[HN Gopher] The rise and fall of the standard user interface
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The rise and fall of the standard user interface
Author : Brajeshwar
Score : 63 points
Date : 2024-01-25 16:04 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| graemep wrote:
| The Register has also published articles claiming (incorrectly
| because it ignores customisability) that Linux desktop
| environments are too much like Windows and not innovating.
|
| I agree about the lack of standard key bindings is a problem. It
| is definitely a problem with things like text editors. Even worse
| between modal editors, or a mix of modal and modeless - I
| generally use Helix and occasionally using vi (or nano, or
| anything else) is a pain.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Talking about out-of-the-box configs (which are important
| because a lot of users run default or near-default), the
| argument that Linux DEs that ship with distros have a heavy
| bias towards the Win9X desktop paradigm holds up pretty well.
| The only odd ones out are GNOME which is iPadOS-like and
| Pantheon which is like iPadOS with an OS X 10.9 theme applied.
|
| There aren't any DEs that for example mimic macOS (modern or
| classic) and the few that do something different (e.g. GNUSTEP,
| CDE, etc) don't ship with distros. As far as I know there
| haven't been any recent DEs that were designed from scratch
| based on research from new user trials and usability studies
| (which is unfortunate; most of data in this realm dates back 20
| years or more and could probably benefit from addition of new
| data from a modern context).
| graemep wrote:
| Out of the box configs need to be familiar, and most uses are
| accustomed to Windows. Doing otherwise is a barrier to new
| users.
|
| I cannot tell how well the distros that do mimic MacOS do it,
| but from what you say it is not well enough (at least not
| Pantheon).
| jwells89 wrote:
| The problem with Pantheon is that it only captures the
| skin-deep aspects of macOS. Power user features and
| progressive disclosure thereof (which are a big reason why
| macOS has a technically capable userbase) are mostly
| stripped. Like GNOME, it doesn't support minimizing windows
| for example and not only doesn't have a global menubar but
| eschews menubars entirely, with functions that don't fit in
| hamburger menus either getting buried or cut entirely.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Absolutely; recently I realize _I wish I 'd never learned vim._
| I use too many other programs that are at least CUA-ish (
| http://zim-wiki.org is the most important app I use ) and now I
| kind of want out. I haven't yet tried Modeless Vim, but that
| looks like my next experiment.
|
| https://github.com/SebastianMuskalla/ModelessVim
| IshKebab wrote:
| Probably the most annoying inconsistency in any UI - no matter
| the platform - is which mouse button / modifier keys do you use
| to pan, rotate and zoom. Both in 2D and 3D there's zero
| consistency across programs.
| hgs3 wrote:
| > Linux desktop environments are too much like Windows and not
| innovating.
|
| If we're talking the files+folders paradigm, then there's not
| much innovation remaining outside of cosmetic changes. Desktop
| computers are "done" much the same way automobile interfaces
| (steering wheel, foot peddles, etc) are "done". I think true
| Desktop innovations would require a paradigm shift or new
| hardware, like eye-tracking or a BCI.
| adamzochowski wrote:
| The question is what drives consistency.
|
| 80s 90s and early 2000s it was the OS. All apps running under a
| specific OS would look similar to each other. Behave same way.
| File menus looked same. Preferences was in same location.
|
| But somewhere in 2000s this reversed and OS was no longer driver
| of consistency.
|
| App developers stopped following OS UI guidelines and decided
| that it's not important for OS to be cohesive. The goal was that
| app, no matter where it is running, should have consistent look
| and behavior.
|
| And now we are in application centric world where application
| dictates UI and there is no OS level consistency.
|
| Additionally Microsoft and Apple did not help the situation by
| themselves breaking the OS UI paradigms with media players, or in
| MS case MS Office.
| marius-sw wrote:
| > Additionally Microsoft and Apple did not help the situation
| by themselves breaking the OS UI paradigms with media players,
| or in MS case MS Office.
