I drive a Toyota that is nearly old enough to run for US Senator. Every control in the car is visible, clearly labeled and is distinct to the touch - at all times. The action isn't impeded by routine activity or maintenance (ex:battery change).

Because it can be trivially duplicated, this is minimally capable engineering. Yet automakers everywhere lack even this level of competence. By reasonable measure, they are poor at their job.

I think the article overlooks that it is not really an accident that apps and operating systems are hiding all their user interface affordances. It's an antipattern to create lock in, and it tends to occur once a piece of software has reached what they consider saturation point in terms of growth where keeping existing users in is more important than attracting new ones. It so turns out that the vast majority of software we use is created by companies in exactly that position - Google, Apple, Microsoft, Meta etc.

It might seem counter intuitive that hiding your interface stops your users leaving. But it does it because it changes your basis of assumptions about what a device is and your relationship with it. It's not something you "use", but something you "know". They want you to feel inherently linked to it at an intuitive level such that leaving their ecosystem is like losing a part of yourself. Once you've been through the experience of discovering "wow, you have to swipe up from a corner in a totally unpredictable way to do an essential task on a phone", and you build into your world of assumptions that this is how phones are, the thought of moving to a new type of phone and learning all that again is terrifying. It's no surprise at all that all the major software vendors are doing this.

I get why you would hide interface elements to use the screen real estate for something else.

I have no idea why some interfaces hide elements hide and leave the space they'd taken up unused.

IntelliJ does this, for example, with the icons above the project tree. There is this little target disc that moves the selection in the project tree to the file currently open in the active editor tab. You have to know the secret spot on the screen where it is hidden and if you move your mouse pointer to the void there, it magically appears.

Why? What is the rationale behind going out of your way to implement something like this?

I think an indicator that something is going wrong in UI design is what I'd call the "the food is in the fridge" anti pattern that seems to pop up lately.

Essentially it's UI text in random places telling you what steps you should take to activate some other feature, instead of - you know - just providing a button to activate that feature.

A variant of this is buttons or menu items that don't do anything else than move focus onto another button, or open a menu in a different location, so you can then click on that one.

Increasingly seeing this in Microsoft products, especially in VS Code.

    The other day I was locked out of my car
    the key fob button wouldn't work

    Why didn't I just use my key to get in? 
    First, you need to know there is a hidden key inside the fob.
    Second, because there doesn't appear to be a keyhole on the car door,
    you also have to know that you need to disassemble a portion 
    of the car door handle to expose the keyhole.

This is what happens when "designers" who are nothing more than artists take control of UI decisions. They want things to look "clean" at the expense of discoverability and forget that affordances make people learn.

Contrast this with something like an airplane cockpit, which while full of controls and assuming expert knowledge, still has them all labeled.

Very slightly unrelated, but this trend is one of the reasons I went Android after the iPhone removed the home button. I think it became meaningfully harder to explain interactions to older users in my family and just when they got the hang of "force touch" it also went away.

First thing I do on new Pixel phones is enable 3 button navigation, but lately that's also falling out of favor in UI terms, with apps assuming bottom navigation bar and not accounting for the larger spacing of 3 button nav and putting content or text behind it.

Its funny.

I built a UI where you can add elements and change their text. I then built a listener where if you press backspace twice in the element it will delete to avoid having a “x” in the UI.

I came back to the interface a month later and i forgot about the backspace twice option!

Apple is undeserving of its popular reputation as a leader in user interface. The article points out only a sampling of the egregious human interface issues with Apple software and devices. Whether it's iOS, CarPlay, or any other Apple software, they're all dramatically overrated. The trouble is, many of the alternatives are even worse. Android? Also awful. Most OEM infotainment systems? Even worse than CarPlay. I feel Apple is well-regarded simply because it's the lesser among several bad options.

We need a viable third option in mobile operating systems. At least with cars, we have high-quality infotainment systems such as those from Tesla and Rivian. In the mobile phone space, we have tow poor options and a few alternatives with vanishingly small market share.

We have a user interface design rule that keyboard shortcuts and context menus must only be "shortcuts" for commands that are discoverable via clear buttons or menus. That probably makes our apps old-fashioned.

