> At recent user interface conferences, several speakers have lamented that the human interface is stuck. We seem to have settled on the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) model, and there is very little real innovation in interface design anymore.<p>Alternately, you can say that UX design stabilized on a known good pattern.<p>This reminds me of how some people will refer to stable software projects that only receive the occasional security patch as "abandoned". They're not abandoned, they're just stable.
My favourite part of this article (disclosure: I've made almost this exact comment before elsewhere):<p>> <i>The see-and-point principle states that users interact with the computer by pointing at the objects they can see on the screen. It's as if we have thrown away a million years of evolution, lost our facility with expressive language, and been reduced to pointing at objects in the immediate environment. Mouse buttons and modifier keys give us a vocabulary equivalent to a few different grunts. We have lost all the power of language, and can no longer talk about objects that are not immediately visible (all files more than one week old), objects that don't exist yet (future messages from my boss), or unknown objects (any guides to restaurants in Boston).</i><p>Does this mean a commandline is always better, because it's more expressive? No, it's a trade-off between this and ease of learning:<p>> <i>The GUIs of contemporary applications are generally well designed for ease of learning, but there often is a trade-off between ease of learning on one hand, and ease of use, power, and flexibility on the other hand. Although you could imagine a society where language was easy to learn because people communicated by pointing to words and icons on large menus they carried about, humans have instead chosen to invest many years in mastering a rich and complex language.</i><p>There's a neat coincidence that illustrates this tradeoff. While this article says:<p>> <i>If we want to order food in a country where we don't know the language at all, we're forced to go into the kitchen and use a see-and-point interface. With a little understanding of the language, we can point at menus to select our dinner from the dining room. But language allows us to discuss exactly what we would like to eat with the waiter or chef.</i><p>Joel Spolsky's <i>User Interface Design for Programmers</i> (an excellent book, looks like it's available online in full on his blog: <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/24/user-interface-design-for-programmers/" rel="nofollow">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/24/user-interface-des...</a>) says:<p>> <i>Using a command-line interface is like having to learn the complete Korean language just to order food in the Seoul branch of McDonalds. Using a menu-based interface is like being able to point to the food you want and grunt and nod your head: it conveys the same information with no learning curve.</i><p>I'm pretty sure it's a coincidence that the same example of a restaurant in a foreign country is used, but despite apparent contradiction, they make the same point: The text interface requires more time to learn, in return for being more expressive and powerful. Whether that's worth it to you depends on how long you intend to live in that environment, and how rich an experience you'd like to have.
Jef Raskin—who led the Macintosh project for the first year (though apparently the design was changed further later on)—worked afterwards on a concept that incorporated typed-in natural-language commands. In his Archy, commands were part of an unorthodox GUI system.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy</a><p>Archy clearly hails from the eighties when it was still imaginable to change users' workflow with desktop computers—that users would type a command while holding a special key (also apparently the author wasn't a touch typist).<p>The commands feature, isolated, was later adapted by Jef's son Aza Raskin, first as Enso (if I'm not mistaken), and then as a Firefox extension Ubiquity.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquity_(Firefox)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquity_(Firefox)</a>
This inspired some of our design principles in the CLI Guidelines: <a href="https://clig.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://clig.dev/</a><p>The CLI is the opposite of the Mac in a lot of ways -- reality instead of metaphors, remember and type instead of see and point, make it a conversation, and so on.
I think that using a bookcase that can be spatially ordered (in 2 dimensions) would be a really interesting concept for an operating system.<p>Applications and files alike, filed on the same bookshelf. A very easy metaphor that makes it easy to explain how computers work, but also locate files that you use often (perhaps by size, shape, colour and location) without using the part of your brain that processes language.<p>Humans are spatial creatures, so I'd like to think that perhaps everything being in lists doesn't make sense and that's why we hate using them to find something.<p>The traditional notion of the Desktop is a bit like this, but the presentation is messy. There's no nice way to order your desktop, and everything is the same size and shape. Despite this, many people work solely from their Desktop.<p>Edit: It would be very interesting to have a check in/check out system where you can drag files on the shelf to your "working box", or check them out, or whatever. Basically the equivalent of your desktop. This gives you fast easy access to files from a variety of locations for whatever job you're doing. When you're done working with them, you can check them out, and <i>poof</i> they go back to wherever you got them from. This is an awesome physical metaphor to a library where the clerk does all the work for you in returning the books. This box could also give you a good metaphor for moving files, and cut/copy/paste. Move to box -> put back on the shelf elsewhere. Or, move to box -> duplicate -> put copies back on the shelf and send the originals back.
