5 ms·

I second the TUI argument here. Back in ... maybe 2005 or what, in our ~60 people family business, I had the pleasure to watch an accountant use our bespoke pa

I second the TUI argument here. Back in ... maybe 2005 or what, in our ~60 people family business, I had the pleasure to watch an accountant use our bespoke payroll system. That was a DOS-based app, running on an old Pentium 1 system. She was absolutely flying through the TUI. F2, type some numbers, Enter, F5 and so on and so on, at an absolutely blistering speed. Data entry took single-digit seconds. When that was changed to a web app a few years later, the same action took 30 seconds, maybe a minute. Bonus: a few years later, after we had to close shop and I moved on, I was onboarding a new web dev. When I told him about some development-related scripts in our codebase, he refused to touch the CLI. Said that CLIs are way too complicated and obsolete, and expecting people to learn that is out of touch. And he mostly got away with that, and I had to work around it. I keep thinking about that. A mere 10 years before, it was within the accepted norm for an accountant to drive a TUI. Inevitable, even. And now, I couldn't even get a "programmer" to execute some scripts. Unbelievable.

lenkite 2y ago
Things have changed back though - the CLI is hot again at-least amongst developers.
- jsk2600 2y ago
  I find it ironic that we developers prefer to use CLI because it's quick, efficient, stable, etc., but what we then deliver to people as web apps is quite the opposite experience.
  - pc86 2y ago
    It's what the default is. TUIs default to fast, stable, high-information-density, so you have to real work to make them otherwise. And I say this next part as primarily a front-end developer the past few years: web apps default to slow, brittle, too-much-whitespace "make the logo bigger" cruft, and it takes real work to make them otherwise. At the end of the day most people are lazy and most things, including (especially?) things done for work, are low quality. So you end up with the default more often than not.
  - stefs 2y ago
    in my experience, many managers tend to try to dumb products down as much as possible, to make it work for the most people. the problem is that this, together with the usual bad ui/ux, makes the product inefficient to use, especially for power users. then, every couple of years, a startup tries to carve out a niche by making a product that caters to power users and makes efficiency a priority. those power users adopt it and start to recommend it to other regular users. this usually also tends to work quite well because even regular users are smarter than expected, especially when motivated. thus the product grows, the startup grows and voila, a tech giant buys it. now one of the tech giants managers gets the task to improve profits and figures out, the way to do this is to increase the user base by making the product easier to use. UX enshittification ensues, the power users start looking out for the next niche product and the cycle starts anew. rule of thumb: if the manager says "my grandma who never used a computer before in her life must be able to use it", abandon ship.
  - weiliddat 2y ago
    Easier to sell the initial impression for "modern" web apps (shiny, easy-to-learn, low-skill-ceiling) vs the actual performance of TUI/"desktop" apps (mundane, effortful-to-learn, higher skill ceiling). Maybe someone has examples of web apps made for also a high skill ceiling? I've heard Linear, Superhuman does something like that while maintaining a nice interface, but I've never used those
jl6 2y ago
Not just accountants. I remember watching fully “non-technical” insurance admin / customer service people play the green screen keyboard like they were concert pianists. People can cope with a lot when they have to.
- karlgkk 2y ago
  I wouldn't say, cope, the green screen stuff has predictable field input, and predictable rules around selecting elements. Despite its obvious downsides, for people who do regular form input and editing, it's often better than the flavor of the day web framework IMO I mean, I wouldn't choose to use it, but I get it
- johannes1234321 2y ago
  There is a learning curve, but not coping. One of the crest things with terminal: with experience one can type ahead, even before the form fully opened one can type data, which is queued in the input buffer and work efficiently. In a modern GUI application a lot of time is wasted with reaching for the mouse, aiming and waiting for the new form to render. That requires coping with it
  - avhception 2y ago
    Case in point: the aforementioned accountant obviously hated the new GUI-based app, exactly because of what you said. Aiming the mouse, looking for that button, etc. slows you down.
    - viraptor 2y ago
      It doesn't have to. The tab order seems shortcuts are there and very usable... if anyone bothers to implement them.
      - johannes1234321 2y ago
        Not only implement, but implement them consistently and making users aware. Consistency is a thing. Old windows apps often followed a style guide to some degree, that was lost with web (while it's also hard, as styleguides differ between systems, like Windows and Mac) and wasn't ever as close as Mainframe terminal things where function keys had global effects.
gertrunde 2y ago
An application I used to deal with was similar, but with a somewhat quirky developer, who would deliberately flip between positive/negative confirmation questions, e.g.: - Confirm this is correct? (Yes=F1, No=F2) - Would you like to make any changes? (Yes=F1, No=F2) And maybe sometimes flip the yes/no F-key assignments as well. In theory this was done to force users to read the question and pay attention to what they were doing, in practice, users just memorized the key sequences.
- pc86 2y ago
  Ah just randomly pick between F1 and F9 for the two questions and don't necessarily put them in order. Yes=F7, No=F3 /s
heywire 2y ago
I was at a ticket window buying concert tickets a couple weeks ago and was surprised to see the worker using the Ticketmaster TUI / Mainframe interface. She flew through the screens. The same experience on the Ticketmaster website is awful.

