Our interfaces have lost their senses

https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/our-interfaces-have-lost-their-senses

by me_smith • 1 year ago

370 174 1 year ago

soared• 1 year ago

There is a certain beauty of a webpage about user interfaces failing to load under strains from traffic volume. I couldn’t read much, but it would appear the best interfaces are the ones that work!

aftbit• 1 year ago

It loaded for me!

yuliyp• 1 year ago

It's probably because there is 90MB of unoptimized images on it.

pessimizer• 1 year ago

Our new applicant for user interface guru has tripped on the first hurdle.

vkazanov• 1 year ago

This is a nice and visually pleasing manifesto.

It is also hard to read.

smitty1e• 1 year ago

It was a pleasant break from the Mark 1, Modification 0 top-to-bottom web page, yes.

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

Hence the whole point of the article. We've reduced our UIs down to minimal friction ("easy to read") where, like creating a drawing, a higher friction ("harder") interface could well be more rewarding.

int_19h5• 1 year ago

I think it ends up proving the opposite. I did not feel like scrolling through all this pointless flair was in any sense rewarding. Quite the opposite, it's distracting enough to be annoying, so if anything, it feels like a counterpoint to the message in the text.

mint2• 1 year ago

also ironic - an article lamenting the way things are so flat and lacking physicality yet it’s jam packed with AI generated art

crazygringo7• 1 year ago

This is a beautifully designed and illustrated page.

But I couldn't disagree more with the premise. It complains that computers have been reduced from physical, tactile, hulking mainframes to neutered generic text interfaces, but I've watched the opposite happen over the past two decades.

My phone is physical -- I swipe, pinch, and tap. It buzzes and dings and flashes. I squeeze my AirPods, I pay by holding my wrist up to a sensor, I tilt my iPad to play video games and draw on it with a pencil.

Everything the article complains about, we've already solved. All of its suggestions, we already have. It wants "multi-modality" but we already have that too -- I can change the volume on my iPhone with physical buttons while I dictate. I can listen to music while I scroll.

Our interfaces haven't lost their senses. Our interfaces have more senses than they've ever had before.

PaulKeeble2• 1 year ago

There has been a number of attempts at making screens create tactile bumps and provide direct feedback which haven't yet worked which might improve physical interaction somewhat so we can get buttons and switches and knobs in a programmable way that isn't hardware specific to the task but we aren't there yet.

intrasight5• 1 year ago

Having no tactile interaction on computers saddens me very much. A couple decades ago, a colleague and I did a mind experiment on pixel-level tactile interfaces and imagining all the affordances that would provide - including of course for those that are sight challenged. All humans have a very very strong tactile aspect to their neurophysiology. Cortical Man shows that clearly.

It would be sad if in 10,000 years we evolved to lose our tactile senses.

I'll also add the buttons and switches and knobs are not all that tactile. They are a modern human creation.

zaphodias• 1 year ago

Apple's Force Touch aka 3D Touch

fred69• 1 year ago

Our interfaces have more modalities than before but they are disconnected from both physical and emotional reality. Buzzes and dings and flaps are nothing like hearing a happy shout from a friend or feeling the 'clunk' of an actual motor starter engaging.

I totally agree with OP that the 'flat' visual style is appalling. (And gray-on-gray text is an obscenity.)

crazygringo7• 1 year ago

I don't want my computer's interface to be overtly "emotional". I don't want it to have the same effect as "a happy shout from a friend". I want it to be unobtrusive and functional, so that I can pay attention to the message my friend recorded with their happy shout that is actually real. And I prefer my cars quiet because I want to keep my focus on the environment.

And what do you mean, disconnected from physical reality? I listed the examples where I pay with my wrist, squeeze my earbuds, draw with a pencil. I also snap photos and take videos, record with voice memos, send a pin with my location. I track AirTags, I identify plants by pointing at them, I learn constellations by aiming at them. Computing is more connected to physical reality than ever.

4ndrewl2• 1 year ago

This is a beautifully designed and illustrated page.

Hard disagree. It's incredibly distracting and the constant movement of text, the introduction and disappearance of images within the medium makes it incredibly difficult to concentrate on the message.

It screams 'look at me, I'm really smart with all these neat effects'. But you know what interface for articles like this has served us pretty well for > 1000 years? Just the words. Please, just display the words rather than this conceit.

jacobolus• 1 year ago

This complaint is like visiting a flower garden and complaining that it is an inefficient use of space because it doesn't grow enough root vegetables.

The style and emotional feeling of the page is the message. An article consisting of only words is not an "article like this", and if you are starting from that premise you already totally missed the author's point.

nntwozz• 1 year ago

"A word is worth a thousand pictures".

— Apple HIG

In 1985, after a year of finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple human interface group took on the motto "A word is worth a thousand pictures.

https://www.asktog.com/columns/038MacUITrends.html

Linked from Daring Fireball back in the day.

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2010/05/12/tog-word

nvllsvm• 1 year ago

Fully agreed.

I'm currently stuck on LTE due to a power outage. The page is horrible to try to read due to most of the images being either in the process of being loaded or not loaded at all.

Animats• 1 year ago

Some of those pictures look like Stable Diffusion output. Zoom in and see junk characters.

gcau2• 1 year ago

It's hard to believe this is the interface for a page titled "our interfaces have lost their senses", and the author not being aware of the irony.

vvillena• 1 year ago

I have great news for you. The article is also perfectly structured, which means it shows flawlessly on reader mode.

