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Comment by timthelion | Hacker News Reader

"You can still find antique green-screen systems if you look hard—in some cases, a pleasant Web interface just disguises the old guts." - There is so much wrong with this sentiment! It's just kind of folded in there, the insinuation that "web interfaces are more pleasant" than TUIs. I cannot express how much this kind of writting annoys me. Why can't they tell the story without wedging in unbacked opinions. The sentence "You can still find antique green-screen systems if you look hard—in some cases, a Web interface just disguises the old guts." would work just as well.

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I think you can hold your fire. Don't you think it is true that in some cases a pleasant web interface disguises the old guts of a legacy system? I see absolutely no insinuation that all web interfaces are more pleasant than TUIs.

TUIs are great for experienced users, but are terrible for inexperienced users.

A good example of where a simple GUI is useful is POS systems. Sure, you could use a TUI, but you'd have to train every 16 year old kid who works for you for 2 weeks over summer, which is going to cost you.

On the other hand, I've noticed that airlines still use a terminal emulator for their booking and check in system. They're amazingly fast at using it, most of the commands are 1 or 2 letters. But you're dealing with a smaller group of trained and skilled employees, with a much lower turnover and a much higher overall training requirement.

There's probably also legacy reasons why airlines use a TUI, but it seems that the staff never have any issues using it, I've never seen them having to consult a manual.

> TUIs are great for experienced users, but are terrible for inexperienced users.

Usability research proved this to be false again and again but unfortunately text is not showy enough.

I'd love to see this research. I've wondered about it myself

They are probably talking about what TUIs get with replaced with in practice, rather than an optimum replacement GUI.

TUIs suffer from a lack of discoverability, I have to type in "help" or look up the man page to actually figure out how to do anything.

Put me in front of an airline booking system, and I'm going to be completely lost. Put me in front of a computer opened to an airlines website, and I can probably figure out how to order myself some tickets.

TUIs require training. After training they are often very fast to use.

> TUIs suffer from a lack of discoverability

Not always true. "Type customer reservation number" is very discoverable. A car dashboard has little text but there is no way to guess the meaning of some engine failure LEDs if you have never seen a car before.

It's about usability design. The airline website has been carefully designed to guide inexperienced users.

In the same way TUI can have guided "conversations" that are often easier for complete beginners, and become less verbose over time, as needed.

I developed POS systems for a friend who starts and runs places (restaurant-bars) that are the most successful in the region; always packed, making him pure gold. He insists on never hiring '16 year old kids during the summer' but rather have his decades long trained staff move from old to new place to properly train the new staff there. The system we made for him was absolutely optimized for hitting the screen as little and as fast as possible per order. This made it unusable for beginners however he argues he made a lot more money because of it: no queues at ordering so no risk of people walking away bored (this is very common with people who are not usual bar goers), less error prone etc.

If everything is ran like a gig economy then simple and wizard like interfaces are a must but for long running companies with long term staff it probably will show less efficient over time although no one will probably measure that in most companies.

A lot of projects we did were web interfaces on top of DOS or terminal projects; usually the companies did not want to replace the legacy because their seasoned employees who basically made all the money for them were very used to the old system. But now short term hires could do some specific tasks as well via the web interface.

So the solution is for everyone to hire decades-trained staff?

No, I did not say that. I said that there are plenty of cases in which those less intuitive interfaces + a bit of training pays off. I even added an example where we built intuitive web interfaces on top of DOS/terminal programs to make them more accessible for 'new people'. Nothing wrong with it, just wanted to provide a case (mentioned by the parent) where a company makes significant profits because of a faster workflow with a hard to use (for beginners) interface.

My local (tiny) bank went from TUI->GUI->TUI because the, again decade long employees who train their colleagues and follow ups, found it awfully inefficient with all the wizards and forms spread out over multiple pages and design elements where more option buttons could have been. It's not a contest either; for most cases a carefully crafted GUI works better; in some cases, a TUI or very dense (considered ugly) GUI works better. I miss the Expert Mode button in web applications.

