Some Users Want Terrible User Interfaces

In that sense, it's very much in the spirit of any other command line environment. But apart from any UI issues, people continue to use it because of network effects. It's got a great messaging system that everyone uses, and it's got a common set of tools shared across the entire financial system.

Old habits die hard, too. Even though I'm no longer trading, I still have an old Bloomberg keyboard on my desk.

I took a gander at the comparison on http://www.portfolio.com/interactive-features/2007/06/termin... , and the whole article just annoys me. If they could focus less on "oh dear, this isn't going to win any design award" and more on making the software more efficient to use, I am confident they would not have faced the wholesale rejection that they complain about.

The current design is easy on the eyes. A black background with bright text is easier on the eyes than a glaring white flashlight with some thin black text on it. (I wonder if the misconception that dark background is bad stems from print, where it is a legitimate complaint?) Fun test: try using each of black-on-white and white-on-black at 3AM with bloodshot eyes and see which one gives you a pounding headache and which one allows you to focus on your work.

The current design is compact, and uses nice color-contrast techniques to group regions, while the "improved design" wastes a ton of pixels for spacing between the regions instead. Less eye-travel, less scrolling, less next-page-ing makes for more efficient (and therefore more relaxed) use.

This is because (A) there is more to design and usability than visual design, and (B) some systems design should be optimized for the expert user, not the general user.

These statements are incorrect. Command line interfaces (black background, in my case green text instead of the article's yellow) often give more control and are more usable than "simple" GUI ones. Especially for complex systems, it becomes unwieldy when a GUI interface tries to provide graphical settings for every supported feature. There are a bajillion tabs and windows, and while the UI designer though of several brilliant one word descriptions for each settings section/tab, of course they're not completely accurate for the setting which you're looking, and you end up flipping through way to many tabs/windows.

While there's often an initial loud and forceful resistance to change, it dies down as people get used to the new system, except for a few die-hards. In the example above, it took about two months for the community to come around and realize that removing some obvious pain points let the players focus more on strategy and whatnot. Of course, it helps that the new system is clearly superior to the old system. Microsoft Office's Ribbon, on the other hand, is not clearly superior, so people still bitch about it years after it was introduced. I happen to think it's superior in theory, but the implementation was botched a bit (menu names and organization not intuitive), so it's not a clear upgrade.

Is anyone going to suggest replacing "top" with a friendlier UI?

I've noticed relentless attacks on wall street portraying them as dumb people who do simple work but are just ruthless and greedy as hell. Of course they're greedy risk takers, and sometimes that causes problems. However, financial models can get fairly complex and require intelligence to navigate and utilize.

I was listening to NPR post-Haiti earthquake, and they were interviewing this woman who was basically borrowing money, going to the Dominican Republic to buy goods, giving them to stores in Port Au Prince, and then collecting the money two weeks later. She also charged the shopkeepers interest. When the earthquake hit, all of her goods were destroyed in the shops, so there was no way she could repay her debts.

Anyway, the radio hosts kept harping on the fact that she had only a middle school education, and was doing "extremely sophisticated math, the type that people on wall street get paid millions for". Now, I very much respect what that woman (and she was working off her debt post earthquake), but I thought it was incorrect and misleading to bring in wall street.

There are a lot of other examples, these are just two.

I remember a UI I was given to test for controlling a custom video display; the operator needed to be able to update things very quickly, but there were zero keyboard shortcuts defined, so everything had to be done by move-click-type move-click-type. Keyboard shortcuts hadn't even occurred to the developer as being important, despite the speed requirement.

But I agree in principle with this article. You can see it sometimes in the Linux/FLOSS world. People decry anything that means the average user can use it.

"But you should know how to set up networking on the command line!"

People like that, they like jumping through hoops. They think sensible defaults are a bad thing. They think you should have to read a 1,000 page manual before doing something simple.