Why Do We Interface? (2020)

Good read, but it focuses a lot on conveying information to the user. The issue nowadays is often the other direction: Interacting with GUIs often feels clunky because there are unnecessary steps, moving buttons on websites or weird mouse rituals that require dragging something a very certain way.<p>Improving on that should be more of a focus imo.

The reading experience is mediocre. It looks like he went a bit overboard with the site. As for the ideas mentioned, it&#x27;s more fluff and designer hype&#x2F;dogma than anything solid.

Nitpick, &quot;The core purpose of graphics in a GUI is not to be pretty&quot; - Maybe for programs where it is for user reading and modifying data. But I&#x27;d argue that is only a fraction of interfaces. Small business websites are very much made to look a certain way, to make you feel the business is competent and trustworthy. You only really need the data that is their phone number or contact details or inventory specifics.<p>But yes, data-based UI is just assembling data in the shape that a human brain can download faster, which can be more efficient if tailored to be brain-specific (e.g. a notes app is laid out by the user who will consume the data).

I think the article has some valid (but not new) points, like &quot;design is communication&quot;, but is otherwise handwavy and full of water. I couldn&#x27;t bring myself to wade through trite&#x2F;imprecise&#x2F;self-contradictory passages (&quot;interfaces are for information&quot;, &quot;we interface because we are human&quot;, then &quot;the purpose of information interfaces has always been to communicate more quickly, more deeply, to foster relationships, to explore, to measure, to learn, to build knowledge, to entertain, and to create&quot;--so turns out not all interfaces are for information and instead the purpose of interfaces is communication? idk). The timeline of &quot;information mechanisms&quot; serves, like most of the text, unclear purpose and seems to be a hodgepodge of vaguely related concepts (&quot;music&quot;, &quot;Walkman&quot;, &quot;Snapchat&quot;, &quot;Small Speakers&quot;). IMO the author can do better, this did not deserve unearthing from 2020 and I&#x27;d rather read Medium is the Message for example.

I get the whole site is designed in a very cool (and creative) way but it feels so draining to read.<p>- Everything is green, <i>WHERE</i> do my eyes go?<p>- Oh, I have to click to go to the next section. Instead of scrolling.<p>- Fat dickbars on the top of the page. In fact, dickbars on the side too.<p>- I get the feeling the author is using a large monitor because on my 13 inch laptop the sentence &quot;The core purpose of graphics in a GUI is not to be pretty&quot; written in a big font doesn&#x27;t all fit on my screen. Also, the font is so horrible to read it didn&#x27;t even register in my mind until I copy pasted it here and could see it in a normal font.

Confusing book, that ironically has the subject on interfaces - something that almost by definition should convey information as clearly as possible.<p>Confusion as the title of the book, why do we interface? evolves to a perhaps more interesting: why do we design? but it then leaves that question unanswered. Then is goes on to explain the alphabet and I bounced.

Interface design is, to me, purely an exercise of human compromise. I&#x27;m always a little bit amazed and baffled by the people who see it as a fundamental operation that can be understood in it&#x27;s own terms.