Funny how all those visions (like the Starfire movie in the link, but certainly similar and even older ones, such as Xerox' promo for the Star or Apple's promo for Lisa) are almost always about some unspecified middle manager working either alone from home or in a large, private office.<p>Imagine an open floor plan with a hundred programmers or administrators shouting code and commands at their giant, flashing 52" screens all day, having to raise their arm in some ergonomically counter-indicative way each time they need to swipe a pop-up ad away from their vision.<p>I know what a general purpose computer is. I know how to control it. Without a reasonable interface to do so, being completely at the mercy of some "UI visionary" (probably the kind who decided we shouldn't be able to change the default fonts in programs made for text messaging), it'll be even more useless to me than most modern UI:s already make it.
<i>"General Magic: The Most Influential Silicon Valley Company No One Has Ever Heard Of"</i> is a 2018 documentary about General Magic, the company behind the Magic Cap OS.<p>You can stream the documentary for free on Kanopy (with a library card from a participating library) here:<p><a href="https://www.kanopy.com/product/general-magic" rel="nofollow">https://www.kanopy.com/product/general-magic</a>
On other OS designs:
“ They are navigationally cumbersome, asking users to go to the "other end of town" to pick up their email from the Post Office”
Made me laugh, it seems silly now, but that’s a pretty creative way of describing what’s going on.
I was always intrigued by the Starfire project mentioned here. The concept video from Sun is definitely peak 90s, but some of the things inside have finally come true 20 years later.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9OKcKisUrY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9OKcKisUrY</a>
Take the team to read this one, especially the later section describing the Anti-Mac interface. It's incredibly prescient and basically describes the direction of modern desktop GUI + cloud + voice controlled assistants.<p>The article might be a bit aggressive on suggesting that language _replace_ icons, rather than augment them - but it seems just as likely that we're still in the middle of the transition and assistants being built from the ground up without icon-based UIs is exactly what the article is predicting.
All metaphors are learned. Given that technology tend to replace things from the manual physical world these metaphors makes a lot of sense as they help humans transition.<p>Over time new concepts emerge which are based on metaphors native to the digital space and understood by the new generations.
I recall reading this and some related papers a while ago, and for the fun of it I tried my hand at mocking up a UI based on the ideas laid out. The basic premise was that the application menu was replaced with a "new document" menu (like Google Drive has) that would take you to the relevant place to get things done automatically. Standard apps could still be run, but like you might go "new>text document>template" you'd go "new>app>terminal" for example. The File Edit View menus were also gone, replaced with a search function much like the Unity Desktop HUD where you just type what you want rather than drill through menus and point at what you want. Window management would be mainly tiling except for dialog boxes related to the programme that made them, but ideally the search function would handle most cases where you need a dialog box, employing a simple command parser reminiscent of Zork and the like, where you would just type out what you want to be done in mostly natural language and the agent responsible for the programme will automate as much as possible. Finally, window switching and virtual desktops would be handled by an exposé similar to GNOME 3 Activities or macOS Mission Control. While I don't think its the best approach, a little bit of intelligent arrangement of windows so that maximised windows move to a new workspace, remembering what apps are opened together on the same workspace, and encouraging the user to keep to about three or four tiled windows per workspace just for the benefit of keeping clutter low, and I think it could be easily managed without too much effort - and some keyboard combos or trackpad gestures would go a long way to quickly switching workspaces.
Most anti mac interfaces are actually bound to the same constraints a mac is. We don't have good enough signal processing to do pure gaze based control systems. If we did, it might be worth not reinventing the mouse, that much I agree. If we don't have gaze directed into the computer it's move and click. If we do have gaze, we can discuss if blinking is clicking or if we are going to make a richer paradigm of action directed outcome.
A somewhat historic article, but I think the comparison is off and dated too because the "Mac-ness" depends on the people's expectation of the day, which keeps changing. I tend to think that as more people are getting tech savvy they'll gradually move away from the classic physical metaphors and accept abstract concepts (e.g. "URL", "mention", "optional arguments") as natural.
> At recent user interface conferences, several speakers have lamented that the human interface is stuck. We seem to have settled on the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) model, and there is very little real innovation in interface design anymore.<p>Ooof, and here we are, 25 years later, with an intervening opportunity to completely redefine HCI (smartphones), and it's still basically all WIMP.
If curious see also<p>2015 <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9831429" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9831429</a>
Don Norman was a respected UI analyst during his days at Apple. How far he has fallen! I lost faith in his judgment after reading the NN/g article bashing PDF:<p><a href="https://www.nngroup.com/articles/pdf-unfit-for-human-consumption/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nngroup.com/articles/pdf-unfit-for-human-consump...</a>