I recall learning that the four corners of the screen are the most valuable screen real estate, because it's easy to move the mouse to those locations quickly without fine control. So it's user-hostile that for Windows 11 Microsoft moved the default "Start" menu location to the center. And I don't think they can ascribe it to being mobile-first. Maybe it's "touch-first", where mouse motion doesn't apply.

I really like the example with Apple Maps on Car Play. I had exactly the described struggle a few days ago. I very rarely use car play in rental cars, maybe 4 or 5 times for very short drives so far. It really took me more than a minute to figure out how to enter a destination. I couldn't believe it.

Not sure I agree with all of the OP's opinions. I prefer a clean, calm, uncluttered user interface over a noisy, busy, cluttered one. In the OP's example with maps, I'd rather see a full-screen map, instead of a map that is always partially covered by a bunch of big buttons, obfuscating my view. Please let me see the map. Yes, fill the entire screen with it.

Gradually, over decades, society has evolved a "shared language of touch-screen actions" for controlling touch-screen devices. Many actions are familiar to everyone here: tap to hide/show controls, press and hold to bring contextual menus, pinch with two fingers to zoom out, etc.

It's OK for UI designers to assume familiarity with this common language to keep UIs clean, calm, and uncluttered. I like it.

Like everything, this goes in cycles. When the iPhone launched, its UI was touted as revolutionary; simple, discoverable, not the convoluted mess that a typical windows experience was. "lol lolyou have to click start to power off your computer" and the likes. You had the physical home button, or the three buttons on android. They were discoverable, you handed an old phone to your grandma and she could just try things and figure it out.

Nowadays everything has to be clean and minimalist. No scrollbar, no buttons, just gestures. Hand a modern smartphone to someone who never used one in their life and see how they struggle to ever leave the first app they open. What are the odds they discover one of the gestures?

Only tangentially related, and a seemingly lost old-man battle: stop hiding my scrollbar.

Interesting article. Some points I didn't quite agree entirely with. There's a cost and practically limitation to some things (like a physical knob in a car for zooming in and out on a map - although that was probably just an example of intuitive use).

I just recently switched a toggle on a newly installed app that did the opposite of what it was labelled - I thought the label represented the current state, but it represented the state it would switch to if toggled. It became obvious once changed, but that seems the least helpful execution.

This is easily one of the most frustrating parts of the user experience on Discord. So many buttons are hidden until you mouse over them, which absolutely drives me UP A WALL. I really hope this trend discontinues.

Information hiding is why I insist that Bamboo is the worst CI/CD tool that had ever existed. (Note: I have used CI/CD long enough to have used cruisecontrol, which is demoted to second place).

You don’t even know what features Bamboo has that would be nice to use - or ask someone else to use on your behalf - because if you don’t have permission it’s almost all hidden away.

Developer tools in particular and productivity tools in general need to leave everything out there for discoverability to function. Taking it away is a disservice to everyone.

There is a sweet spot in between those two extremes if you stop trying to build a compromise of a UI for both, touch screens and desktops. (sadly we still do not have the reality demoed by apple and google 10 years ago, where touch screens have hover detection, maybe XR gaze detection will bring this) You can pack extreme amounts of features without cluttering the interface or sacrificing discoverability by only showing most features on hovering certain areas. This is risk and effort free from user perspective, as users are much more explorative when no clicking is involved and it is clear an interaction will not trigger features by accident in the discovery process.

Im especially passionate about this because having ADHD makes one sensitive to irrelevant stimuli in the periphery but being a power user for most software the dumbification of software happening since mobile apps drives me insane. I want software where a feature being used by the top 5 to 10 % power users once a month is not being ripped out if that once a month use provides high value for that group.

Agree utterly. It's a real shame, and severely affects accessibility for disabled and elderly people. Not only UI discoverability but also the types of swiping or holding movements required on mobile devices. The initial mobile interfaces felt way more accessible, so I don't think its an implicit implication of limited screen real-estate. This has been a trend-driven flattening of UI, with aesthetics over functionality. The palm and compaq pilots felt sublime to use, and the ipod and early mp3 players were fine, as was the originally charming iphone skeudomorphic iconography. It's all been downhill since then.