Reader mode is a standard feature on all major browsers on both desktop and mobile. Given you're so vocal about how articles should work by just "displaying the words", I'd suggest that you acquaintance yourself with the one feature that does exactly that.

Thanks to reader mode, you get to concentrate on the message. And we get to keep our joy.

rpcope1• 1 year ago

The images are also irritating and jarring when you notice that the bokeh is fake and that they're all AI generated (and AI generated images have really headache inducing depth of field effects).

65102• 1 year ago

If it was a book I wouldn't buy it. The theme does seem to fit a kids book.

What I find hilarious is that I cant tell if this took years to draw and compose or if it was 5 minutes worth of prompts. Did they knit everything? I sometimes see my art on low effort articles, I'm 99% sure they think it's AI.

The only detail I really liked was how the arrow representing the computer communicating to the user has a ring on the back so that the user can be roped in like a whale.

torginus• 1 year ago

Honestly using GenAI slop pictures to illustrate the article about the soullessness of modern computing clashes with the message in a way I don't think the author intended.

RicoElectrico• 1 year ago

As far as GenAI goes, this ain't slop. Guess people wouldn't be so hostile to GenAI used as stock footage if it were of this quality and consistency. But this sort of output is hardly "type a prompt and press a button", not sure what was used but I imagine style transfer or LoRAs were involved - or at least few rounds of prompt refinement

Edit: or even img2img of rough sketches.

godelski4• 1 year ago

  > Our interfaces haven't lost their senses. Our interfaces have more senses than they've ever had before.

Hard disagree. Let's take a very simple example, Wikipedia[0]. Took way too long to build in a dark mode and when they do they have the options "light", "dark", and "automatic". YET the default value is "light". WHY THE FUCK IS THERE AN AUTOMATIC IF THIS ISN'T THE DEFAULT!? Obvious stuff like this is everywhere.

I find a lot of interfaces INFURIATING. My car wants to do things with touch screens while I want to feel because I want to keep my eyes on the road. My iPhone won't capitalize the letter I and will change not just the word I'm typing but the word previous to it making swipe style texting painful to use. Speaking of the iPhone, it's 2025 and there's no universal back. I still don't know how to exit the YouTube popup asking me to activate my free trial of premium other than swiping close the whole app and reopening[1]. Or I scroll through an app with threads (e.g. Twitter) and I move slightly left or right and bam I'm on a different tab and when I move back I'm not where I left off but somewhere completely new.

You may say "well that's a 'you' problem, I'm happy with the way things are" and my point is that humans are all different. There's no one size fits all. Maybe that swiping thing happens because our thumbs are different sizes or our phones are different sizes. Maybe you like light mode and don't open any websites with the lights off. But that difference is what makes us human. The problem is that things are converging to things that are bad for everyone. Design matters a lot and getting used to a design is very different than designing things around people. A well designed product needs no instructions (obviously not absolute), just see the "Norman Door."[2] We shit on backend developers for making shitty UIs (as a 'backend' person, I agree, this deserves criticism) but I don't think the front end people are at all concerned with design now a days either. There's a special irony with Apple, considering the magic was the interaction between Jobs and Woz. The magic is when the good backend meets good frontend. Yet now we're just doing both like it is a competition of who can create the worst thing the fastest.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_News

[1] I now use Orion browser. The video quality is lower but it is better than dealing with this bullshit.

[2] https://99percentinvisible.org/article/norman-doors-dont-kno...

crazygringo7• 1 year ago

I think you might be misunderstanding.

This is about "senses" as in "the five senses".

Not "senses" as in "they've lost their senses/mind".

The author is making a pun on the latter, but the article is about the former.

tshaddox• 1 year ago

The article reads like a description of personal computing in the late 90s to early 2000s. It also reads very similarly to Apple’s early marketing around multitouch displays.

nradov• 1 year ago

Beautiful? It looks like utter garbage to me. I really can't abide that twee visual style. The designer is trying way too hard and completely lost the plot.

nextaccountic• 1 year ago

This is a beautifully designed and illustrated page.

The artwork on those is stunning. It's hard to imagine someone would spend so much time and effort illustrating an article with so little content. (the other articles on that page are similarly well illustrated)

If this article were created 5 years ago, I would be downright impressed. Sadly, I've defaulted to assume the artwork was generated by AI those days. (even though I have no evidence of that)

It doesn't help that the author claims they "empower devs with AI" in their home page, and their older webpage from 2019 [0], while still very beautiful, isn't illustrated to the same standard.

I just wish authors were upfront that they generated the artwork with AI (with a little caption, footnote, something; the same kind of thing newspapers use to credit their photojournalists). I really have nothing against using AI for this kind of thing and regardless of whether AI was used, the author of the article for sure has a lot of artistic merit for the composition as a whole.

[0] https://2019.wattenberger.com/

skrebbel• 1 year ago

I'm very impressed with the visuals here! Wow

pona-a2• 1 year ago

It seems from the finer details, a lot might be AI generated, which at least to me would defeat the message about how our interfaces are less human. I'd be very glad to be proven wrong, and it's just the style.

taurath• 1 year ago

As an evocation of adding "texture" to a "flat" experience, I think it does the job quite well, and is pleasant to look at - it feels well thought out and crafted to me!

throwaway1502• 1 year ago

Aren't these visuals just AI generated fillers?

daemonologist• 1 year ago

I agree with other commenters that it seems AI generated (patterns/noise in fine detail, nonsense text, and inconsistency in style, particularly in the faces of the "dolls").

