4 ms·

Most software I find to provide a smooth, gratifying UX has been carefully designed, but not by a designer. The Fish and Elvish shells have designs involving l

by pxc 1y ago

Most software I find to provide a smooth, gratifying UX has been carefully designed, but not by a designer. The Fish and Elvish shells have designs involving lots of small, tasteful choices that add up. `fd` refines the traditional Unix `find` CLI in a ton of ways that reflect "good taste" and at the same time brings it more in line with the conventional long and short options of most GNU CLI utilities, including reducing dependence on ordering/positions of arguments. On the other hand, apart from a few odd GUI disasters, it seems every piece of software I've used that has a UI I hate has had one or more designers behind it. Is there even a "haute couture" school of design for interfaces other than GUIs? Are there designers who design for the experiences of people who are visually impaired short of totally blind? It seems to me that virtually no trained designers care about what actually makes computing experiences useful or pleasant for me, let alone beautiful. (And they often devote an inordinate amount of energy to things I'd say don't matter at all.)

tsunamifury 1y ago
Yea coherent systems are satisfying. Command line or Ui really has nothing to do with it. That’s about usability. Which is entirely different.
- pxc 1y ago
  I'm potentially interested in formally studying HCI, but I'm a little worried that my classes will all be filled with visual design people I can't relate to, and that my classes will contain general recommendations that don't apply to users like me, or even make software more difficult to use for me.
  - tsunamifury 1y ago
    First, I would suggest your mentality is a bit... funny as you're saying you want to learn but NOT LIKE THAT. But as someone who did HCI at Berkeley/Stanford and teach it currently, it is a LOT more technical and heuristic driven than just 'designerlyness" So you know, do it, but like also... try to branch out and learn too.
    - pxc 1y ago
      I do expect for my tastes to change if I study HCI, and to begin to notice things that I didn't notice before. And I'm interested in good heuristics for designing user interfaces for general audiences. But I've been visually impaired my entire life, I'm colorblind, my colorblindness is progressive, and I'm going blind (timeline unknown). So my worries that HCI might not be "for me" come from a few places: 1. (This is the element you've perhaps picked up on.) Vision is generally the least compelling aesthetic dimension to me. I love music and poetry, but visual art virtually never moves me. Visual experiences generally lack spiritual depth for me, to the point that I sometimes find the way some people talk about visual art ridiculous or irritating. This is what I mean about not fitting in with people who are passionate about visual design. 2. Because of my vision, a lot of common assumptions about user interface design, especially about what is easy, natural, difficult, or awkward probably don't apply to me on a physical level. For instance: - I often have to use full screen magnification, which violates the assumption that an entire application is visible to me at once - gaze detection data can't even be collected for people with eyes like mine because our acuity problems are *worse* in the central visual field to the point that in advanced cases people have to read text exclusively using their peripheral vision - sometimes it seems I have visual processing difficulties to the point of being unable to tell what a picture is even an image of, like if there are any objects in the image and what they are - visually recognizing things takes me a lot of time and effort relative to other people, even when I can reliably do it - although I am significantly and untreatably visually impaired, I do not yet use a screen reader in any capacity and I don't know Braille at all I'm interested in HCI broadly— both for users like me and users unlike me. But I don't want to put a ton of energy into things that feel inordinately difficult or basically meaningless to me, either.
      - davidivadavid 1y ago
        You can't be unaware of the existence of the field of accessibility in design? It's literally one of the trendiest things in design, probably trendy enough for you to specialize in it entirely if you wanted to.
        1y ago
davidivadavid 1y ago
If it was designed, it was designed by a designer. That that designer also happened to play other roles, or that it's a CLI and not a GUI is immaterial. You're clearly confused about what designers do and who they are.
- pxc 1y ago
  If I deliver a letter to a friend's house, that doesn't make me a mailman. But even setting that aside, I could have simply written "not a designer by training" or "not a designer by trade" or "not a professional designer". Boring.
nicbou 1y ago
It could be that the designers have to contend with greater forces: marketing, management, available developer time, politics, sprints etc. It could also be that their work is dictated, so they don't get to explore and research. It could also be that they are too removed from the users to understand them.

by pxc 1y ago

tsunamifury 1y ago

Yea coherent systems are satisfying. Command line or Ui really has nothing to do with it. That’s about usability. Which is entirely different.

pxc 1y ago
I'm potentially interested in formally studying HCI, but I'm a little worried that my classes will all be filled with visual design people I can't relate to, and that my classes will contain general recommendations that don't apply to users like me, or even make software more difficult to use for me.
- tsunamifury 1y ago
  First, I would suggest your mentality is a bit... funny as you're saying you want to learn but NOT LIKE THAT. But as someone who did HCI at Berkeley/Stanford and teach it currently, it is a LOT more technical and heuristic driven than just 'designerlyness" So you know, do it, but like also... try to branch out and learn too.
  - pxc 1y ago
    I do expect for my tastes to change if I study HCI, and to begin to notice things that I didn't notice before. And I'm interested in good heuristics for designing user interfaces for general audiences. But I've been visually impaired my entire life, I'm colorblind, my colorblindness is progressive, and I'm going blind (timeline unknown). So my worries that HCI might not be "for me" come from a few places: 1. (This is the element you've perhaps picked up on.) Vision is generally the least compelling aesthetic dimension to me. I love music and poetry, but visual art virtually never moves me. Visual experiences generally lack spiritual depth for me, to the point that I sometimes find the way some people talk about visual art ridiculous or irritating. This is what I mean about not fitting in with people who are passionate about visual design. 2. Because of my vision, a lot of common assumptions about user interface design, especially about what is easy, natural, difficult, or awkward probably don't apply to me on a physical level. For instance: - I often have to use full screen magnification, which violates the assumption that an entire application is visible to me at once - gaze detection data can't even be collected for people with eyes like mine because our acuity problems are *worse* in the central visual field to the point that in advanced cases people have to read text exclusively using their peripheral vision - sometimes it seems I have visual processing difficulties to the point of being unable to tell what a picture is even an image of, like if there are any objects in the image and what they are - visually recognizing things takes me a lot of time and effort relative to other people, even when I can reliably do it - although I am significantly and untreatably visually impaired, I do not yet use a screen reader in any capacity and I don't know Braille at all I'm interested in HCI broadly— both for users like me and users unlike me. But I don't want to put a ton of energy into things that feel inordinately difficult or basically meaningless to me, either.
    - davidivadavid 1y ago
      You can't be unaware of the existence of the field of accessibility in design? It's literally one of the trendiest things in design, probably trendy enough for you to specialize in it entirely if you wanted to.
      - 1y ago

davidivadavid 1y ago

If it was designed, it was designed by a designer. That that designer also happened to play other roles, or that it's a CLI and not a GUI is immaterial. You're clearly confused about what designers do and who they are.

pxc 1y ago
If I deliver a letter to a friend's house, that doesn't make me a mailman. But even setting that aside, I could have simply written "not a designer by training" or "not a designer by trade" or "not a professional designer". Boring.

nicbou 1y ago

It could be that the designers have to contend with greater forces: marketing, management, available developer time, politics, sprints etc. It could also be that their work is dictated, so they don't get to explore and research. It could also be that they are too removed from the users to understand them.