5 ms·

Rustic UI: Crafting the Future of UX

33 points by milliondreams 3y ago

Gehinnn 3y ago
I thought this was about doing UI in rust, but it's just Javascript/react. Also, in the demo screenshot, the margins of the agent/you labels feel off.
- romanovcode 3y ago
  I was excited at first because UI libraries for react is a cool thing but saw the screenshot and did not like it at all myself. It just doesn't look pleasant to the eye IMO. Borders are too round, labels are too close to the left side and also too close to the elements, font is too small, the color choice is weird. Again, not some kind of design guru but something like this is definitely not something I would ever use just based on looking at the screenshot.
feverzsj 3y ago
What this has to do with AI?
- rrr_oh_man 3y ago
  ...or Anguilla
- aerhardt 3y ago
  AI needs UIs too, and I don’t think it’s a terrible idea to create a UI library for multi-modal experiences. Unfortunately this isn’t it, at least for the moment being.
jen729w 3y ago
Obligatory shot of a page professing to be about UX totally ruining the UX. https://ibb.co/Mk34N7s https://ibb.co/Mk34N7s Suffice to say I didn’t bother reading the article.
- rrr_oh_man 3y ago
  "But Management made us do it!"
- Findecanor 3y ago
  The cookie popup happens to every European every time they visit practically any site for the first time. It is required by EU law, and it usually pops up on US site if your source IP is identified as being from Europe. The IP databases used by sites can be outdated... Or perhaps the site asks everyone anyway. That's actually not a bad cookie dialog. It has the "Deny" button right there, instead of requiring you to scroll through a list of options and uncheck every "non-essential" cookie (which is much too common...). It even has the check boxes available at the first level instead of requiring you to enter a second dialog box.
  - JoshTriplett 3y ago
    > It is required by EU law No, it emphatically is not. Just stop tracking people, and then you do not have to prompt for anything. The entire edifice of "can we use cookies" dialogs is an unnecessary abomination.
    - mr_mitm 3y ago
      And even if you do want to track people, there are ways to ask a lot nicer than the vast majority of cookie banners. This guy does it well I think: https://www.dkriesel.com/ https://www.dkriesel.com/ The request to allow cookies is reasonable, genuine (I believe) and unintrusive. It does use a bit of a dark pattern by making the refuse button more faded, but I can empathize.
      - IMTDb 3y ago
        That cookie banner is non compliant with the EU law. I agree that the banner is nice, unobtrusive and kind. But a serious business cannot use that instead of the bigger one which - while super obnoxious - provide the required information about which cookies are used, what, and how.
CGamesPlay 3y ago
I like the idea, frankly. A rapid prototyping tool to make chat-driven UIs (like, "the bootstrap of chat UIs") seems like a useful addition to the ecosystem. I see that MarkedStreamingMarkdown is mentioned, but I'd like to see a demo, and in particular I'm curious how it interacts with images and code blocks. Also, the interface (`updatedText` detects changes in value and appends them to the displayed text) appears to be a gross violation of React's model (e.g. you cannot stream "he had had enough" without streaming "had", undefined, "had").
aerhardt 3y ago
This thing is packaging components from MUI and Recharts, any React dev would know how to bring these in if needed in a project. Also why a time series chart but not every other chart? I think there is a case for a chat UI library, but this doesn’t look like a well-designed solution. A better approach would be to bring in the absolute minimum primitives needed for chat and let the dev bring everything else (eg, charts). Also agree with others that the styling doesn’t look good at all. It looks to be in a strange middle-ground between unopinionated and opinionated, satisfying neither. There are problems with design rudiments too - the spacing generally and the vertical rhythm particularly are very poor, for example.
CuriouslyC 3y ago
As someone building an app that has AI chat as a feature, this library is too coarse grained. This might be useful if someone's trying to quickly build a low quality canned AI app, but my hand rolled UI is much nicer. You wanna know what would be a useful component? A simple <Text> component that takes a streaming character generator wrapping output from a LLM and can render the stream progressively without any any additional config by the user, and that provides hooks for animating the appearance of the text so the user can easily create beautiful experiences.
isodev 3y ago
I'm not sure if this is "rustic", it doesn't feel appealing at all. Also, why it even needs to be packaged as a library - it would have been way more portable and easier to adopt/tweak if it comes as web components or just vanilla html/css snippets.
airstrike 3y ago
This is hardly the future of UX. More like the present if not the past.
- CyberDildonics 3y ago
  When someone is learning everything for the first time, everything seems like an invention.