Hiring decades-trained staff is often a good idea.

> He insists on never hiring '16 year old kids during the summer'

Unfortunately, as a company developing POS systems, you can't just tell your customers that.

You're right on the minimal taps thing though. It shouldn't take more than 3 taps to send a basic order through (e.g. a beer).

Well, in this case, he ordered a custom made POS for all his bars/restaurants. So it was a specific case.

If you put a number next to the on screen menu, and a small keypad below the screen, they can use the screen in the beginning and naturally start using the keypad to speed up orders over time. They'll teach themselves because in crunch time they'll want to become faster so they can get more orders to make more tips, etc

Expert mode. Most applications would do well with that.

Back in my cashier days all the registers had 2x40 char LCD screens and that was it. Training was all of two days, and most of that was loss prevention and how to bag properly.

> TUIs are great for experienced users, but are terrible for inexperienced users.

For most users in a professional setting, they will spend far more time as an experienced user than they will as an inexperienced user. Why optimize to the first 6 months or so of a persons job, when they might work there for years, or even decades?

Because some jobs have an average turnover <6 months, so it makes sense to optimise those first months.

Apart from low skill jobs, there's also seasonal work. For example fruit picking and packing. There's only 1 or 2 months a year that they're operational, so it makes sense to optimise those systems for inexperienced users.

Sure, there will be some who work every year for decades, but there will also be a lot of seasonal workers who only ever work one or two seasons.

I'd disagree strongly. The dynamics of a web application are different than a terminal app.

You're average web-skinned 3270 app is generally a direct translation of whatever the app did done by a gang of contractors without any design consideration.

The problem with that is that for all of the most trivial of apps, the use cases were envisioned 30 years ago. That's usually a problem. For example, one app that I looked at that still had old documentation available. Their design was based around 90% of transactions were initiated by a clerk opening paper mail. The obtuse layout of screens was there because they processed mail to dispatch it to appropriate teams of clerks, and it was customized to each function. Today 90% of transactions are initiated by phone or webchat, and are expected to be resolved in one call.

Bad web implementations are common. But it's almost always bad to ape things that aren't understood, which is the case 80% of the time for webified temrinal apps.

> You're average web-skinned 3270 app

Am I?

(Sorry I couldn't resist)

Life would be simpler!

>There is so much wrong with this sentiment! It's just kind of folded in there, the insinuation that "web interfaces are more pleasant" than TUIs. I cannot express how much this kind of writting annoys me. Why can't they tell the story without wedging in unbacked opinions.

Not everything needs to backed. It's obvious that most people, at least most lay people, find web UIs better and more friendly than terminal style interfaces...

Pleasant is not something objective to be measured comparing TUIs and web UIS -- it's in how people see them, and it's clear that what the article says it true for most people.

Until 2014 (at the earliest, may have extended into 2015), the built-in ticketing kiosks at AT&T Park (San Francisco) ran on Windows NT PCs, with a 1999 copyright date on the boot screen (when it crashed).

I think that you might be very nearly alone in your sentiment that green screens offer as good a user interface as more recent technologies.

Me and three upvotes in however many minutes. Plus all the old ladies at the supermarket who can enter a product code into the terminal without even looking at the screen, because the rules for what element is focused are so simple.

I agree that terminals are more "productive". One of the reasons that the mouse based interfaces gained such traction is that the sales people pitched it as "you can teach someone to use this interface in X amount of time" where X is orders of magnitude less than using a terminal interface. Like saying that Nodepad is quicker to learn than Emacs or Vim. This is true at face value, the trade off is that you pay for it later on as people become productive with it. Alas, cutting down "training time" and the costs involved with this for new employees is something bean counters can measure.