The first few images are impressively well curated and consistent though. I think the "rotoscoping"/"compositing" helps quite a bit to make it feel more cohesive and intentional - certainly it's a step above the usual "blog post header image" slop.

godelski4• 1 year ago

Yeah I'm having a hard time telling as well, but I think it is AI. Following threads has a surprising amount of consistency and coherency that we don't commonly see in AI art. I would expect AI art to be VERY bad at felt imagery. The image here[0] looks too consistent though there are definitely parts that are edited. And here[1] the blurring is very consistent (other than the stitching you cans see when scrolling). Although this one[2] really makes it look like the text on the computer screen is AI generated. A lot looks good but the coat on the main character flattens out. But here is a really good one where you can see the AI errors pop up if you look at the bow[3] (the blurring is also inconsistent here)

There are definitely issues that pop up but I find it weird people are calling this "slop". "Slop" is that bullshit people are posting where they take the first output and don't pay attention to details. Clearly this person played around with the parameters a lot. The problem with AI Art is taking the art out of the art (and the data theft). But if you're using AI, iterating, focusing on details, then I'm not sure how it is different than any other medium where you do the same things. Art takes time and makes you feel. Considering how it added to the message here and how clear it is that this person put time into the details, I find it hard to call it "slop" just because AI was used.

[0] https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/our-interfaces-have-lost-t...

[1] https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/our-interfaces-have-lost-t...

[2] https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/our-interfaces-have-lost-t...

[3] https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/our-interfaces-have-lost-t...

dantheta• 1 year ago

It's a lovely set of sentiments. I think another aspect of UI that has been lost is discoverability - finding out how to do things in a new interface seems harder than it used to be when there was one app-level menu bar. Too many things are hidden in context menus, found only by right-clicking or long pressing on just the right spot. A set of multi-modal interfaces might just make discoverability even worse.

andrepd• 1 year ago

But don't you love buttons with ad-hoc icons and no text and no explanation of what they do and they don't even have any visual indication that they're buttons? :)

InsideOutSanta• 1 year ago

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we used to call that "mystery meat navigation." Now, we call it user interface design.

layer8• 1 year ago

Consistent use of context menus would actually be a boon, because it’s a single mechanism that can be applied everywhere, and just opening a context menu is a benign interaction (no fear of triggering some undesired action). The disappearance of context menus is one thing that I lament about modern UIs (another is tooltips). There may be “share” or “ellipsis” or long-press menus, but they are highly inconsistent, and you never know where to look for desired or possible actions.

pazimzadeh• 1 year ago

Hm, no reference to Bret Victor?

https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDes...

ccorcos• 1 year ago

exactly my thought! his talk "humane representation of thought" as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K89W4WyiRFI

If you like this article, you should definitely check out Bret Victor's work on this.

appleorchard46• 1 year ago

Fantastic design. Normally pages with funky scrolling behavior and boxes whizzing all over the place and all that are annoying but it really works here. Not to mention the adorable visuals.

That being said I think it misses what made the old physical interfaces so appealing and useful. It's not that there's something inherently superior about multimodality; it's that physical interfaces are permanent, with defined edges and definite shape. Unlike screens you know exactly what's where, building muscle memory every time you use it. There are no hidden menus or moving parts.

Multimodality - such as being able to see the position of a slider at a glance, or feel its position by touch - is useful because it reinforces the absolute existence of a control and its state across multiple senses. Interfaces using voice and gestures like suggested are the exact opposite of that, because each point of interaction becomes even more disconnected and vague.

thfuran2• 1 year ago

Fantastic design. Normally pages with funky scrolling behavior and boxes whizzing all over the place and all that are annoying but it really works here. Not to mention the adorable visuals.

On my phone, there are several pictures that erratically resize themselves whole scrolling past, and that card stack section completely flips out when scrolling back up. Aside from being very visually noisy, I'd say it just doesn't work.

josheva• 1 year ago

I got agitated looking through that due to the excess of flourishes. Fancy elements should punctuate focal points. If there's too many, the focus is lost.

gavinhoward8• 1 year ago

Yes and no.

Yes, flat design is too flat, and AI chat is too devoid of friction.

But mobile and tablets are better at certain things [1], and we shouldn't get rid of that either.

I saw somewhere (Bret Victor?) that tools have two parts: the part that fits the problem, and the part that fits the human. The example was a hammer; the head fit the problem (the nail), and the handle fit the human (the hand).

Notably, the two parts must fit their respective things, but they also have to work together.

That is what we should be doing: creating harmonious tools that fit the problem and the human. What that looks like will be different for every tool.

Our interfaces currently have two problems:

* Because they can have any appearance, appearance gets more attention than being a good tool. Example: flat design (good appearance) overriding skeuomorphic design (human fit).

* No one wants to redesign everything, so we all reuse the same base stuff (Electron, Qt, etc.) even if the result won't fit (one or both ends) or harmonize.

I would love to fix both of those problems, but because people are lazy, it essentially means creating a GUI framework that is flexible enough to fit almost any problem and any human (accessibility included) while making sure that flexibility does not destroy harmony.

While I am working on that, it is a tall order, and I am almost certain I will not succeed.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43350339

SoftTalker2• 1 year ago

AI chat is too devoid of friction.

