. Having them as permanent staff leads to our present usability and accessability nightmare of everything constantly being redesigned and completely changed around for no good reason other than padding designers' resumes.

dtjb 5y ago
I'm sure there are designers making parallel arguments about developers :)
- bitwize 5y ago
  Indeed, this is how game developers work: hired in legion strength to push a game to release, then laid off once it's released.
  - Transfinity 5y ago
    I've heard that DLC has made this less of a problem in recent years. Since there's a stable, predictable revenue stream and delivery channel for new content, iit's much easier to justify keeping devs, designers and artists on full time. Presumably this varies by studio / publisher / genre, but my impression is it's much better than it was.
- sodapopcan 5y ago
  Yeah, there is certainly a parallel argument to be made about constantly introducing new tech even if the currently used tech is GoodEnough.
ysavir 5y ago
Assuming for the sake of argument that this is at all true, is the problem that designers are out to justify their jobs, and making changes as a consequence, or that designers are being put in a position where they have to justify their jobs, and are making changes to satisfy their managers? If anything, the problem in this scenario is that culturally we need everyone to be contributing all of the time, even for positions that may experience occasional downtime. Let's not assign blame to a particular group when they're simply responding to the pressures put on them.

phailhaus 5y ago

> Words like simple or intuitive are misleading here. They can be attributed to a solution in retrospect, but they don’t form a principle from which clear recommendations for action can be derived. Fantastic nugget of wisdom here. Saying that you want a product to be "intuitive" or "simple" is as useful as saying that you want it to be "good, not bad."

quelltext 5y ago
I disagree. A product might be visually appealing, serve hundreds of functions, be inexpensive, be sturdy, etc. These are all things that affect whether a product could be perceived as good vs. bad. Importantly, intuitiveness is not relevant for some products, or not what makes it good or bad. The tradeoffs between other aspects of your product could be such that trying to achieve intuitiveness would actively reduce value. Identifying intuitiveness as something you can optimize for or not is not pointless. I'd also argue that intuitiveness can be measured and strategies for more intuitive designs/patterns can be formed.
- phailhaus 5y ago
  > These are all things that affect whether a product could be perceived as good vs. bad. Yes, and it is actually useful to say "I need this product to be inexpensive", rather than "I want this product to be good." That's what the author is getting at. Just saying "I want the product to be intuitive and simple" is worthless. You have to actually define what that means and what properties the product has to be considered "intuitive". But too often, "I want it to be intuitive" is about as far as they get.

Stampo00 5y ago

I find reading this in a web browser to be ironic. But then I immediately shared it with people via Slack, too, so...

agumonkey 5y ago

Calm Oriented Development, why not In festina lente

amelius 5y ago

That's probably why we get a blue screen, as opposed to a red screen.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

Sounds like fairly bog-standard Usability. Folks like Jakob Nielsen have been calling this kind of thing out for decades. They have not always been popular. I think a lot of this depends on the target audience. If it is a wide-distribution consumer application, then I like the "swimming duck" analogy, where it looks smooth and calm, above water, but is paddling like hell, underneath. That's what I strive for, myself, in my standard consumer-level apps. Many of my apps look quite "boring," but actually have a lot of moving parts, invisible to the user. Selecting a screen may result in multiple server transactions, and the user only sees a throbber for a half second. No progress report. The other side, is that, if you are marketing to engineers, or specific types of professionals (not all "pros," though. That's a wide net), you may want to present a very complex and "raw" UI. I have done this for admin dashboards.

np_tedious 5y ago
Adjusting information density to the desired audience is a very real thing. I've also had a lot of success (and fun!) with internal tools that display a lot of stuff but would be terrible for consumer software

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

I actually think the mid 1990's Mac and Windows GUI programs were much better at fulfilling this ideal. We have regressed from there. I am most familiar with Windows, so I will speak from that perspective. Because software was an application, and the path of least resistance was to use the OS provided controls and menus, there was a sense of uniformity in how you accessed features. Keyboard shortcuts just worked and were pretty much the save (Ctrl-S, saved the document, etc). OLE provided a uniform way to embed documents into other applications. Cut and paste worked consistently. There were also a limited amount of frameworks (bare Win32, MFC, OWL, Visual Basic, and Delphi probably covered 95%+ of apps). It seemed that most user interfaces at the time were actually made by programmers and not graphic designers. In addition, for the most part there was a lot of continuity from version to version in how a program looked. Now it seems that every web app wants to look different for the sake of looking different. People want to change how an app looks on a regular basis, often for no other reason than that it needs to look "fresh.". There are a myriad of every changing front-end JS frameworks. It seems that UI is driven by graphic designers looking to make something unique and standout and not programmers that just want to make a standard, low friction way the user can access the functionality and be done with it. Also, all you data is siloed a lot more because it is stored in the "cloud". Whereas before you could easily have access to the raw output from all your programs (and if they supported OLE embed documents from one program in a completely different one), now it is somewhat of a pain if you want to get raw access to your data. Web based apps do have a lot of advantages, but I feel we have given up a lot when we went from native desktops apps to web based.