My car’s audio system seems to go out of its way to bury sound settings (bass, treble, balance, etc.) in as many nested menus as possible. And when you do finally find the settings, they are greyed out. I had to actually watch a youtube video to figure out that they are configured at the individual source level. Super confusing and unintuitive, and especially egregious considering that this is in a vehicle you are DRIVING - confusion, distraction, and frustration are the last things you want drivers to experience.

I'm sorry, this website doesn't have a mobile interface, are you seriously complaining about accessibility when you don't support majority of the web?

Apple Photos has fallen into this trap as well.

As a user, you have no way to see if a photo has been "scanned" with smart features and what it has detected (e,g found person x, found dog, blue sky, beach etc).

Trips features, has this algorithm finished scanning your library? You have no idea, it's just hidden.

Faces, detection, has this completely scanned your library? You don't know. Photos that don't seem to have faces detect, was it scanned or failed or did it not scan yet?

The list is nearly endless - but in line with the rest of the direction of MacOS, getting worse.

While I appreciate the ACM having an article on this, their own site is a poor example of good UX.

And some of their conferences are just downright awful UI

https://s2025.siggraph.org/

Your "shared language of touch screen interactions" is and will forever be unrealized as endless 'innovations' 'novelties' of creative developers and companies remain unfettered by any requirements for compliance voluntart or otherwise to UI 'standards'. Software developers are focused on myriad depths and constraints of toolkits and frameworks languages and libraries to get network, cloud, and actual functionality right, and immersed in those worlds, burden users with their own vast congitive prejudice that their application is the only one in the world, figuring 'users' have unlimited time to decipher undocumented UIs effectively gamified and unique across hundreds of spplications by not only gestures but by required and precise cadences to correctly effect those gestures, cadences which are overloaded and confounded by network and device delays and zero haptic or audio or visual feedback on what may have been 'commanded' or what is yet to be acomplished and displayed onscreen.

Just a minor quibble. Terminal based UI's weren't completely memorized. Many of us had a reference card taped to the wall, or a list of commonly used commands. It was an acceptable way to extend the limited information density of the 80x25 text display, and a really good manual was as discoverable as a GUI.

Not too convenient to carry along with a pocket computer, though.

My favorite is how Android shuffles buttons around just as I'm about to tap, so I wind up tapping the wrong one.

I'm convinced advertisers will find a way to leverage that behavior in some new dark UI pattern.

Always fun to read about user interfaces best practices from sources that when opened are completely broken. Could be just me having JS off on mobile, but the site is an utter mess when I visit it.

I think the new Apple design tries to do this too much and it will cause some issues. They're trying to make many things modal, split and merge on scroll, show and hide contextually. The intentions might be good, an intelligent interface that adapts sounds good in theory, but who knows really what the users want to do?

Something which drives me mad is how modern operating systems (both desktop and mobile) keep hiding file system paths. There used to be a setting on OSX which let you show the address bar in Finder (though it wasn't default) but nowadays it seems to be impossible (unless you get some third-party extension) and I have to resort to using the terminal. It's bonkers.

It makes it impossible to locate files later when I need to move or transfer them.

Ironically the article is barely readable on an iPhone…

Fig.1 doesn't look like a drop-down menu - is the term really used for that style?

I remember Nokia E-series phones with QWERTY keyboards had a little torch printed on the tiny spacebar. Everything else now feels unintuitive compared to that.

The car key example especially resonated. That kind of design isn't just annoying, it's stressful in real-world situations

But the pervasive "form over function" design school disagrees with your desire for the UI to be useful, it has to look clean!

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1552055/general-rant-about-t...

The article suggests a “simple, well-labeled rotary control ... would accomplish the same function” as a power button and “prevent the user from accidentally activating the control in a way that is no longer hidden”. But a rotary control itself has a serious problem, in that it can mislead the user as to the state, on or off. If the power has failed and the machine does not restart when it comes back, the rotary control will remain in the ON state when the machine is off. From memory, Donald Norman called this kind of thing “false affordance” and gave the example of a door that needed to be pulled having a push-plate on it.