You want an AI that argues with you?

gavinhoward8• 1 year ago

I don't want AI at all, but please read the article to understand what I mean by "friction."

readthenotes1• 1 year ago

It'd be slightly more funny if your user name was LLM...

r_klancer• 1 year ago

Actually that would be kind of awesome.

uaas• 1 year ago

Yes, Bret Victor: https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDes...

gavinhoward8• 1 year ago

Oh my goodness, thank you! I've been looking for that for AGES!

Terr_• 1 year ago

Disagree: Our malaise is not boredom from simplicity, but fatigue from inconsistency.

"Flat" interfaces aren't bad because they lack an ineffable whimsy of embodied human experience, they're bad because they threw out the baby the bathwater, tossing decades of conventions and hard-learned accessibility lessons in the name of supporting a touchscreen.

Compared to 20 years ago, everyone is shipping half-website-half-desktop abominations (e.g. with Electron[0]) and reinventing UX wheels. Too many apps/sites impose "their own look" instead of following what the user has already learned. [1] Often users must guess whether certain things are even clickable, how a certain toggle looks when enabled, whether certain settings are a single-select option or a multi-select tickbox... And memorize those rules with per-app or per-website granularity.

You can talk while clicking, listen while reading, look at an image while spinning a knob, gesture while talking.

Those are all things people do after "make computer do what I want" has become automatic.

Now when--for example--trying to find the 21st item they just added inside a list that is vertically limited to 20 and the custom grey-on-grey scrollbar is always hidden unless you've currently hovering a mouse exactly in the right 5-pixel-wide strip between two columns of the interface.

[0] A sample listing of software readers may be familiar with: https://www.electronjs.org/apps

[1] That may be due to deliberate "remember us" branding, whatever was fastest-to-ship, because things to look new to get somebody a promotion, because they want to create a switching-cost so current users feel bad trying to use a competitor's product... Or because someone like the blog-poster has misguidedly tried to make a "richer experience."

skydhash3• 1 year ago

I'm currently using Gnome and their UI may not be the most beautiful or complete, but they've gone all in on consistency. I don't mind software like Blender, Audacity, and others having their own design systems as their domain is much more complicated. But a lot of software only needs a few controls and the native ones should suffice.

cosmic_cheese3• 1 year ago

I don’t think it’s a coincedence that out of the Linux DE ecosystems, GNOME has probably the biggest presence in little third-party utilities made to match the environment. The DE itself is quite flawed in my opinion, but its consistent and opinionated design system catches the eyes of devs and would-be devs and motivates them to build things.

A similar effect I believe is what’s been largely responsible for the healthy botique indieware scene on macOS too.

cosmic_cheese3• 1 year ago

To add insult to injury, not only is everything inconsistent thanks to incessant wheel reinvention, nearly all of the reinvented wheels are halfassed at best and missing functionality compared to what they’re replacing. When a company writes a new widget to match their theme they only build the bare minimum necessary to visually match mockups. UI controls have become vapid and devoid of function.

whstl3• 1 year ago

Agree. The constant UI reinvention of lately is super strange to me. Companies want to save money but most developer time in simple apps is spent on it.

I remember 20-25 years ago mostly using Windows widgets to make Enterprise apps. It was fast to make, fast to run, and users back then knew how to use. Didn't look the best, but at least was consistent.

The next 5 years we sort of tried to do our best, but most things were still sort of standard-ish.

Then for about 5 years or things like Bootstrap, Material, etc, dominated. It was nothing special, but at least consistent between apps.

But in the last 10 years pretty much every company I worked on had a custom UI built ENTIRELY from scratch by a designer and a small army of developers to implement it. It looks "the same but different" in an uncanny valley way.

I honestly feel like this is the worst possible use of frontend developers, period. Not only from a financial perspective but also from an end result.

But hey jobs are generated so what do I know...

skydhash3• 1 year ago

If most software were following DDD, UI should be a generic domain. But they bind themselves to Electron and bring the whole kitchen with them. And then a note app bring a whole audio and video ecosystem among others.

Before software only needs to be useful. Now the C Suite thinks it needs to be engaging and isolating like a casino.

ilrwbwrkhv• 1 year ago

There is also a big elephant in the room that we are sort of ignoring with the whole AI stuff, which is when flat design came about, a lot of the designers who weren't really good now suddenly had jobs because everybody could put a flat thing on the page and call it a "button".

Good designers still exist but they are simply crowded out.

The same is happening today with the AI generated apps. Most front ends now in another 10 years will be filled with AI generated apps. But good design and applications will be around but they will be crowded out.

And you see this in almost other industries as well. For example, architecture has simply gotten worse. A building from today looks much, much worse than let's say a building from even 300 years back.

So we will simply have worse software and worse performing software which breaks down all the time in the near future and we will all suffer but there is no solution out of this.

Things don't always get better.

Aeolun3• 1 year ago

A building from today looks much, much worse than let's say a building from even 300 years back

You don’t even have to go back that far. They still knew how to build decent buildings just 80-90 years ago. I think it all kinda changed after the Second World War. Maybe they needed to conserve money and build as much as possible?

curiousnerdyboy• 1 year ago

100% SaaS will suffer the most, mostly big SaaS.

RachelF• 1 year ago

The "great flattening" fashion has made computers harder to use for many people.

Older UIs separated computer output from where user input is expected. Compare Windows 7 or 2000 to Windows 10 or 11 and the older Windows versions win. It's the same with Android.

UX designers follow fashion as much as the garment manufacturers on the catwalks of Milan, even if the fashion is uncomfortable.

Just because something is new, that doesn't mean it is better.

throwaway1502• 1 year ago

It might just be me but I find the thesis of the article to be very confusing.

but we should have made typing feel like painting.

