Is it only because I myself am building an alternate OS interface or has this become a popular subject of conversation?
And then the designers came and threw away so much of that knowledge because they wanted to make something that looks good in screenshots. Visible controls are ugly they said, so all buttons and controls get hidden away under some nondescript icon that doesn't even look like an interactive element (maybe 3 lines in the corner or something). Scrollbars are uncool so now they disappear immediately and you just have to know where to look for them. White space is visually pleasing so just fill the screen with it. Old rules about making buttons look like buttons are completely ignored so the screenshot is pretty. Sure you have to hunt around like a blind person in an alley trying to make things actually work, but it sure looks nice doesn't it?
Building shitty UI because it looks cool in your marketing materials is doing a criminal disservice to your users and ultimately your business.
Ad-tech and similarly myopic business pressures are frequently at odds with usability, and those business pressures ultimately determine what solution makes it to (or remains in) production. Less usable websites and tools are frequently "better performing" when measured by a metric leadership is beholden to, and usability is easily sacrificed if faith in its value doesn't extend to the very top of a company.
I know this is HN and it's fun to pick on incompetent designers, but there are a lot of parallels with the lack of care for security that frequently tops the news on here. Poor usability often reflects company values, not designer capability.
>there are a lot of parallels with the lack of care for security
Absolutely, 100%. Same idea.
I long for the day when more elaborate and luxurious art-deco-based interfaces become fashionable in UI design.
And they are all ultimately derived from IBM CUA, so that's a good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
This was made in 1990, sponsored by the ACM CHI 1990 conference, to tell the history of widgets up until then. Previously published as: Brad A. Myers. All the Widgets. 2 hour, 15 min videotape. Technical Video Program of the SIGCHI'90 conference, Seattle, WA. April 1-4, 1990. SIGGRAPH Video Review, Issue 57. ISBN 0-89791-930-0.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qtd8Hc90Hw
Also by Brad Myers:
Taxonomies of Visual Programming (1990) [pdf] (cmu.edu)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26057530
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/papers/VLtax2-jvlc-1990.pdf
Updated version:
We still have much further to go. My main display doesn't have a single UI element on it. It's a terminal in full screen mode. Except devoting 100% of the display to content wasn't enough for me. I wanted a third dimension of content. So I modified the terminal software so that I could control transparency by shift + scroll wheeling which means I can play movies in VLC running in full screen mode underneath the full screen terminal. That's my design. Terminal and television. The most important use cases of the most important devices of the twentieth century.
Not everyone knows that, I don't even think to try it unless there's a corresponding control or menu item. It's also not universal, outlook is one of the most heavily used GUIs in the world and ctrl-f means forward in that. Then you've got the ubiquity of touch screens where ctrl-f isn't even an option.
> They were probably formally studying people who had never seen or used a GUI before
Everyone's seen a GUI, but that doesn't mean they've seen the particular GUI they're trying to use at any given time.
I think it is true that people learn and we can assume other things now. But still there must be discoverability of such features.
Yes. It was called "web UI".
This brought a level of casualness and lack of rigor, that infected native UIs as well.
In the 90s there was a lot of GUI research, including by major companies like Microsoft and Apple, and lots of innovations.
But even more importantly, the standard practices of the main OS makers, favored a uniform look, with clear affordances (e.g. button bevels), and so on. The apex of with would be something like Windows 2000, Mac OS 8, BeOS, NeXT, and the like.
Stuff like "mystery meat navigation", "hamburger menus", "invisible scrollbars", huge padding, buttons that look like text, and so on, including "let's make the whole desktop app interface in the DOM" where post-2000 additions, and not for the better.
In some ways xfce4 reminds me a lot of windows 2000.
Most of the apps would be an assortment of (non Xfce) Gnome-inspired GTK, Electron (e.g. Slack, VSCode), custom (Firefox, Chrome, Sublime Text), and/or KDE stuff, each with its own warts and "modern" approaches...
People say that CLIs are composable and GUIs aren't, and so CLIs are better for power users. They're right, for today's GUIs, but yesterday's GUIs were composable. We've lost that.
Imagine where we could be today if this was our starting point in the 70s.
I myself am working on a web-based note-taking system which works with every browser since Mosaic. :)
Well, there are two conflated problems here:
1) The GUI and interacting with humans, itself.
I don't think we've even scratched the surface here. I'm not a big fan of the Instagram/TikTok "HAH! Everything is hidden, Boomer! If you aren't spending 5 hours a day with our application talking to your friends how to use our application you'll never figure it out." However, at least some stuff is different.
2) The software implementation of the GUI underneath
I do think we've gotten lost in a local extremum here. The whole "The GUI must run on the main thread" when we've got gajillions of cores spread across the CPU and GPU is a gigantic problem. We really need a multithreaded UI implementation.
Younger generations don't feel like these features are hidden at all, and wouldn't feel like it's any different from most new apps. What Gen Z are very good at is discoverability inside apps using things like swiping. A younger person will interact with the app by swiping up and down or left or right, where older people might be more trained for button pressing. Having spoken to some younger people, they find some apps like Facebook harder to use, since there are too many buttons, and not enough contextual motion.
And now that I think about it some more, I have a VR headset, and the UIs are often more complicated than swiping on your phone. It's more like pointing at buttons, menus and links with your controller. That's typically the case for gaming consoles as well.
As such, I'm not sure phone apps are still the latest in UI design, it's more that the smaller screen touch interface and apps that typically do one thing well better fit the form factor of smart devices. Granted, the younger generation use their phones for everything, until they put on a VR headset or have to work in a desktop-like program.
From watching the younger generation, I disagree.
There is no app discoverability or consistency at all. The first thing they do is go watch the video about how to do X in the app.
Sure, being younger, they can triple tap and multi-finger rotate better than older people. That doesn't make the GUI better.
I would love to see circular menus in GUI interaction on tablets. Sadly, only games seem to think they're a good idea.