lenkite 2y ago

Things have changed back though - the CLI is hot again at-least amongst developers.

jsk2600 2y ago
I find it ironic that we developers prefer to use CLI because it's quick, efficient, stable, etc., but what we then deliver to people as web apps is quite the opposite experience.
- pc86 2y ago
  It's what the default is. TUIs default to fast, stable, high-information-density, so you have to real work to make them otherwise. And I say this next part as primarily a front-end developer the past few years: web apps default to slow, brittle, too-much-whitespace "make the logo bigger" cruft, and it takes real work to make them otherwise. At the end of the day most people are lazy and most things, including (especially?) things done for work, are low quality. So you end up with the default more often than not.
- stefs 2y ago
  in my experience, many managers tend to try to dumb products down as much as possible, to make it work for the most people. the problem is that this, together with the usual bad ui/ux, makes the product inefficient to use, especially for power users. then, every couple of years, a startup tries to carve out a niche by making a product that caters to power users and makes efficiency a priority. those power users adopt it and start to recommend it to other regular users. this usually also tends to work quite well because even regular users are smarter than expected, especially when motivated. thus the product grows, the startup grows and voila, a tech giant buys it. now one of the tech giants managers gets the task to improve profits and figures out, the way to do this is to increase the user base by making the product easier to use. UX enshittification ensues, the power users start looking out for the next niche product and the cycle starts anew. rule of thumb: if the manager says "my grandma who never used a computer before in her life must be able to use it", abandon ship.
- weiliddat 2y ago
  Easier to sell the initial impression for "modern" web apps (shiny, easy-to-learn, low-skill-ceiling) vs the actual performance of TUI/"desktop" apps (mundane, effortful-to-learn, higher skill ceiling). Maybe someone has examples of web apps made for also a high skill ceiling? I've heard Linear, Superhuman does something like that while maintaining a nice interface, but I've never used those

jl6 2y ago

Not just accountants. I remember watching fully “non-technical” insurance admin / customer service people play the green screen keyboard like they were concert pianists. People can cope with a lot when they have to.

karlgkk 2y ago
I wouldn't say, cope, the green screen stuff has predictable field input, and predictable rules around selecting elements. Despite its obvious downsides, for people who do regular form input and editing, it's often better than the flavor of the day web framework IMO I mean, I wouldn't choose to use it, but I get it
johannes1234321 2y ago
There is a learning curve, but not coping. One of the crest things with terminal: with experience one can type ahead, even before the form fully opened one can type data, which is queued in the input buffer and work efficiently. In a modern GUI application a lot of time is wasted with reaching for the mouse, aiming and waiting for the new form to render. That requires coping with it
- avhception 2y ago
  Case in point: the aforementioned accountant obviously hated the new GUI-based app, exactly because of what you said. Aiming the mouse, looking for that button, etc. slows you down.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    It doesn't have to. The tab order seems shortcuts are there and very usable... if anyone bothers to implement them.
    - johannes1234321 2y ago
      Not only implement, but implement them consistently and making users aware. Consistency is a thing. Old windows apps often followed a style guide to some degree, that was lost with web (while it's also hard, as styleguides differ between systems, like Windows and Mac) and wasn't ever as close as Mainframe terminal things where function keys had global effects.

gertrunde 2y ago

An application I used to deal with was similar, but with a somewhat quirky developer, who would deliberately flip between positive/negative confirmation questions, e.g.: - Confirm this is correct? (Yes=F1, No=F2) - Would you like to make any changes? (Yes=F1, No=F2) And maybe sometimes flip the yes/no F-key assignments as well. In theory this was done to force users to read the question and pay attention to what they were doing, in practice, users just memorized the key sequences.

pc86 2y ago
Ah just randomly pick between F1 and F9 for the two questions and don't necessarily put them in order. Yes=F7, No=F3 /s

heywire 2y ago

I was at a ticket window buying concert tickets a couple weeks ago and was surprised to see the worker using the Ticketmaster TUI / Mainframe interface. She flew through the screens. The same experience on the Ticketmaster website is awful.