quelltext 5y ago
A lot of the user interfaces we use today are "better" than what we had in the old days. The old generic windows and buttons and whatnot don't work on a finger touch input. Switching apps via gestures, visual cues by animation, use of space, effects to bring things in and out of focus, a lot of things have been refined and evolved over the years. Yes, things are not perfect but claiming that designers are making everything difficult while programmers would have just made everything better albeit not as pretty looking is really not a fair assessment. I mean, preference and general nostalgia, I get it, but it's a bit much. Getting raw access to your data also wasn't a breeze in the past with program often having their own binary formats and not exposing any programmatic interface at all to get data in or out. Not sure how this relates to the cloud.

discordance 5y ago

Going back a bit further, Mark Weiser came up some principals around 'calm computing' [0]. As we transitioned into the ubiquitous computing age, computers were supposed to disappear. I wish that were the case but we seemed to have designed them to need more attention than ever. 0: http://quicksilver.be.washington.edu/courses/arch498cre/2.Readings/2.Theory/CalmTech(Weiser%20&%20Brown,%201996).pdf http://quicksilver.be.washington.edu/courses/arch498cre/2.Re...

jd3 5y ago
"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it." Calm Technology is "that which informs but doesn't demand our focus or attention." for those unfamiliar with Weiser/"Calm Technology": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calm_technology http://web.archive.org/web/20180604010109/http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/calmtech/calmtech.htm http://web.archive.org/web/20180604010109/http://www.ubiq.co... https://people.csail.mit.edu/rudolph/Teaching/weiser.pdf https://people.csail.mit.edu/rudolph/Teaching/weiser.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20141022035044/http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html https://web.archive.org/web/20141022035044/http://www.ubiq.c... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Weiser https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Weiser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jwLWosmmjE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jwLWosmmjE https://web.archive.org/web/20080905233018/http://www-sul.stanford.edu/weiser https://web.archive.org/web/20080905233018/http://www-sul.st... https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=51 https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=51

throwaway09223 5y ago

I remember decades ago building a menu system for a homebrew media center to launch game emulators and so on. I wanted it to have a loud arcade style feel. All menu text was rendered in 3d and would bounce and vibrate. Lots of flashing lights, noise, music and high energy. Functionally, it was just a simplified file explorer. It was very fun to use. I agree with most of the opinions in this article, but I don't like the idea that all software should convey calm, or the conflation between a simplified intuitive interface and calm. Video games are a great example of simplified, intuitive interfaces which are often the polar opposite of calm. Elements like calm and intuitive are also extremely subjective. I find emacs calm, intuitive and extremely accessible. People with different context will have a comically different response. Humans need interfaces that cater to their different experiences.

varikin 5y ago
> Video games are a great example of simplified, intuitive interfaces which are often the polar opposite of calm. Video games are interesting in terms of usability. I thought a lot about this the past couple years after a UX course. A lot of UX principles are about making things easier, like large clickable areas, not moving clickable areas, contrasting colors, proving plenty of time to react or undo, and making things obvious and as easy as possible. But in a game, many of those principles are flipped. In a shooter, the enemies are smaller and move. They may be difficult to see. Solutions are not always obvious, especially if they are extras or hidden power ups. But at the same time, a lot of the UX principles are very important. An enemy about to attack should telegraph that attack so you have time to react. Menus should be very clear and obvious. Inventory management should not be a chore, the map and HUD should be easy to use.
- handrous 5y ago
  Valve (in particular) even pioneered UX in level design—if it doesn't improve gameplay, why let the player wander around trying to find the way they're supposed to go (a situation common even in relatively on-rails shooters of the past)? And just putting in HUD arrows sucks, and those can be misleading. Instead, they use lighting, color choices, and level layout to direct the player's attention and direction of movement, while maintaining the illusion that the levels are part of a larger space.

deleted 5y ago

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Wistar 5y ago

I'd prefer a sense of trustworthiness.

rustybolt 5y ago

I don't know if I'm old and bitter, or that software becomes harder to use, but so many software seems to degrade in user experience. HTTP is a relatively easy thing, let's replace it by an overengineered clusterfuck called HTTPS. Good luck implementing THAT on your homebrew OS. (don't get me wrong, it's good thing that it exists, I just don't see why all the sites have to use it) Well, git+github seems to work nicely, lets disable logins using your password! Took me about an hour to take care of this (there is a nice guide for it, but that doesn't mention what your 'github email' is -- there is no such thing, and it doesn't mention that you have to change your remote to an ssh connection, and it also teaches you to copy-paste commands from the browser to your terminal).