Maybe painting should should feel like painting and typing should feel like typing? I don't know about others but when I type, I just want to type, as efficiently and quickly as possible. I definitely don't want typing to feel like painting.

By the way, loading 92 MB of images to make me read 6 KB of text is brutal!

userbinator• 1 year ago

By the way, loading 92 MB of images to make me read 6 KB of text is brutal

That's what I get for wanting to read the article before the comments here. Waited minutes only to be greeted with mediocre AI-generated images too, to add insult to injury.

nomdep• 1 year ago

These beautiful images (AI generated, perhaps?) make for a great showcase, but I find myself disagreeing with almost everything here - except for the core desire to make interfaces more engaging.

The real challenge is that UI designs are ultimately constrained by their hardware. This means major interface innovations often limit where the software can actually be used.

Take tablet-optimized apps, for instance. They can fully embrace touch interaction, but this leaves desktop-only users completely out of the loop.

So unfortunately, truly revolutionary interfaces tend to require equally revolutionary hardware to match .

godelski4• 1 year ago

Did we read the same article?

  > The real challenge is that UI designs are ultimately constrained by their hardware.

Sure, but part of designing a product is recognizing this and the author seems to be making that point. Surely they aren't saying you should have sound and haptics in devices with no speakers or motors. Certainly I think the author would argue that cars should have physical knobs and not touch screens.

The problem is what you mean by "UI"

UI means "User Interface". It does not mean "Software defined User Interface".

  User interfaces are composed of one or more layers, including a human–machine interface (HMI) that typically interfaces machines with physical input hardware (such as keyboards, mice, or game pads) and output hardware (such as computer monitors, speakers, and printers). 

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_interface

schneems• 1 year ago

truly revolutionary interfaces tend to require equally revolutionary hardware to match

The prime examples given were about mixing and matching capabilities that most hardware already has. Most computers and tablets already have a microphone and some kind of tactile input (touch or keyboard).

So, I wouldn’t say that you’re wrong in tying UI innovations to hardware, but it feels like perhaps you didn’t read the whole article. We can innovate by remixing existing functionality without having to wait on entirely new paradigms being adopted and universally available.

do_not_redeem• 1 year ago

Definitely AI generated.

https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/our-interfaces-have-lost-t...

What are those floating letters? Does the keyboard have 3 rows of keys, or 4? What's going on near where the esc key should be? Why does the screen look like the back of a park bench?

robotguy• 1 year ago

Yeah, I immediately noticed the extra arm in this one:

https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/our-interfaces-have-lost-t...

haswell• 1 year ago

I was reflecting on something similar to this this while photographing the recent lunar eclipse with a Fujifilm X-T5, a highly tactile camera that is just an absolute joy to operate.

I was on my roof in the dark at 1:30 in the morning in the cold and wind. I'm tired, can't really see much, but still need to actively work with the camera's controls. Thankfully, the X-T5 is covered in physical dials, switches and buttons. Without looking at the camera's screen, I can quickly change shooting modes and the majority of the settings I care about and be confident that I changed the right things.

The same cannot be said about a large number of modern cameras, which opt instead for a more digital approach.

In terms of modern "computing" devices, my cameras are an absolute joy to use compared to most of my other hardware.

So much so that I've recently been finding myself looking to recreate this tactile experience on my general purpose computers. I've been looking at weird bespoke dials, switches and various input hardware to make processing the photos (among other tasks) feel more tactile.

rambambram2• 1 year ago

Thankfully, the X-T5 is covered in physical dials, switches and buttons. Without looking at the camera's screen, I can quickly change shooting modes and the majority of the settings I care about and be confident that I changed the right things.
The same cannot be said about a large number of modern cameras, which opt instead for a more digital approach.

I feel you. I can only imagine the horror of looking at a small but very bright touch screen in the dark, eyes adjusting, etc.

So much so that I've recently been finding myself looking to recreate this tactile experience on my general purpose computers. I've been looking at weird bespoke dials, switches and various input hardware to make processing the photos (among other tasks) feel more tactile.

A physical knob on my desk to precisely control the volume of the speakers is a very handy one for me. Don't know how to live without that. Especially because one big yank on the knob mutes unsuspected annoying sounds.

_wire_• 1 year ago

When you think that your primary relationship with a machine is "telling it what you want" you've already taken the first step to an inevitable hell.

mac-mc• 1 year ago

There is a niceness to more kinesthetic input devices, to dials, knobs, and pens. I'm always experimenting with trying more. The unfortunate thing is they tend to be niche and unsupported. Try finding a nice dial to control things like zoom or volume, it's harder than it should be and costs over $100 or is not a great experience.

greybox• 1 year ago

I very much liked this:

We made painting feel like typing, but we should have made typing feel like painting.

I think this quote is worth ruminating for a few while. It reminds me of some Bret Victor talks.

kaycebasques4• 1 year ago

A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interaction Design [1] was great. The comments in this thread are my first time hearing about that blog post. Send me more blogs/books/videos/etc. like that, please.

[1] https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDes...

wiley14542• 1 year ago

See "Inventing on principle" also by Bret Victor on YouTube.