|
| Indeed - I remember this situation very clearly. Back when
| Office 2007 came out, there was no first-party way to create
| applications like that, and after a year or two, only few
| third-party libraries that were lacking in quality and polish.
|
| This was the turning point. Clients asked us for it, we tried,
| but ultimately we decided to ditch the bad libraries and do our
| own thing - then the clients decided they might as well define
| their own UI design language if they're paying for UI component
| development.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| The Ribbon was a travesty. Organized menus were replaced by a
| giant bar full of incomprehensible icons. If you were decent
| at Office, then your muscle memory was screwed up. (If you
| were excellent, then maybe you had all the shortcuts
| memorized and it didn't matter, but most of us are in an in-
| between state.) If instead you were completely new to Office,
| then your consistent, discoverable indication of keyboard
| shortcuts (in the menus) also went away -- no more skill
| ladder. The only winners were preliterate toddlers, I have to
| assume.
|
| This was justified with, "I am an HCI expert, trust me".
| Which is garbage: I'm the user of the tool; don't try to
| pretend you know better, like some colonial governor.
|
| Also, it started getting slower. A process that only got
| worse and worse.
|
| My assumption is that it was really all driven by internal
| politics within Microsoft, specifically some manager's need
| to Change Something.
| lproven wrote:
| [Article author here]
|
| Strongly agreed. Better for newbies, maybe, but disastrous
| for skilled users. It broke the suite for me: I can't stand
| it at all, and switched to LibreOffice full time.
|
| Sadly, though, LO Writer doesn't have Outline Mode, the one
| indispensible bit of MS Office for me. So I keep Word 97 or
| Word 2000 around, just for outlining.
| jwells89 wrote:
| In the case of Windows, that consistency wasn't ever really
| there at any point. DOS was the Wild West when it came to UI
| and much of that carried over to Windows -- it wasn't unusual
| to come across Windows programs that looked nothing like the OS
| in the 95/98/ME/2k/XP era.
|
| It was more of a thing on Macs, which never had a point where
| the platform didn't provide guidance for what programs should
| look like, and that only got stronger with the introduction of
| OS X where non-native programs stuck out like a sore thumb due
| to looking so supremely unpolished next to apps built with
| Cocoa or Carbon, which were richly nuanced.
|
| To my memory, all of this flipped with the introduction of flat
| design, when it became more acceptable to build software that
| didn't have much love put towards UI design. An electron (or
| similar, e.g. CEF) app built using Material Design 1.0 stuck
| out much less starkly when framed by the flattened Helveticized
| OS X Yosemite or Windows 8 than it did framed by OS X Mavericks
| or Windows 7.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Every thing looked pretty much the same in the Windows 3
| line. And almost everything looked the same on the NT line.
|
| At the time of Windows 95, things were still basically
| homogeneous.
| ok123456 wrote:
| > DOS was the Wild West when it came to UI
|
| You could tell when something was made with Borland and TUI.
| Professional applications tended to look alike.
| lproven wrote:
| [Article author here]
|
| This is true... but, to be fair, there were a handful of
| apps that went out of their way to look like Turbovision
| apps but weren't, and by the same token, it was possible to
| create (e.g.) Delphi apps that didn't look like it.
|
| The first console text editor I really liked on Linux was
| SETedit.
|
| https://setedit.sourceforge.net/#scrnsht
|
| That, I think, uses a 3rd party independent clone of
| Turbovision.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| The whole idea of a "standard user interface" always seemed
| totally goofy to me.
|
| Do hammers, bulldozers, and microscopes all use a "standard
| user interface"? No, they do not.
|
| A user interface should be optimized for the tool in question,
| not optimized to look exactly like the interface for all other
| tools.
|
| Not to mention the hubris involved with imagining that one has
| invented the One True User Interface at the very dawn of the
| technology.
|
| While performing roughly the same task, modern hammers don't
| have anything like the "user interface" of a Paleolithic hammer
| stone. Fortunately there weren't any "Human Interface
| Guidelines" people around when the hammer stone was invented.