So my iMac, among many other devices like the light I wear on my head camping, has a button which you long-press to turn on. It is a very common pattern which most people will have come across, and it’s reasonable to expect people to learn it. The buttons are even labelled with an ISO standard symbol which you are expected to know.

This article reminds me of one of my favourite comments on the subject I've seen here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965293

Notion is horrendous for this. Hiding every control behind an invisible hover target. No, I don't want my company documentation to have a minimalist aesthetic. I just want to use it.

a lot of the things being pointed out seem like non issues. It seems to me that this doesn't really explore that knowledge in head UIs are actually a lot more straightforward and easy to use with the knowledge in head. Most attempts to circumvent that bloat UIs. Also whatever you give people, if it's a repetitive use UI they tend to learn it and turn into knowledge in head, even if its a knowledge in world type of UI, you then change it and people get confused.

I'm on the edge of my seat waiting to see how skeuomorphic icons will solve this and every other problem.

> if I want to activate the flashlight on my iPhone, I have to know to swipe up from the bottom left-hand corner in order to bring up a control panel where the flashlight button exists.

The author even drives the point home by getting this wrong.

To get to the control panel it’s not a swipe up from the bottom left, it’s a swipe down from the top right.

And you don’t even need to do that. The flashlight and camera icons exist right on the Lock Screen for immediate use without having to bring up the control panel

It’s only the dangerously obsolete iPhones - iPhone 8 / 2016 and earlier - where you swipe from the bottom up. And from the bottom-anywhere straight up, no need to go from any corner. We’ve had 9 years of iPhones with the swipe-down action, and less than 2% of iPhones still in use are iPhone 8 and earlier.

This is one thing that pisses me off about modern computing. This is shit that we mostly already figured out, but people with no context decided that visual design was the most important part of UI design, with no forethought to usage or discoverability.

The golden age of computing is sadly long, long passed.

The rotational On-Off switch for a computer is cool and provides excellent feedback, but like many stateful electromechanical input elements it has the problem that it might run out of sync with the system it controls. E.g. what if the PC is shutdown, it is practically off (you can't do useful stuff with) but technically on (only in a weird shutdown state).

I am a fan of the conceptional clarity, but having to wait for my PC to shutdown only to have to flip a switch myself is not good UX. The absolute ideal would be the switch mechanically turning to off once it is off, and such switches exist, but they are expensive and require extra electronics to drive the electromagnetic part. A really good example of this UX principle are the motor faders in digital audio mixers: You can move them with your hand but if you cange to a different channel layout the mixer can move the faders for you. The downside of those is mainly cost.

The cheap 80/20 solution for the PC is a momentary push-button and a Green/Red LED to display the current state. 5s holding is power-off because everything else has the danger of accidentally switching off — but this isn't obvious to the non-initialized.

Kind of ironic since this website isn’t mobile optimized

This is a great post!

The article mentions the late Mark Weiser's work on Ubicomp at Xerox PARC. Before he went to run PARC, we worked together at the University of Maryland, where he supported and collaborated with my work on pie menus.

Mark Weiser, Ben Shneiderman, Jack Callahan, and I published a paper at ACM CHI'88 about pie menus, which seamlessly support both relaxed "self revealing" browsing for novices, and accelerated gestural "mouse ahead" for experts: smoothly, seamlessly, and unconsciously training users to advance from novice to expert via "rehearsal".

Pie menus are much better than gesture recognition for several synergistic reasons: Most importantly, they are self revealing. Also, they support visual feedback, browsing, error recovery, and reselect. And all possible gestures have a valid and easily predictable and understandable meaning, while most gestures are syntax errors.

Plus the distance can also be used as an additional parameter, like a "pull out" font:direction / size:distance selection pie menu, with live feedback interactive both in the menu center and in the text document itself, which is great during "mouse ahead" before the menu has even been shown.

The exact same gesture that novices learn to do by being prompted by the pop-up pie is the exact same action experts use more quickly to "mouse ahead" through even nested menus without looking at the screen or needing to pop up the pie menu. (By the principle of "Lead, follow, or get out of the way!")

