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Comment by fermienrico | Hacker News Reader

These kinds of GUIs bother me so much. While they're bedazzling to look at, say in a sci-fi movie, they are horrendously designed in terms of functionality, user experience and ability to convey clearly/concisely with the least amount of ambiguity.

It bothers me that people are drawn to it like flies and you see this type of thing everywhere in "Futuristic" projections of our life.

They're objectively worse, yet they look cool and the general public values "Coolness" over GUI's ability to meet its core purpose - that is to leverage human vision's bandwidth to convey information rapidly, concisely and without ambiguity. That is the whole point of a GUI.

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Kind of agree - however, if the interface elements never move around and stay the same, it's very similar a UX to the instrument panels of old.

I.e. not that bad, if precaution is taken against information overload in some kind if crisis.

I could write a long essay criticizing the obvious drawbacks of this type of implementation. For example, contrast is non-existent. There is just so much stuff that's wrong, I am overwhelmed as I respond.

Please do. Because personally, contrast is about the only thing that irks me about this; beyond that, I believe it's a very decent dashboard, with a bit of intentional futuristic style, but otherwise close to zero useless bullshit that plagues the UI fashion of today.

You're completely correct, but the only way people will understand how bad the UI is if they were forced to use it in their daily.

Exactly the opposite might be true - if you used it daily you would be accustomed to where the critical data is and what it looks like.

(Ignoring things which are unknown to us - for instance would the operator benefit from trends in data? This does not seem to be present in the UX.)

Disagree. The UI is nearly identical to our modern UIs, from an information and functionality point of view. The sole difference in this case appears to be style. Fonts and colors, mostly.

Your critique would be true when leveled at the font choice, though.

Here are some references to how NASA designs their GUI's for mission critical systems and dashboards:

https://human-factors.arc.nasa.gov/awards_pubs/publications....

Are there examples of NASA dashboards?

OpenMCT comes to mind

https://openmct-demo.herokuapp.com/

https://github.com/nasa/openmct

How do I view things? I can only get to summary pages with no big gigantic "open", "view", "download", etc links.

was this meant to link to a particular document?

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