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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

There have been systematic studies of this. UI productivity for people that have had time to learn the software peaked in the mid 1980’s.

So, the industry traded being able to walk up and use a thing in the first 30 seconds for having it be painfully bad after the first 30 minutes.

People like to say, “oh, but power users are rare”. That’s only true if you count users that bounce after 29 minutes the same as users that use the software more than once.

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You're zeroing in on the actual answer to "why did we replace these awesome high-speed text interfaces with slow GUIs?" Businesses aren't stupid or irrational: they switched because they moved to an employment model based on a disposable labor force, where workers wouldn't be expected to stick around long enough for training to be worth it, so it was more important to make an interface that was good enough for the endless revolving door of untrained users.

Yes and: then that approach got cargo culted into places where it doesn't work because e.g. the domain is too gnarly, because management heard that glanceable interfaces with high discoverability were the new industry best practice...

> People like to say, “oh, but power users are rare”

Huh, didn’t consider that power users being rare meant the software makes becoming a power user difficult.

Is it just 30 minutes? Isn't this just like the "bows are better than arquebuses" thing where the advantage of easy training and replaceability beats individual quality?

When someone uses a tool for several hours every day for years, you can afford quite a bit of training.

When you need to make a bunch peasants into soldiers on short notice, the equation is different.

AI UIs can fix this. If you know what you want, you could just say it without learning anything about the doing part.

But it needs to be rock-solid or it'll become a glorified unreliable voice control.

commoditizing skill

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