Linear menus with keyboard accelerators do not have this "rehearsal" property, because pressing multiple keys down at once is a totally different (and more difficult to remember and perform) action than pointing and clicking at tiny little menu labels on the screen, each one further from the cursor and more difficult to hit than the next.

Our controlled experiment compared pie menus to linear menus, and proved that pie menus were 15% faster, and had a significantly lower error rate.

Fitts' Law unsurprisingly predicted that result: it essentially says the bigger and closer a target is to the cursor, the faster and more reliably you can hit it. Pie menus optimize both the distance (all items directly adjacent in different directions), and the area (all items huge wedge shaped target areas that get wider as you move away from the center, so you get more precise "leverage" as you move more, trading off distance for angular precision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

An Empirical Comparison of Pie vs. Linear Menus, Proceedings of CHI'88:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/an-empirical-comparison-of-pie...

Pie Menus: A 30 Year Retrospective (37 years now):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/pie-menus-936fed383ff1

The Design and Implementation of Pie Menus: They’re Fast, Easy, and Self-Revealing. Originally published in Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Dec. 1991, cover story, user interface issue:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-design-and-implementation-...

>[...] Pie Menu Advantages

>Pie menus are faster and more reliable than linear menus, because pointing at a slice requires very little cursor motion, and the large area and wedge shape make them easy targets.

>For the novice, pie menus are easy because they are a self-revealing gestural interface: They show what you can do and direct you how to do it. By clicking and popping up a pie menu, looking at the labels, moving the cursor in the desired direction, then clicking to make a selection, you learn the menu and practice the gesture to “mark ahead” (“mouse ahead” in the case of a mouse, “wave ahead” in the case of a dataglove). With a little practice, it becomes quite easy to mark ahead even through nested pie menus.

>For the expert, they’re efficient because — without even looking — you can move in any direction, and mark ahead so fast that the menu doesn’t even pop up. Only when used more slowly like a traditional menu, does a pie menu pop up on the screen, to reveal the available selections.

>Most importantly, novices soon become experts, because every time you select from a pie menu, you practice the motion to mark ahead, so you naturally learn to do it by feel! As Jaron Lanier of VPL Research has remarked, “The mind may forget, but the body remembers.” Pie menus take advantage of the body’s ability to remember muscle motion and direction, even when the mind has forgotten the corresponding symbolic labels.

>By moving further from the pie menu center, a more accurate selection is assured. This feature facilitates mark ahead. Our experience has been that the expert pie menu user can easily mark ahead on an eight-item menu. Linear menus don’t have this property, so it is difficult to mark ahead more than two items.

>This property is especially important in mobile computing applications and other situations where the input data stream is noisy because of factors such as hand jitter, pen skipping, mouse slipping, or vehicular motion (not to mention tectonic activity).

>There are particular applications, such as entering compass directions, time, angular degrees, and spatially related commands, which work particularly well with pie menus. However, as we’ll see further on, pies win over linear menus even for ordinary tasks.

Gesture Space:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/gesture-space-842e3cdc7102

>[...] Excerpt About Gesture Space

>I think it’s important to trigger pie menus on a mouse click (and control them by the instantaneous direction between clicks, but NOT the path taken, in order to allow re-selection and browsing), and to center them on the exact position of the mouse click. The user should have a crisp consistent mental model of how pie menus work (which is NOT the case for gesture recognition). Pie menus should completely cover all possible “gesture space” with well defined behavior (by basing the selection on the angle between clicks, and not the path taken). In contrast, gesture recognition does NOT cover all gesture space (because most gestures are syntax errors, and gestures should be far apart and distinct in gesture space to prevent errors), and they do not allow in-flight re-selection, and they are not “self revealing” like pie menus.

>Pie menus are more predictable, reliable, forgiving, simpler and easier to learn than gesture recognition, because it’s impossible to make a syntax error, always possible to recover from a mistaken direction before releasing the button, they “self reveal” their directions by popping up a window with labels, and they “train” you to mouse ahead by “rehearsal”.

>[...] Swiping gestures are essentially like invisible pie menus, but actual pie menus have the advantage of being “Self Revealing” [5] because they have a way to prompt and show you what the possible gestures are, and give you feedback as you make the selection.

