User Interaction 101 | Hacker News Reader

User Interaction 101

andymatuschak.org

31 pointsdhotson8 comments

This post was excellent, although I take issue with the silent waiter part. His waiter example was trivial; there's no reason you wouldn't want the marshmallow bowl refilled, but usually programs aren't like that. I hate when programs do stuff without asking me, especially by default. Everytime I start using OpenOffice on somebody else's machine it takes it all of a minute to incorrectly autocorrect something I've typed (I disable autocorrect on my machines). That's the kind of "silent waiter" I hate, I don't want it automatically doing something unless there's absolutely no way I wouldn't want it done, and that's fairly rare

If you're going to be a silent waiter, you have to be a damn good one.

"any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology" (Larry Niven)

I like turning this on its head: if you're going to do something with technology it has better be so good that it looks like magic. Every time it fails, the illusion is broken and flow/trust/fluidity is gone. It has failed you.

If autocorrection was always right, you wouldn't mind it (see http://twitter.com/gruber/statuses/880736890).

If the caching algorithm of your drive controller was sometimes wrong and you had to manually find data in the right sector, you'd be annoyed by it too.

If your code is promising to do something for the user, it has to do it exactly right every time. Otherwise you need to package, promote and conceptualize it differently so that you don't constantly fail to live up to expectations.

You turn that Niven quote on its head all right, all the way back to Arthur C. Clark.

This guy should write a book. We could use a modern "Psychology of Everyday Things", focused on software design.

And no, Steve Kurg's book doesn't cut it.

This link (http://worrydream.com/MagicInk/) from the comments is fascinating also. A long article but well worth a read.

Some of the techniques could be just what a start-up needs to give it the edge over, "just good enough" web apps.

It takes a very good post to make me subscribe to someone's blog, especially an Apple person's blog, but this is high-quality Tognazzini-level musing on interface design. Better, even: Modern, web-focused.

Not to make this an Apple Person argument, but I think this is the sort of Apple Person mentality that I like the most: the one that isn't about constantly harping on other computer types, but that just quietly appreciates how beautifully simple most Apple stuff is.

I subscribed as well.

"slowed by the speed of their ideas rather than by the speed of their tool"

Brilliant insight. It explains the reason that I find IDEs so damn annoying.

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