Great watch.

kaycebasques4• 1 year ago

Thanks

Inventing On Principle: https://youtu.be/PUv66718DII

A couple other Bret Victor resources I gleaned from other comments:

Humane Representation Of Thought: https://youtu.be/agOdP2Bmieg

Dynamicland: https://dynamicland.org/

fitsumbelay• 1 year ago

I'm imagining this post as a 360 VR experience with on demand narration and heavy on ASMR. I'd like to spend time in that world quite frankly

mnky9800n• 1 year ago

It lost me when it encourages websites to have sound.

blackeyeblitzar• 1 year ago

This is a beautiful article with great visuals, like many other comments have said. But the actual point being made is worth paying attention to:

Computers used to be physical beasts.
We programmed them by punching cards, plugging in wires, and flipping switches. Programmers walked among banks of switches and cables, physically choreographing their logic. Being on a computer used to be a full-body experience.

It’s about working in a physical environment and not just isolated digital interfaces, which is how many different jobs work today (not just programmers). The personal touch is lost. But I’m not sure it can be fixed. There is no commercial justification for making using computers or phones “enjoyable”.

intrasight5• 1 year ago

Computers were never "physical beasts" in terms of their connection to the human senses. If anything computers are vastly improving in the way they interact with the human senses. I'm an optimist. I think we're in the early days and in 100 years the current computers will seem terribly primitive from a sensory standpoint.

kaycebasques4• 1 year ago

I can get behind the vision of computers being more physical. That's a potent vision.

The claim that current technology is a regression compared to past technology is hard-to-swallow, though. I have a family friend who took CS classes in the early 70s. Punching out 0s and 1s, waiting a day to have a chance to run the program, etc. I do not get the impression that she views this as the pinnacle of enjoyable HCI.

My mom also has a funny story about visiting this friend during the chaos of finals. The friend showed my mom the computer area. My mom vividly remembers seeing students frantically trying to get their final programs done and punch card papers being scattered EVERYWHERE.

Back to the main point, I don't see a lot of extensive, enjoyable physical interaction in this past paradigm. Punching holes in paper would probably get tedious. Carrying the stack of papers over to the mainframe operators would also get annoying. And then you read out the results of your program one page at a time on physical paper. Sure, it's more physical, but is this really more enjoyable in the long run?

So exactly what point in the past is the author reminiscing about?

graypegg2• 1 year ago

Maybe if I can make a counter-point: a lot of these patterns are common place right now! And much more so than whatever golden era we want to imagine existed long ago.

- Gestures in a lot of applications have made things more confusing by hiding functionality that you now need to stumble into to discover.

- Sound cues are used all over the place. Anyone who's ever worked in a kitchen hears the godforsaken ubereats alert sound in their nightmares.

- About ten minutes ago, I got startled by my phone deciding that the "you should stand up" vibration pattern should be three long BZZZZ-es... amplified by it sitting on my hollow-sounding printer.

- If another fucking god damn website asks me to chat with an AI agent in it's stupid little floating chat bubble, only appearing AFTER I interact with the page so it's allowed to also make an annoying "chirp!" sound, I WILL become a chicken farmer in some remote forest eating only twigs, berries, and improperly-raised chicken eggs.

All of these things annoy me, and actively make me hate computers. A silent glass brick can go in my pocket because I know it's not going to bother me or beg me to talk outloud to it. If it was some sensory-overload distraction machine (which, by default, it is) it would find itself over the side of a bridge rather quickly. It's getting in the way of my human experience! The one where I'm the human, not the computer!!

hinkley3• 1 year ago

When iOS had a couple gestures to get away from needing physical buttons, things were pretty good.

However once you realize that you can add new gestures without having to defend adding a physical or screen real estate button, it takes a lot of discipline to avoid adding more. I like to think that Steve would have told most of their people to fuck off and we’d have one or two new gestures now, instead of twice as many. They would have found some other way.

whstl3• 1 year ago

Good points...

For me personally a similar thing was when Ableton Live transitioned from having a more "direct" interface to having popup menus for absolutely everything, and it took time for me to adapt to it for live performances. To be fair I never really adapted and just moved to something else.

Rather than coming up with creative solutions like they did before they just kept adding things to those popup menus. The app went from magic (by enabling me to perform live effortlessly) to frankly difficult (by having the interface become difficult to memorize and getting in my way).

Coincidentally was when they also started racking up bugs so much that they needed a couple years without new features just to clean up bugs.

arctek• 1 year ago

Even Google ended up adding more stuff to their homepage in the end. For a long time they tried to keep it super minimal- and it still is, but there's footer links and signed in header and a whole bunch of other links as well.

Mind you in the early days pages used to have hundreds if not thousands of text links all over the place, the only sites that do this now are the hardcore conspiracy sites where the author just adds several new links a day.

So in this dimension at least web UIs have changed for the better.

graypegg2• 1 year ago

Also, just to add to that because it's on my mind now, I think there's a ratchet effect to "UI that screams at you" or at least "UI that tries to tap into my senses". The more of it becomes common place, the more people expect to be able to annoying you, via your devices.

It doesn't matter that I can force my phone's vibration motor to only output an anemic "buhhhh..." no mater what coeffienct of bothersomeness some app sends to it. The person causing my phone to make that API call still expects the cacophony of pain to emit from it. We all become numb to how annoying this all is because it becomes the standard TO BE annoyed and distracted.

The uber eats sound is annoying because it conveys nothing except "whatever you're doing is unimportant!!!! PAY ATTENTION TO UBER!! UBER THINGS ARE HAPPENING!!!". There's a million other better ways to do that, so *I* find the information. *I* go to the stupid glass brick when *I* can take on a new order. But because we already set the expectation that the user is allowed to set off an alarm in any kitchen in the city for the low-low price of overpaying for food, the stupid glass brick tells ME when it's time to deal with it.

