Hacker News Reader

> That doesn't make (current favorite UI) a good one, though.

There are plenty of things with great user interfaces, and the way you can recognize them is if the interface "disappears" when you use the thing. If you can use the thing without thinking, without having to read a sign, without having a cheat-sheet, when you're very sleepy, and you still do the right thing, then the interface is good.

My pet peeve is household appliances that are just in the way, that do the wrong thing, that make you do unnecessary steps to get what you want.

I still miss my old microwave with its huge digital knob for setting time and power. I developed muscle-memory for using that thing, because it just felt right, my body knew exactly how much to turn the knob to get a certain time.

My current one is atrocious, it has a number pad. No.

And it doesn't have to be that way, I'm always concious about user interfaces of things I buy, and go out of my way to buy stuff that has good interfaces. I hope that by supporting companies that put in the effort, they'll win in the end. (It's a slim hope, though.)

> If you can use the thing without thinking, without having to read a sign, without having a cheat-sheet, when you're very sleepy, and you still do the right thing, then the interface is good.

I'm not sure any of this applies to table saws. You might be setting the standard a little high.

"Muscle memory" I worked years ago as a welders assistant and the physical act of controlling the trigger on a burning torch became ingrained and reflexive. It really does apply to everything even table saws.

Great points, thanks. I like extending the thought experiment to real world objects like toilets, because they too have 'user interfaces', even if we don't immediately relate them to computer operating systems.

This also reminds me of something Neil Gaiman said, which is really a second hand quote from Douglas Adams:

From: http://readingagency.org.uk/news/blog/neil-gaiman-lecture-in...

"I do not believe that all books will or should migrate onto screens: as Douglas Adams once pointed out to me, over twenty years before the kindle turned up, a physical book is like a shark. Sharks are old: there were sharks in the ocean before the dinosaurs. And the reason there are still sharks around is that sharks are better at being sharks than anything else is. Physical books are tough, hard to destroy, bath-resistant, solar operated, feel good in your hand: they are good at being books, and there will always be a place for them. They belong in libraries, just as libraries have already become places you can go to get access to ebooks, and audiobooks and DVDs and web content."

When we arrive at good design, it can be surprisingly resilient.

> Cars, toilets, old-school dial telephones, doors, blenders, paper books, hammers, bulldozers, can openers... have vastly disparate user interfaces, but no one complains about having to learn them all,

Some people do complain. Many versions of the common objects you mention have really stupid interfaces, which cause delays, mistakes, and lots of frustration.

I highly recommend Don Norman’s book The Psychology of Everyday Things (later editions retitled The Design of Everyday Things) which analyzes such objects (doors, telephones, cars, refrigerators, faucets, stoves, etc.) and concludes that many of their interfaces are horribly broken.

I wonder how much of that is confirmation bias and/or appeal to authority, though? Not consciously, mind you! But I found that after reading that book, things that previously didn't bother me at all began to annoy the crap out of me, just because I'd read the book, and here was this authority figure telling me they were doing it all wrong.

Well, which part? Clearly reading the book helps someone to be more attuned to interface, and maybe more bothered when interfaces are poorly designed. (In the same way that learning about typography can lead to being bothered by all the crappy typesetting in the world, or learning about statistics can lead to being bothered by all the horrible statistical analyses in academic papers and news articles. Etc.)

But even before reading the book I observed people running into trouble with household objects all the time, found great frustration in some of their designs, and was constantly puzzled by the many features on appliances and gizmos that no one ever seemed to use.

The book just gives a nice framework for thinking about such problems, and a great set of concrete examples.

The car's interface is far more complicated than most of the others on that list, and I'd say is a perfect example of a bad one: look at how hard it is to learn, how much worse new drivers are at it, and how many deaths are caused by it every year.

The ideal car user interface (for car-as-a-tool, not car-as-a-toy) is "set destination, go." Or some sort of browse mode where you just tell it when you want to make a turn.

There are similar advances available for some of those other tools: consider the table saw/router/jigsaw/etc. If you just want to get something built, do you want to learn the finer points of using and controlling all those separate tools, or would you rather just be able to say "cut it to look like this" and let a computer do the driving? (I'd love to have a nice CNC setup in a workshop someday...)

> Or some sort of browse mode where you just tell it when you want to make a turn.

I'm sorry, but this has got to be the most ridiculous UI idea I've ever heard suggested as an improvement.

Yes, one day soon we'll have self-driving cars. But until then, the steering wheel is damn good UI. You turn right, you go right. You turn left you go left. You turn more left you go more left. It just works.

I agree the other parts of a car UI suck as of yet. Bit the steering wheel, brake and gas pedal are examples of good design, they do whT they are supposed to and get out of the way.

I agree. In the suggested book The Design of Every Day Things they cover the topic of "positive knowledge transfer". Climb in a car you have never driven before, chances are in addition to gas, brake, and steering you can also quickly figure out how to use the horn, turn signals, open and close windows, etc.

There are a lot of positive things to be said about the car's UI.

[Edit: grammar]

Yeah, now that I think about it, the turn signals are (usually) well designed. In some vans/trucks they suck though (you have to twist a knob rather than a down/up motion).

Windows are again usually pretty good. However, in my mini cooper, the window switches are located in the center console, unbelievably bad design in an otherwise pretty well designed car.

I mentioned steering, gas and brakes primarily because they are the same for almost all cars.