| jwells89 wrote:
| App UIs should be optimized for their use case, yes, but I
| would argue that the idea that a one-off app UI design can do
| common widgets and interactions as well or better than a
| platform with tens of thousands of dollars and man-hours
| poured into user research involves just as much or more
| hubris as thinking that there's One True User Interface. The
| average app with bespoke UI is chock full of
| usability/accessibility issues that wouldn't be there had
| they been built with a platform UI framework.
| skydhash wrote:
| > A user interface should be optimized for the tool in
| question, not optimized to look exactly like the interface
| for all other tools.
|
| When you learn how to drive a car, you can expect the same
| standard across all cars. You don't relearn how to drive when
| you get into a new car. There's common UI and UX paradigms
| across all software and no one should have to learn your
| bespoke implementation. And I believe these sets should be
| part of the OS.
|
| When you look at Spotify or Slack UI, there's nothing there
| that is better than their more native looking alternatives. I
| have utilities to populate a command panel with menu items,
| but it's essentially useless on these apps because everything
| is buried inside the app itself.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > You don't relearn how to drive when you get into a new
| car.
|
| These days you do. We're at a transition these last 10
| years or so as great as the one from crank-start to key-
| turn start cars, from regular steering to powered steering,
| and from manual to automatic transmission.
|
| Even back a couple of decades ago I remember my 1980's
| Buick having shifting on the steering post toggles versus
| my 2000's Saturn having a standard shift stick.
| skydhash wrote:
| Standards should change. No one is recommending to keep
| 1024*800 as the current resolution. I'm for evolution and
| for consistency. Not changes for the sake of change.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > No one is recommending to keep 1024*800 as the current
| resolution
|
| I think the better parallel is aspect ratio, not
| resolution.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| In the 90's it was easier to use the OS native controls and
| harder to customize them. Adding a small image to a button was
| pain. Using non-standard fonts or font sizes was pain.
|
| Now it's easier to use HTML stack to create UIs and harder to
| use OS native controls.
| garrickvanburen wrote:
| Apple and MS own UI inconsistencies across app versions and the
| OS overall deserve part of the blame.
| kens wrote:
| An article about the history of user interfaces that ignores the
| Xerox Alto? The article has the WIMP interface and graphical
| desktops emerging from the graphics of 8-bit home computers. The
| article also ignores that TUIs came from terminals like the VT100
| that had cursor positioning, instead claiming that home computers
| were the source of moving cursors around the screen. The article
| goes into plenty of obscure details (e.g. where Bucky bits came
| from), but the history is very strange.
| pvg wrote:
| It's really an article about CUA, the slug is a better title
| than the actual title.
| zwieback wrote:
| I lived through everything this rambling article poorly
| articulates. What I realized for myself is that I have two modes:
|
| 1) Frequently used applications: doesn't matter if I have to
| ctrl-alt-right-double-tap a weird key or click on some invisible
| UI element. I'll learn what it takes and use it without complaint
|
| 2) Casual use of a new environment or app: endless complaining
| about the weirdness until I either cast it aside or use it
| everyday (see 1 above)
| lproven wrote:
| [Author here]
|
| It is overlong, sadly, yes. It was written in some haste,
| despite considerable planning -- see my docs uploaded to the
| Internet Archive, for instance -- because one of my planned,
| agreed interviewees for Retro Tech Week dropped out at the last
| minute and left me without an article, and I had to rush this.
|
| _Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas
| eu le loisir de la faire plus courte._
| kevinsync wrote:
| UI definitely shouldn't have to be standard, but if it deviates,
| it should be good! Intuitive, memorable, easy to navigate, etc.
|
| There are as many bad user interfaces out there as there is bad
| graphic design, although I often think that the majority of
| "egregious" examples of graphic design (signs, etc) are actually
| quite functional and informative, just arguably visually-
| offensive -- they do their job well enough, they're just tarted
| up like toaster pastries.
|
| Bad UIs on the other hand are genuinely unusable and can make or
| break an otherwise-brilliant program or service.
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