>They also provide the ability of “Reselection” [6], which means you as you’re making a gesture, you can change it in-flight, and browse around to any of the items, in case you need to correct a mistake or change your mind, or just want to preview the effect or see the description of each item as you browse around the menu.

>Compared to typical gesture recognition systems, like Palm’s graffiti for example, you can think of the gesture space of all possible gestures between touching the screen, moving around through any possible path, then releasing: most gestures are invalid syntax errors, and they only recognizes well formed gestures.

>There is no way to correct or abort a gesture once you start making it (other than scribbling, but that might be recognized as another undesired gesture!). Ideally each gesture should be as far away as possible from all other gestures in gesture space, to minimize the possibility of errors, but in practice they tend to be clumped (so “2” and “Z” are easily confused, while many other possible gestures are unused and wasted).

>But with pie menus, only the direction between the touch and the release matter, not the path. All gestures are valid and distinct: there are no possible syntax errors, so none of gesture space is wasted. There’s a simple intuitive mapping of direction to selection that the user can understand (unlike the mysterious fuzzy black box of a handwriting recognizer), that gives you the ability to refine your selection by moving out further (to get more leverage), return to the center to cancel, move around to correct and change the selection.

>Pie menus also support “Rehearsal” [7] — the way a novice uses them is actually practice for the way an expert uses them, so they have a smooth learning curve. Contrast this with keyboard accelerators for linear menus: you pull down a linear menu with the mouse to learn the keyboard accelerators, but using the keyboard accelerators is a totally different action, so it’s not rehearsal.

>Pie menu users tend to learn them in three stages: 1) novice pops up an unfamiliar menu, looks at all the items, moves in the direction of the desired item, and selects it. 2) intermediate remembers the direction of the item they want, pop up the menu and moves in that direction without hesitating (mousing ahead but not selecting), looks at the screen to make sure the desired item is selected, then clicks to select the item. 3) expert knows which direction the item they want is, and has confidence that they can reliably select it, so they just flick in the appropriate direction without even looking at the screen.

Steve Jobs was mocking Microsoft for this kind of UI two decades ago when shipping the first iPhone.

None of this is new. But this kind of dysfunctional product is what a dysfunctional organization ships, despite knowledge.

Why? Because leadership wants features. Leadership also wants a clean, marketable product. Leadership also wants both of those done on a dime, quickly and doesn't care about the details. The only way to satisfy all constraints at the same time is to implement features and hide them so they don't clutter the UI.

The problem isn't awareness. It goes deeper.

Mobile is a deliberately second-class platform, in many cases to prevent closing an obtrusive window to serve an advertisement, or to provoke an inadvertent click on an ad. Many ads with malware simply don't present if the platform is not mobile, by design, from the creator.

My gosh I was unaware there were so many old men shaking their fists at clouds here. The level of nitpicking here is ridiculous, none of this is hard, no one else seems to have any issues with most of this stuff, it seems to me like people are bored and want to be angry at something.

Touch grass people.

A lot of these comments sound like people who can’t get with the times to be honest

I wish web developers would stop hiding the scrollbars and stop taking over the back button.

Also hiding key navigation behind hamburger menu instead of using tab bar should be discouraged.

> If you want to lock the door, then the hidden control problem becomes evident... to lock the door, I must know that the hidden control to lock is the pound key. To make matters worse, it's not a simple press of the pound key. It's a press of the pound key for a full five seconds in order to activate the lock sequence. The combination of the long temporal window and the hidden control makes locking the door nearly impossible, unless you are well acquainted with the system and its operation.

Isn't that kind of the point? You don't want people accidentally locking the door, but if it's your door, it's easy enough to remember how to do it.

Published on a site that isn’t responsive lol

I think there are couple of conflated aspects here - and some of them are fine, and likely a consequence of computing devices being more ingrained in common day, and some of them are very hostile, and clearly intended to subvert the interests of the user.

As an example:

I think hiding controls in favor of "knowledge in the head", as the author phrases it, is absolutely fine when the user is presumed to be aware of features, should be able to understand they exist and know how to use them, and can reasonably learn them. Especially fine if those controls aren't used all that often, and are behind a keyboard shortcut or other common and efficient route to reach them.