Tainnor 5y ago
> (don't get me wrong, it's good thing that it exists, I just don't see why all the sites have to use it) Because regular users don't know how to distinguish between the level of trust they need for visiting "Justin's travel blog" vs. their online banking website. If we don't display red error messages if a site they visit has an invalid certificate, they don't know how to tell it's not safe to enter their credentials there. The web was once mainly used by academics, programmers and other geeks, now it's used by marketers, scammers, hackers, and a bunch of other malicious actors. I wish we could go back but that ship has sailed.
iamstupidsimple 5y ago
> I just don't see why all the sites have to use it https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140908/07191228453/comcast-using-packet-injection-to-push-its-own-ads-via-wifi-apparently-oblivious-to-security-concerns.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140908/07191228453/comca...

grey_earthling 5y ago

I'm not sure “software” is useful as a category in this context. If you're trying to make a useful tool these principles apply, but if you're trying to farm users for ad money they don't. People will say they want the former, but in practice they often choose the latter (and then grumble about it not being more like the former).

gnramires 5y ago
I think it's less users choosing it, but market forces pressuring most tools to turn into ad-ridden nightmares. There are secondary effects like the ad-ridden product may have more money for development and deliver better features. But at this point we're all wondering if there isn't a better funding model that can deliver both good experience and sufficient development funds.

BobBagwill 5y ago

Ideally, software should help you to enter and maintain an activity flow state.

UweSchmidt 5y ago

I'd be glad to check out any examples of software that come close to this ideal.

layer8 5y ago
The Windows 2000 user interface. Uniform look and behavior, very discoverable, clearly identifyable controls, “boring” gray.
- userbinator 5y ago
  Contrast with Windows 11 - inconsistent UI, and adverts and notifications/nags blasting at you from every place they could fit one in. The exact opposite of calm.
emadabdulrahim 5y ago
Maybe Tempo comes to mind? a Minimal and calm email app for Mac OS https://www.yourtempo.co/ https://www.yourtempo.co/
- UweSchmidt 5y ago
  Looks good, thanks.

mdoms 5y ago

A lot of modern software makes me feel stressed, confused and aggravated. When I open Youtube Music I never know what I'm going to get - sometimes Your Favourites is at the top, sometimes Mixed for You, sometimes something else. When I open Netflix it's almost always the case that I want to continue watching something, but will I find that in row 1 or row 4? How long will I need to scroll to find it?

cbanek 5y ago

This just reminds me of the composer Soyo Oka, who did the music for some great games, like SimCity (SNES), SimCity (NES, unreleased), Super Mario Kart (SNES), Pilotwings (SNES), etc. She said that in making the SimCity music she wanted it to feel comfy while building the city, not hectic or frustrating. And god, what a masterpiece of a game and music. I still play it 30 years later.

thedogeye 5y ago

Even Headspace has gotten this 100% wrong. It's so sad.

brundolf 5y ago

I agree with the goal, I have mixed feelings about the listed solutions I'd like to add one: using consistent metaphors. A user of software is constantly trying to form a mental model of how this ethereal, formless thing behaves. A state machine. What can and cannot happen, what will and will not happen after a given action, what can and cannot happen once we're in a different state. The shakier and less scrutable and/or reliable this mental model, the more anxiety is felt. As programmers we're partly insulated from this effect. We may not know the exact inner-workings of a piece of software we didn't write, but we know some general things about software and the way it does and doesn't behave that soften the huge void of scary unknowns. This helps us form our mental model. Physical metaphors of objects, continuity, permanence, locality, persistence, independence, are often used in GUIs for this reason. If I click a tab and then click back to the previous one, I expect to return to the same state I was in. If I change the text in one field, I expect that unrelated fields won't be impacted by that. Etc. This is a good starting point. Desktop platforms and then mobile platforms have built additional semi-consistent UX expectations on top of those largely physical intuitions. This helps too. But your application needs to go beyond that: it needs to present a simplified model of its internal state-machine to the user, and then it needs to hold to that. That mental model, once formed by the user, needs to have predictive power about the way the system behaves under different circumstances.