Spatial computing (like the example of a note taking app) now introduces all of the extra work of cleaning to a digital note. The computer wants me to sort my own notes now. It opens up the potential of being an e-slob for no reason other than my ability to make it as equally messy as my desk.

I don't know why we would expect this even-more sensory-focused model of computing to not also ratchet up the stress and dread of being alive.

I'm 27 going on 95 I guess, just send me to the old folks home now lol

airstrike• 1 year ago

The only solution is to turn off notifications for all but literally a handful of apps. Trust me, you won't miss those apps

sfn422• 1 year ago

I like to disable most notifications, but I'm confused about the Uber eats thing. If I'm a restaurant and I take orders via Uber eats, I probably want to be notified about new orders. That seems quite important to me. It's not the kind of thing you can leisurely discover an hour or two later. It's on the same level of importance as a customer walking into the restaurant. I can't really imagine many things more important than that.

Similarly if I'm on the receiving end I need to know that the delivery is here. I want my food and the courier wants to get going. I live in an apartment building, so I like being downstairs ready to pick up my order when they arrive.

So that's something I want to get notified about. I don't use Uber eats but I use Wolt, where I can monitor the couriers location and get a notification when they're close. I don't turn those off because these are actually important in my eyes. There's a real person potentially waiting for me right now.

Snapchat on the other hand gets muted immediately. Whoever came up with notifications for someone typing should be locked up. Not to mention all the bullshit like "some influencer or whatever posted something" notifications. I barely want to know when my friends sent me something.

makeitdouble4• 1 year ago

Agreed.

I WILL become a chicken farmer

Chicken don't hold a reputation of being calm and considerate about what noise at what level they'll emit during the day or the night.

If I can advise, silk worm farming could be it

doublerabbit• 1 year ago

Chicken/Cattle farming is too old fashioned and cumbersome for today's climates.

If for real mental breakdown vineyard farming is where you should be.

You can also sip away your woe by rewarding yourself with a glass of wine at the end of the day.

snypher• 1 year ago

This is interesting, chickens mostly sleep at night and the roosters crow at day break. I wouldn't call it calm or considerate - but at least they know when to keep it down!

nick3443• 1 year ago

Hens are pretty quiet, except the first half of the daytime.

kaycebasques4• 1 year ago

In The Great Flattening section of the post the author literally argues that the way we interacted with computers back in the 50s-70s was better because it was more of a full-body experience. That's a silly argument to make. As far as the status quo HCI paradigm goes, we've obviously made a lot of progress over the last 50 years.

However, I think the post is striking a chord because it's pointing to a deeper truth: after 70 years, we are still only scratching the surface of all the ways that humans and computers can potentially interact with each other.

jazzcomputer• 1 year ago

This feels like a article against the fur trade that was written on a rare animal skin.

wiley14542• 1 year ago

Reminds me of Bret Victor's article,"A brief rant on the future of Interaction design".

https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDes...

I guess one on the reasons why he's building Dynamic Land.

skadamat• 1 year ago

Obligatory & highly relevant: Humane Representation of Thought by Bret Victor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agOdP2Bmieg

And of course: https://dynamicland.org/

ChrisMarshallNY• 1 year ago

Seems to be a call for the return of skeuomorphic UI, and combining it with things like haptics (actually, fairly classic).

TBH, I'm not especially against the idea, except that, if you make something look like a real-world object, it's important to make it behave like one.

There's a hell of a lot of digital interfaces (not just touchscreen stuff -digital dials and switches can also have the issue), that look like they should behave a certain way, but don't actually do it.

__MatrixMan__• 1 year ago

I think of this trend every time I try to connect my bluetooth headphones to a third device. They'll tolerate two just fine but if you want a third you have to puzzle out which other two they're connected to, go find one of them and disable bluetooth on it. Then you can power cycle the headphones and your third device will now be your second.

I want some kind of magical piece of string which I can touch to both devices as a way of saying:

"you two, communicate now"

And then later, to break the spell, I'll just touch the ends of that string together.

I don't want to have to dig through settings, I want to manipulate physical objects around me.

Dwedit• 1 year ago

What we really need is a device switcher on the headphones. Something like a simple 4-position switch, to pair with device A, B, C, or D.

ianburrell• 1 year ago

What would make sense is tapping the devices together, and using NFC to pair them. The hard part would be figuring which parts of devices to tap together so it would probably be more like rubbing them together to find sweet spot. Also, it needs to be seamless and automatic, not involve downloading any apps.

getnormality• 1 year ago

This kinda reminds me of how, in the wake of the smartphone, for a few years every company thought they needed to boost engagement with their product. Even if their product was something in the background that people are happiest not thinking about. Do we need to engage with our oil filters? With our clothes washers? With our insurance policies?

Some things are best if they stay simple, efficient, reliable stable, and quiet. Not needy, demanding, high-maintenance, attempting to ensnare us through as many of our senses as they can get their claws on.

Some things are an experience, other things should just be quietly useful. Do we ask ourselves which we should be, before adding another colorful icon, with a red dot in the corner, with a number inside the red dot, to the poor user's screen?

And I hate haptic feedback. I keep my phone on silent 24/7 just to not feel my phone creepily zapping my fingers, and for some reason silent mode is the only way I can accomplish that.

rglover• 1 year ago

This is a true gem of a thought that every designer should consider at the outset of a project: "Some things are an experience, other things should just be quietly useful."

makeitdouble4• 1 year ago

It didn't help that bigger companies were hungry to integrate vertically and build the biggest moat they could, to the point it became a "eat as much as you can" landscape.