As "more recent technologies", probably not. (At least as good) as the non-native, slowly-responding, glitchy web UIs that are so hip lately, most likely yes, especially when it comes to tasks like data entry and the like.

Give me a good responsive web app, mobile Android/iOS app, Win32 app or TUI app over ugly not so responsive XAML Win10 apps or SAP screens.

From talking to the sales & service agents at ${COMPANY} after prototyping some 'New Generation' systems we determined that Web-based UIs had two advantages:

1. Multi-column layout with independent updates. Useful for presenting prompts and help information beside the main transaction window.

2. AJAX-style dynamic updates on data-selection.

Other than that there were few advantages to Web UI. In fact we had to spend some time developing Javascript functionality such as tab-order and F-key capture that are elementary, 'free' features with green-screen and which greatly improve transaction speed.

Any 5250 terminal emulator from the 1990s onwards offered copy-and-paste and multi-session capabilities so a Web UI didn't offer advantage there.

On what TUI systems is a multi-column layout not possible? On what TUI systems are dynamic updates not possible? In my experience, teletype or ssh is much better in this regard, as the systems use socket connections which support push, which allows updates to propogate faster and more efficiently than using http (I know, http2 improves this system, as well as websockets, but those are recent arivals and only serve to play catch-up).

I think that depends on what you mean by "good". Being able to complete transactions without taking your fingers off the keyboard is almost always faster.

So, if it's an application where the end user spends a lot of time, a green screen can be more efficient. Things like a call center, or the check-in counter at an airport, etc.

It does depend on a good text and boxes ui though. Green screens had things like pulldowns, copy/paste, etc.

And even if it weren't faster, it's more comfortable. As someone who spends the vast majority of his waking hours behind a screen, I can tell the difference between two days that involved a lot of mousing around and two days typing (I usually get to type most, but there are projects where I can't). I can only imagine what it must feel like if you have to use a web interface to move between pages all the time.

>Being able to complete transactions without taking your fingers off the keyboard is almost always faster.

Until you get carpal tunnel syndrome.

Is switching back and forth from a keyboard to a mouse less likely to cause carpal tunnel?

Nah. Green screens were great. Stuff today is crap.

How does a user interface? For a web site, primarily with a mouse. So, single touch input. For green screen they have an array of dedicated individual simultaneous input devices (known as "keys"). In addition, green screen often provides near-immediate response, whereas touchscreens can suffer from lag either in the physical interface or the unfortunate multiprocess operating system. Finally, green screen was designed to step quickly through the interface, where web requires lots of hunting around for what you want to do.

You simply can't interface better with an application than a single process dedicated application using fixed multiple inputs with immediate response. It's like web pages are a cart and horse and green screen is a race car.

The first job I took right out of college (I was kinda out of money and needed a job immediately) was at a polling company. You know, the obnoxious kids who call and say, "If an election were held tomorrow..."

Anyway, the place still used green screen terminals in 2006 (Mmm, with mechanical keyboards attached). In most cases, the only input required was a single number for each response, so once I'd memorized a script and the responses, I could get through a survey without looking at either the screen or the terminal.

Eventually the company shut down, and needing another job right away, I went to another polling company, who used a web interface for some reason. So there I had to use a vintage mouse (...which obviously did not bring the same joy as a vintage keyboard) to click radio buttons and check boxes and was, frankly, just a painful experience all around.

So, yeah, I agree, there are a surprising number of instances where an old terminal UI is significantly better.

Text terminal can provide superior user interface. They can be faster and very logical. When you use them several hours per day and master the system they surpass most modern UI's. Minimal distraction, fast access and less errors.

Good modern UI design uses common metaphors that make it easier to learn new systems that are used with mouse if you are familiar with metaphors. They are designed for the beginner. There is nothing that prevents modern UI designer from learning the lessons from old terminals and carefully crafting the application so that experienced users can use different screen layout with fast keyboard navigation. It's just very rare.

