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I kind of disagree, I think this was more based on ad-tech taking over and pages optimizing for SEO and session-length and things like that. The metrics changed when the customer changed as we moved to free software.

It seems kind of a cheat to increase session length by making your page so hard to use that people will spend extra time just trying to figure out the controls.

I don't think that's what GP is referring to.

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.

Yes, I meant that priorities and metrics changed, not that they intentionally sabotaged one metric in order to "cheat," and directly boost another metric, it just wasn't a priority anymore to optimize for usability. In fact, when you look at it from a market/systems level instead of any individual product or company, it doesn't even need to be one designer or product or company moving A-to-B from "usable" to "moar white space." It could be a totally different company who never optimized for usability who comes in and steals lunch.

>there are a lot of parallels with the lack of care for security

Absolutely, 100%. Same idea.

They were probably formally studying people who had never seen or used a GUI before. Visible controls were a great crutch that helped get us to the point where we don't need them anymore. Because at the end of the day, content is king. For example, Netscape Navigator 4.0 had a big button labeled Find with a little binoculars icon. Today, everyone knows about CTRL+F. So we can use that screen space for the thing we care about, which is content.

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.

> Today, everyone knows about CTRL+F.

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.

This leads to the Safari version Apple presented this week: even the "reload" button is gone now.

I think it is true that people learn and we can assume other things now. But still there must be discoverability of such features.

I believe there is space for great looking design that is also functional. The problem is that achieve this balance takes time and knowledge, and the software industry has a very short term focus, so you end up with non-solutions that are supported purely by hype.

Also, UI design has traditionally used visual styles from minimalism and the Bauhaus, mainly because the very low-resolutions where it was created (desktops first, later mobile screens) didn't support anything more ornate that would be still visually appealing.

I long for the day when more elaborate and luxurious art-deco-based interfaces become fashionable in UI design.

But minimalist design is not unique to software. If you look everywhere in our industrial society you'll see that. Even buildings follow this trend nowadays. It is a trend that derives from industrialization, where the goal is to make the simplest designs that still retain their utility.

I feel like every front-end engineer should be required to read The Design of Everyday Things and pass a quiz before being handed a job.

Building shitty UI because it looks cool in your marketing materials is doing a criminal disservice to your users and ultimately your business.

Most front end engineers don't get to decide how the UI looks, typically product and design will dictate that maybe with the exception of really small teams or products where design is apparently not priority.

Do you know of any good (presumably old) resources like books or articles that cover efficient economical GUIs and GUI frameworks?

Ask Tog

https://www.asktog.com

There were the original Apple and Gnome HIG (human interface guides). Also Ask Tog, and nngroup.com for web stuff.

Windows also had one.

And they are all ultimately derived from IBM CUA, so that's a good start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

The classic Mac interface is a couple of years older, although most of these seminal works were published in the late 80s.

Brad Myers. All the Widgets (Fixed v2) - 1990.

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:

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/papers/chi86vltax.pdf

What's up with the war on scrollbars!? I don't understand it.

the context of GUI use has also changed dramatically.. UIs were used to manipulate semi complex to complex formal documents in 2D, people were trained, it was all very important .. nowadays we can bring it down to swipe and tap over floating selfies. I'm sure nobody in the mainstream would ever use an 80s application no matter how good/better it is.

There's still plenty of office work to do. The selfies haven't displaced spreadsheets, they're a new category.

true but i have a feeling that for the next years to come, good old 2d static abstractions will be out of the picture (replaced by fully fluid animated UI paradigms)

People use Office and Adobe products. Sometimes you need a lot of functionality in your application which goes beyond simple swipe UIs.