qmmmur 5y ago
Well written and a nice way to conceptualise the problem and zoom out a bit.
bob1029 5y ago
> If I click a tab and then click back to the previous one, I expect to return to the same state I was in. If I change the text in one field, I expect that unrelated fields won't be impacted by that. Etc. This is a good starting point. This is such a huge fucking deal. I could not hope to overstate the importance of UI flow & proper state management. It took us 7 years of mistakes & learning to figure out how to do this correctly. We had to learn to listen to the customer and not give in to our inner lazy developer. We now have total confidence in our ability to back-navigate through complex workflows, or arbitrarily switch between instances of them. Without breaking things. It is so intuitive to our users to be able to think "oh wait no i need to go back and change XYZ" or "I need to put this on hold so I can help this customer real quick". In our target market, the work is very complex and error-prone, so you are usually editing your previous inputs and double checking the new output. Every screen in our application has a back button & next button in exactly the same spots on the screen. I watch some of our users go back by muscle memory 3-4 screens within a second or 2. Mapping the users' brains to your UI is crucial. Really helps if you don't play RNG with the coordinates. It's really easy to paper over these things, especially if you are doubling down on a sub-par solution. Getting your users to want to use your app is really important in most situations. Even in a B2B setting, we hear our customers complain about bad UX in some of their other solutions and how this causes trouble for training & adoption. Even if you are getting paid for it, you still don't want to use trashy software. I have used software that you literally could not pay me to suffer with on a daily basis.

bgibson 5y ago

He's basically writing about discoverability in UI/UX. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=UI%2FUX+discoverability https://duckduckgo.com/?q=UI%2FUX+discoverability There's also the Calmtech movement, somewhat related to the post: https://calmtech.com/ https://calmtech.com/

jameshart 5y ago

Nonsense. Software should meet its design goals. A ground proximity warning software system should absolutely not “convey a sense of calm”. An online PvP battle arena game should not convey “a sense of calm”. I’m not sure a sense of calm is necessarily appropriate for a chat app, an ad blocker, or a to do list. Do you even want a sense of calm from your compiler? > calmc main.calm Compiling… please relax… Okay, now, are you sitting down? Y/n> Y Okay, I have some bad news about line 27, but I don’t want you to panic

LukeShu 5y ago
> Software should meet its design goals. OK, so interpret the title as "the design goals should include conveying a sense of calm". > A ground proximity warning software system should absolutely not “convey a sense of calm”. In the sense of "convey a sense of calm" described in the article, it absolutely should. The user shouldn't be freaking out because of the software, thinking "oh shit did I click the right thing?" or being confused about what is being indicated. If they're going to freak out, it should be because of the aircraft's situation, not because of the software. Moreover, in an emergency situation it is important to stay calm; the software should not make that harder to do; it should convey urgency, but not a sense of panic. > I’m not sure a sense of calm is necessarily appropriate for a chat app, an ad blocker, or a to do list. Again, you seem to be ascribing a different meaning to what the author describes. In the first paragraph, they describe calm as "I, as a user, should know what I can do with it and what I can’t do. I always know what’s happening, where I am and what is next. Everything comes easily to me. I don’t get stuck, never feel lost or stressed out." Regardless of what's said in the chat app, the app itself shouldn't convey non-calm; you wouldn't say that the user should be confused about what the app is doing, or that the chat app should be hard to use, or that they should feel lost navigating the app. Conveying a sense of calm absolutely is appropriate for each of those apps.
- jameshart 5y ago
  I just find the entire post reductive and limiting in terms of its view of what software is or should be capable of. It is describing a philosophy applicable for software that has a particular purpose - mostly productivity desktop applications, it seems - which is just a very long way from all software. "I, as a user, should know what I can do with it and what I can’t do. I always know what’s happening, where I am and what is next. Everything comes easily to me. I don’t get stuck, never feel lost or stressed out." This is clearly not a reasonable design goal for a puzzle game. It’s not a good goal for a call center queue management system. It’s not even a reasonable design goal for a search engine! Oh, but you’ll say the author only means within the bounds of the tool’s interface the user should understand what options they have, not be burdened with additional stress of trying to figure out how to interact with it, etc. Which is just.. yes, obviously, you shouldn’t build software to just screw with people (oh, but… puzzle game?). But overall, taking responsibility for a user’s stress/calm and placing the burden on all software to try to “exude calm” into any situation is… it’s an opinion, but it’s not a particularly interesting one?

cgrealy 5y ago

Unless it's DOOM, in which case if the user is calm, you've failed. :)

akacia 5y ago

It’s all about making money. Almost nobody in business department cares about the quality of software and its actual usefulness as long as its selling. It’s possible to sell shitty software and get high returns through manipulation and marketing.