Comment by fermienrico | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fermienrico | Hacker News Reader

I wish this article actually ditched Legos and used actual examples from existing UIs. There is something to be said about fighter jet cockpits, avionics controls, understanding of haptics in older cars, power plant control boards and subway control rooms, crane operator interface, bulldozer UI, CNC machine HMI and a whole bunch of UI systems that exist out side of consumer space.

For some reason (I blame sci-fi authors and their vision of future), consumer space is eroding rapidly with touch screens. Consumers will eat up marketing bullshit when it is wrapped in a scifi wrapper, with "Now a touchscreen interface!". This is sadly eroding into things like professional oscilloscopes, and even cockpits!

They're cheap, easily reconfigurable (this is a bug, not a feature) and it makes the bean counters happy - "Oh you mean the $48 BOM can be reduced to $7.50 with one touch screen and 1 UI software contractor for 4 months! And we can market it as a cool thing without users noticing? Holyshit, you're promoted."

That said, iPhone is nice. It is rare exception, I don't know how Steve Jobs saw this, but this is perhaps his genius. iPhone + touchscreen interface totally makes sense. Blackberry folks flaunted their physical keyboards and yet, iPhone won. This frankly surprises me. If it was year 2005, I would have bet on Blackberry over iPhone. Everybody did.

Diabetic here. These days, the meter and even insulin pump comes with touch and color screens.

My vision is good, but I imagine diabetics with poor eyesight (which is a common effect of diabetes) basically get unusable devices.

My previous pump and my first meters all had dedicated buttons. A button "on", a button for "give insulin" then two buttons to "crank up or down the amount to give" and so on. All these buttons had braille on them and were tactile and often form-coded. Up, was an triangular up-arrow, etc. I could blindly operate it in my pocket with one hand.

Now my pump requires me to go through dialogs, menu's and workflows for which the state and the options are only on the screen. And my meter looks like a cheap chinese android phone (and has about the same battery time) with only touchscreen interfacing. I often miss my doses because some warning dialog breaks muscle-memory or because -somehow- the pump decides that today we need an extra step in the wizard.

It's good when medical equipment "goes with the time", but touch-screens and color-lcd screens are really not suited for medical devices in their "mass consumer" form.

Thanks for the nice thoughts. I'm a huge fan of all of the interfaces you describe from industrial and commercial applications. I've written previously about my concerns with the touchscreen dominance and the poor UX impact it can have. My day job is to design physical interfaces for all manner of automotive and consumer applications and you could say I specialise in the non-touchscreen design parts.

Regarding the LEGO references, this was just a light hearted look at the problem from a different perspective :).

Please give us an example of the interface you designed (or one you are especially proud of)!

So the things I'm most proud of aren't quite launched yet, but I work right now on a lot of electric mobility projects. Something like a charger for an electric car is especially fascinating because you have none of the cues of typical car refuelling (smell, sound, vibration) and you can create an entirely new metaphor and language around how that charging experience plays out with light, sound, haptic...

Often you'll have a client who says "I want my product to be smart and connected so I need a 5 inch touch screen on the front of the box" and its fun to show them an entirely different approach that delivers both a better user experience and also becomes a key differentiator for their brand.

You can see a few (older) things that I've worked on at my employer's website here: https://kiska.com/

> "I wish this article actually ditched Legos and used actual examples from existing UIs."

I disagree. There are already plenty of articles discussing UX that way. Using Lego is an interesting change of perspective that lets us look at this in a different way.

> That said, iPhone is nice. It is rare exception, I don't know how Steve Jobs saw this, but this is perhaps his genius. iPhone + touchscreen interface totally makes sense.

He basically took an Asian tablet (these existed at the time), made it smaller and added phone capability. Funny thing is that almost nobody uses the phone capability anymore these days.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com