When Steve Jobs was saying DropBox is not a product but a feature, it surely didn't reassure DropBox that they could keep making simple and transparent services that the platform owner will gently play nice with.

Aeolun3• 1 year ago

There is a reason we are using a keyboard to interface with this stuff. We’ve been writing to think for millennia. Using a keyboard to do it is just marginally more efficient and less of a strain on your wrist.

underdeserver• 1 year ago

This feels Bret Victor-esque.

The problem I see here is the more senses you engage - really, the more coordination you demand of the user, the harder it is to make the interface feel intuitive.

makeitdouble4• 1 year ago

Compare the feeling of doomscrolling to kneading dough, playing an instrument, sketching

The whole article felt disconnected from reality to me, and this might be the core part that underlies it all.

The author seems to be hostile enough to smartphones that they don't really see much more physical using them has got. In particular in the last decade or so we got rid of so much of frequent polling to see if something needs attention or not, and notification management has become leaps and bounds better, at least on android.

But the author's focus seems to be more on social media ?

And they also idealize what people were doing before smartphones.

People scrolling Twitter rage thread today would probably not have been sketching birds in their backyard. Some perhaps, most surely not. TV was already widely popular for a reason.

ghc• 1 year ago

I understand the sentiment, but I believe Brad Woods explained it better in https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/design/juice .

Flat design is much more of a blank canvas than old desktop UI toolkits were, but companies are loathe to invest in "Juice" because it requires a level of attention to detail that works against fast iteration.

protocolture• 1 year ago

I think what UI needs is talented people to come up with new ideas.

When it was purely utilitarian only a minority of people could use it.

When it became tailored to a wider audience it was bland and uninspired.

The further it goes towards art\skeumorphism the more niche the userbase.

The further it goes towards corporate capture the angrier the userbase.

I think we shouldn't pretend like there's a big obvious solution that everyone else has ignored.

Shit I remember reading the Windows 8 designer blogs. Microsoft did serious testing to come up with the most hated interface in their history. From an academic perspective they did a lot of things correctly. Still shit. In fact Microsoft have form here, I remember being one of the few people who enjoyed the original Xbox controller, which was fairly rapidly redesigned due to market angst.

nine_k• 1 year ago

First of all: this is utterly beautiful, thank you!

There is an important thing about computer interfaces which does not hold for playing an instrument, or woodworking, or dancing, etc: it very often needs to be done privately and discreetly enough, both to avoid publicizing your private affairs, and to allow several people work near each other, or work near people who are not working, without bothering them.

This significantly limits the use of the body language (finger gestures are OK; gestures, so-so; poses, no), sound (listening is OK provided headphones, speaking or singing, much less so), haptics (some force feedback is OK, noisy vibration and clicking, less so).

This does not mean that all these things are useless! Not at all; audio feedback may be welcome, haptic feedback may be welcome, but both should be optional (e.g. in a game), unless sound is what you work with anyway (e.g. in a DAW).

What I miss is the richness of erstwhile interfaces, with their colors, shapes, textures, pseudo-3D effects, the occasional skeumorphism. They gave so many clues, helpful hints that encouraged exploration, and provided large amounts of subtle feedback. Sadly, they were considered "noisy" and removed by æsthetics purists, likely the same people who designed the sharp, wrist-biting "clean" edges of certain Macbook models. This regress needs to be revested.

Something has to be said about non-keyboard controls. They are few, and non-standard, with the exception of touchpad / touchscreen and mice. They allowed direct manipulation and gestures to flourish! But, unlike knobs, these cannot give reasonable haptic feedback. Musicians have all the best devices like that, and those who need such controls repurpose MIDI devices with their knobs and faders; GIMP, a raster graphics editor, even has a special MIDI device configuration section in settings. Another good source of haptic controls are mice with their wheels, and, more rare, game pads with joysticks. Neither is assumed to be connected to an average laptop though, which limits their use in interfaces, however optional.

j45• 1 year ago

Maybe interfaces are self-interested instead of interested in the outcomes of the user, which might not align with the creators of the interface.

peter_vukovic• 1 year ago

An article on user interfaces that is barely usable on a mobile phone due to scroll hijacking is hardly making a convincing point.

moribvndvs• 1 year ago

I think the article laments over a lack of something that interfaces have legitimately embraced for some time. Gestures, audio control, interactivity, visualizations, and so on are all things we’ve seen an increase in over the decades, not vise versa. Whether it’s done to a degree and in a manner that suits the author is another matter. That in itself leads to another rebuttal: As someone who is easily overwhelmed by their senses, simplicity and accessibility should be the priority. Surely, there are times when a rich interaction can be extremely useful (why just talk about physics when you can also let the reader interact with the concepts[0]). On the other hand, it’s easy to become flustered when someone imposes their artistic flair, conceptual model, or worse (when businesses weaponize interfaces against the user). I look at the author’s note organization mock up and I feel legitimate anxiety as it looks like little more than chaos on the screen.

0 - https://ciechanow.ski/airfoil/

mollerhoj• 1 year ago

ironic how broken this site on my phone

hoseja• 1 year ago

Is this completely AI-generated; the illustrations, the website, and the text too? I'd suspect so.

laxk• 1 year ago

We can say whatever we want, but aesthetically the site just delivers. :)

Our interfaces have lost their senses

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