On the other hand - I think there's also been a drive to visibly reduce how much control and understanding basic users might have about how a machine works. Examples of this are things like

- Hiding the scheme/path in browser url bars

- Hiding the file path in file explorers and other relevant contexts

- Hiding desired options behind hoops (ex - installing windows without signing into an account, or disabling personalized ads in chrome)

Those later options feel hostile. I need to know the file path to understand where the file is located. I can't simply memorize it - even if I see the same base filename, is it in "c:/users/me/onedrive/[file]" or "c:/users/me/backed_up_spot/[file]"? No way to know without seeing the damn path, and I can have multiple copies floating around. That's intentional (it drives users to Microsofts paid tooling), and hostile.

Basically - knowledge that can be learned and memorized can benefit from workflows that give you the "blank canvas" that the author seems to hate. Command lines are a VERY powerful tool to use a computer, and the text interface is a big part of that. R is (despite my personal distaste for it as a language) a very powerful tool. Much more powerful and flexible than SPSS.

But there are also places where companies are subverting user goals to drive revenue, and that can rightfully fuck right off.

One of my biggest complaints with modern computing is that "The internet" has placed a lot of software into a gray zone where it's not clear if it's respecting my decisions/needs/wants or the publisher's decisions/needs/wants.

It used to be that the publisher only mattered until the moment of sale. Then it was me and the software vs the world - ride or die. Now far too much software is like judas. Happy to sell me out if there's a little extra silver in it.

jetbrains could learn.

Alan Dye in shambles.

This is why I really despise “Material Design” and the whole Google aesthetic.

Look at Google Meet for example. How many times and I trying to remember what the Share Screen icon looks like? Apple generally does this stuff far better: text labels for example. Also clicking some “+” icon to reveal more options — how does a “normal” person know what’s buried inside all of those click to reveal options?

Diversity in tech has always been a concern — but one concern I have is that diversity has always meant race, gender, or sexual orientation stuff — but a 28 year old Hispanic LGBT person doesn’t react to a UI much differently than a 28 year old Black hetero person. But a 68 year old Hispanic woman with English as a second language absolutely has potentially different UI understandings than an 18 year old white woman from Palo Alto.

Real diversity (especially age and tech experience levels) should be embraced by the tech companies — that would have a strong impact on usability. Computers are everywhere and we shouldn’t be designing UI around “tech people” understanding and instead strive for more universal accessibility — especially for products we expect “everyone” to potentially use. (Some dev ops tool obviously would have more latitude than an email app, but even then, let’s stop assuming users understand your visual language just because you do.)

I want to see more UX designers who are “old” rather than some clever kid who lives on Behance. I also want to see more design that isn’t created by typical higher educated designers who think everyone should understand things they take for granted. The blue collar worker that works construction, the grandmother from Peru, the restaurant cook, or the literature professor — whatever. Usability should be clear and obvious. That’s really hard — but that’s the job.

One of the original genius aspects of iPad is that a toddler can immediately start using it. We need all usability to be in that vein.

> Witness the navigation system in Apple Maps in CarPlay. The system developers obviously wanted to display as much map as possible, as shown in Figure 3 a). This makes sense, but to do that they relied on the use of hidden controls. If I want to enter a destination or zoom in on the map, I have to know to touch the bottom left-hand portion of the map

What? You don't have to touch any specific portion of the map. You tap anywhere and it brings up those controls.

I think this article largely has a point, and most of it seems true, but to me these bits of untruth are unamusing at best.

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I sort of disagree with this: once I’ve internalized the gestures, I really appreciate the lack of UI for them. It’s like vim and emacs: the sparse ui creates a steeper learning curve but becomes a feature once you’ve learned the tool

I love how everyone is UX/UI specialists in this thread :) exactly like in projects I worked for, everyone had something to say in that area.

> A DOS command window. Without specific knowledge in the head, the user cannot perform a single action.

To be fair, even CLI environments provide some UI discovery. E.g. DOS had 'help' and it would list available commands and a short description.