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Comment by malerba118 | Hacker News Reader

Aesthetics aside, we're interweaving a wasm port of ngspice with a microcontroller simulator and running realtime simulations all in the browser which i would say is innovative in several ways

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The simulator under the hood is cool - someone even got a component to smoke. But the post leads with a pretty condescending title that focuses on aesthetic motivations by dumping (superficially) on everything else. Naturally people are going to focus on the usability of the interface and unfortunately it is really hard to use. Gratuitous 3D is not a good design choice for a number of reasons that others have elaborated in great detail.

Hard to use? what do you mean, you drag parts around and then you click a simulate button, that's it. You think configuring a transient analysis with 8 parameters is easier? I'm sure it's easy for people who are already familiar with it. But face it, no high schooler is going to be itching to start an electrical engineering career because they got their hands on a spice simulator.

Yeah it’s hard to use. It’s hard to drag parts around in 3D space with a 2D mouse. There are tons of ambiguities about targeting/accordances. A 2d orthocam view looking down on the bread board would be much easier to see and manipulate. There are several posts outlining issues with usability on this thread already. I think that the product is compelling but the interface still needs some work if it is going to be an improvement over 2004.

Indeed it's hard to drag things around in 3d which is why we restrict movement of parts to the XZ plane effectively making it a 2d editor in a 3d viewer.

Yeah. 3D view navigation is generally tricky with mouse/keyboard. The way it is setup here is good. The problems come in when there are also interactive elements in the view and this leads to a lot of usability issues. The mouse click/drag operation is overloaded and no feedback is provided to disambiguate different modes.

A few quick issues that I encounter with this (in trying to build a basic waveform generator):

* At a slant angle view a lot of components are blocked and cannot be clicked, one must change the view in order to target them.

* There is no feedback provided to disambiguate between when the mouse will engage in camera/view navigation vs component translation.

* No feedback is given in the hover state to let the user know when component they are targeting. (I frequently moved the whole breadboard by mistake).

* Component placement is very hard. The holes are small and all look the same. Offering some feedback about which holes would be connected would be much easier to use.

* Connections are hard to ascertain. Sometimes this requires a change of views, but also the bread board get cluttered. Offering some visual affordance for the connections could help make this superior to a physical equivalent and also remove the requirement for tacit knowledge (most people don't know how the rows/columns of a breadboard are connected.

* Wires get tangled. They currently take a linear path (in XY) between the two connections. Some research has shown that using curved paths is easier for the eye to follow (so something like a smooth step). Alternative offering some ability for the user to push/pull them apart or edit a bezier path might help her).

* Components have no flexibility. One must use wires to get the correct circuit topology which complicates things visually/ interactively.

Again I want to be clear that I think that this technology is really interesting and it has a lot of promise - especially since it is a pure web stack. I also think that it is not yet at the stage where it can arrogantly mock its rivals for using 15 year old UI component libraries.

That's like saying "we're making it less performant and more fragile on purpose"

We envision it going more like this:

"here's an interactive simulation to illustrate my point <embed src="diode-url" />"

instead of:

"to see my point please download these files, download this version of ltspice, and then give it a run"

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