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Comment by Asooka | Hacker News Reader

I think a simple data-display UI shouldn't be that hard to code. Every program you run has access to a terminal, which it can use to display and read text. It shouldn't be hard to extend that to displaying and reading structured data. One dream I have is to have a Desktop where each program can send an ioctl to stdout that turns it into a stripped-down browser, so it can then just dump XHTML data and have it be visualised on screen, while stdin feeds you json-serialized user input, e.g. user entered text X in input field Y, or selected file Z. It won't be useful for multimedia or anything like that, but will make building simple one-off UIs much easier.

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The difficulty is not just in coding the UI, but crafting one that's easily and intuitively understood by users. We haven't yet established a universal design pattern for GUI's yet, to the parents point, just a bunch of conventions that are often tossed in favor of something new.

A 'solved' UI example would be of a car (not the radio, but the operation of the vehicle). Learn to drive one car, and you can pretty much drive any car - same pedals, steering wheel, gear shift, turn signals, etc. I don't know if we'll ever get to something like that for software though.

IMO, intuitiveness is overrated.

As one snarky joke goes: only the nipple is intuitive, everything else is learned.

And as anyone with children can tell you, the nipple is far from intuitive.

Explain.

That's a hilarious joke, made me LOL. If you want your product to be used though you have to think about what users already know how to do and try to build off of that. This is why baby bottles and skeumorphic design are popular and effective.

Since when does intuition exclude learned information? It's very much relevant to, say, what interfaces people have used before.

You might be thinking of instinct.

I wouldn't compared all GUIs with the car; the car is more like a particular type of GUI, say, of word processors. Plus, the basics may be standard, but everything else (mainly the dashboard) is still quite a mess. I wouldn't say it's solved at all.

If you know how to drive cars, you will still not be able to drive trucks, motorcycles or tractors. Software in general us more diverse than the types of vehicles that are in existence.

If you want to make a car analogy, then you should compare cars to browsers. And these have very similar UIs, the underlying stupefying complexity nonwithstanding. So we seem to create standardized interfaces for certain common classes of user interfaces over time.

I think that people tend to think in terms of discrete and dedicated appliances because this is how the real world is structured. Being faced with a small box with the overbearing set of capabilities of a swiss army jackhammer (atomic bombs included) ends with confusion unless lot of time is devoted to trying to discover and learn all the magic spells to which that infernally picky and annoying thing will respond meaningfully.

One more thing RE car analogy. People are spending 30+ hours learning how to operate a car before being allowed to do it on their own on public roads. Software vendors no longer expect users to spend even 5 minutes learning. This is a cultural problem.

As someone who has only been driving for a couple of years, please don’t make my UI as complicated as my car's 'interface'! I take your point about 'portability' (although different cars are notoriously different to drive - even the gear pattern on the stick varies between different manufacturers) but the initial learning curve is incredibly steep. If I really wanted to, I could learn emacs from a manual. I can’t imagine learning to drive without another human involved.

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