33 points by milliondreams 3y ago

I thought this was about doing UI in rust, but it's just Javascript/react. Also, in the demo screenshot, the margins of the agent/you labels feel off.

romanovcode 3y ago
I was excited at first because UI libraries for react is a cool thing but saw the screenshot and did not like it at all myself. It just doesn't look pleasant to the eye IMO. Borders are too round, labels are too close to the left side and also too close to the elements, font is too small, the color choice is weird. Again, not some kind of design guru but something like this is definitely not something I would ever use just based on looking at the screenshot.

feverzsj 3y ago

What this has to do with AI?

rrr_oh_man 3y ago
...or Anguilla
aerhardt 3y ago
AI needs UIs too, and I don’t think it’s a terrible idea to create a UI library for multi-modal experiences. Unfortunately this isn’t it, at least for the moment being.

jen729w 3y ago

Obligatory shot of a page professing to be about UX totally ruining the UX. https://ibb.co/Mk34N7s https://ibb.co/Mk34N7s Suffice to say I didn’t bother reading the article.

rrr_oh_man 3y ago
"But Management made us do it!"
Findecanor 3y ago
The cookie popup happens to every European every time they visit practically any site for the first time. It is required by EU law, and it usually pops up on US site if your source IP is identified as being from Europe. The IP databases used by sites can be outdated... Or perhaps the site asks everyone anyway. That's actually not a bad cookie dialog. It has the "Deny" button right there, instead of requiring you to scroll through a list of options and uncheck every "non-essential" cookie (which is much too common...). It even has the check boxes available at the first level instead of requiring you to enter a second dialog box.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  > It is required by EU law No, it emphatically is not. Just stop tracking people, and then you do not have to prompt for anything. The entire edifice of "can we use cookies" dialogs is an unnecessary abomination.
  - mr_mitm 3y ago
    And even if you do want to track people, there are ways to ask a lot nicer than the vast majority of cookie banners. This guy does it well I think: https://www.dkriesel.com/ https://www.dkriesel.com/ The request to allow cookies is reasonable, genuine (I believe) and unintrusive. It does use a bit of a dark pattern by making the refuse button more faded, but I can empathize.
    - IMTDb 3y ago
      That cookie banner is non compliant with the EU law. I agree that the banner is nice, unobtrusive and kind. But a serious business cannot use that instead of the bigger one which - while super obnoxious - provide the required information about which cookies are used, what, and how.

CGamesPlay 3y ago

I like the idea, frankly. A rapid prototyping tool to make chat-driven UIs (like, "the bootstrap of chat UIs") seems like a useful addition to the ecosystem. I see that MarkedStreamingMarkdown is mentioned, but I'd like to see a demo, and in particular I'm curious how it interacts with images and code blocks. Also, the interface (`updatedText` detects changes in value and appends them to the displayed text) appears to be a gross violation of React's model (e.g. you cannot stream "he had had enough" without streaming "had", undefined, "had").

aerhardt 3y ago

This thing is packaging components from MUI and Recharts, any React dev would know how to bring these in if needed in a project. Also why a time series chart but not every other chart? I think there is a case for a chat UI library, but this doesn’t look like a well-designed solution. A better approach would be to bring in the absolute minimum primitives needed for chat and let the dev bring everything else (eg, charts). Also agree with others that the styling doesn’t look good at all. It looks to be in a strange middle-ground between unopinionated and opinionated, satisfying neither. There are problems with design rudiments too - the spacing generally and the vertical rhythm particularly are very poor, for example.

CuriouslyC 3y ago

As someone building an app that has AI chat as a feature, this library is too coarse grained. This might be useful if someone's trying to quickly build a low quality canned AI app, but my hand rolled UI is much nicer. You wanna know what would be a useful component? A simple <Text> component that takes a streaming character generator wrapping output from a LLM and can render the stream progressively without any any additional config by the user, and that provides hooks for animating the appearance of the text so the user can easily create beautiful experiences.

isodev 3y ago

I'm not sure if this is "rustic", it doesn't feel appealing at all. Also, why it even needs to be packaged as a library - it would have been way more portable and easier to adopt/tweak if it comes as web components or just vanilla html/css snippets.

airstrike 3y ago

This is hardly the future of UX. More like the present if not the past.

CyberDildonics 3y ago
When someone is learning everything for the first time, everything seems like an invention.