The worst thing about our modern GUIs, IMO, is that they've basically brought UI evolution to a screeching halt.

I don't think we've even begun to develop optimal user interfaces, and we won't as long as the "common metaphor" idea holds sway.

Think what it would be like if we applied that idea to the real world, so (e.g.) hammers, can openers, toilets, and bulldozers all had to operate using a common set of widgets. It's hard to envision, but I would bet a very large sum of money that the result wouldn't be optimal for any of those jobs.

That's what we've done with computer UIs.

Unfortunately, I don't see any real way out of the trap.

Unfortunately, I don't see any real way out of the trap.

Some new device or application will introduce a new metaphor or technology that eventually trickles into existing software. Unfortunately, last time this happened that new tech was touchscreens, and I fear voice is next. These are both regressions in efficiency for lots of tasks.

>Think what it would be like if we applied that idea to the real world, so (e.g.) hammers, can openers, toilets, and bulldozers all had to operate using a common set of widgets.

Only apps don't do that. Paint apps use brushes and canvases, spreadsheet apps use cell grids, music apps use notation views and piano rolls, writing apps use document screens, games use whatever invented controls and worlds, etc.

What is common is that a lot of stuff we do involves mere text and symbol manipulation (buying tickets, reading news, checking sports scores, entering customer data, etc). For those we use the same widgets, yes.

But in the real world we do build all kinds of stuff, from cars to boats, and from skyscrapers to bulldozers, to pinballs with nuts, bolts, screws, wires, glass panels, etc., too. A hammer is as useful for hanging a frame as it is for building a house.

"Paint apps use brushes and canvases"

No, they use skeuomorphic simulations of those things.

(edit, to expand a bit)

We have the capability to put anything on the screen that we can imagine, but we're not doing that. We're limiting ourselves to bad simulations of real-world tools. The "brushes" are just more of the same thinking that gave us "desktops", "file folders" and "trash cans". As others have noted, those things do make it easier for newbies to learn the system, and yeah, that's a point in its favor. It's just disappointing to me that we haven't come further than we have with respect to truly innovative interfaces.

You even see it in VR! You get the same menus, buttons, and whatnot, but, hey, now the components are rendered as high-resolution stereo images. Yay! I guess?

>No, they use skeuomorphic simulations of those things.

No, they don't. You don't paint moving some virtual drawn brush gizmo, taking to some "virtual water box" to wash it out, etc.

You paint moving a cursor (whether it has a brush icon is irrelevant and not skeuomorphic in the UI sense), and you control properties of the underlying line (color, spread, width etc) with some of them going far beyond what a real world brush can do.

>We have the capability to put anything on the screen that we can imagine, but we're not doing that.

That's because it's not convenient. Except if you have some cool new idea we haven't tried.

What are you proposing as an alternative to a button? Gestures? Voice commands?

I've seen it many times, particularly in finance which still has plenty of VT100 applications.

The reason is that once you know the codes, you can navigate and enter data at a genuinely incredible rate. If you've ever watched an experienced operator on one of these applications you'd be amazed. For one loan processing application, the terminal was an order of magnitude faster than the Web-based interface that was being deployed.

The key here though, is "experienced". This is someone who has developed the knowledge and muscle-memory to operate at that speed. This also makes the system more brittle (and often harder to change). Critically, it also means it takes a lot of training and time for people to be productive.

The reason many big organizations dropped the terminals - they wanted to be able to train people quicker, not because it was more productive.

>The key here though, is "experienced".

The other key is that those people and those "POS" style apps do very little things -- mostly a single task like e.g. bank accounts management.

The example I put in there was loan applications, which are quite complex. Loan origination (especially Business Loans) is perhaps the most complex business process I've ever encountered.

I call this "the Dwarf Fortress UI paradigm."

Yes, it's very fast to someone experienced with it.

Yes, the learning curve is incredible.

No, it will never change because the stakeholder (ie. the developer) is happy with it.

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