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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Nice little writeup that skims the surface of "User Interface Designs".

Problem is that when you decouple interface design from system design, that's all you can do: skim the surface.

#10 provides the perfect example: how to label your dialog boxes.

Once you take a larger, more organic view, you reach a much simpler conclusion: don't have dialog boxes. Just do it and provide an Undo, and leave the user alone. Millions will thank you.

An outcome you can only reach by looking at the whole system, not just the way it looks.

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But almost no one really follows this advice to its core. Imagine an operating system designed this way: you could quit Photoshop, then "undo" the quit, and all your windows would reopen without anything have to re-load from disk (because it wasn't really unloaded yet to begin with.) You could "rm -rf /" and then press Ctrl-Z in your shell. You could send an email, and then pull it back from the server (or all the way from the other person's inbox), as long as they both had the same system installed.

If the entire world worked this way, you could even wire $5000 to a Nigerian scammer, then pull it back out, undoing the purchase of anything they spent it on in the process. Of course, cash would have to be replaced with a reversible commodity (credit chips that really just referenced a row in a central, though distributed, table) so money could flow back into your pocket without anyone having to hand you anything.

Taken even further, to the point where you can take out a hit on someone and then press undo after the person is dead, this begins to sound like the start of a good Science Fiction. "The Reversible Society", perhaps.

I often wish I had an undo button in the terminal. Obviously not everything can have an undo. But most things (anything you can undo in Windows) you should be able to undo on the Web.

This is what people will expect from web applications or they won't use them.

chroot jail

Exactly.

It's much easier to lecture people to provide Undo with everything than it is to actually implement it in a worthwhile way.

it isnt about "to the core", there are obviously non associative things that should be warned as such, but seeing as you use photoshop as an example

edit a photoshop file, quit, it will warn you to save changes blah blah, it is annoying, but also stops you deleting stuff, load it again, history is lost

Use lightroom, another adobe product for editing photos, edit a photo, quit, no dialog, its already saved, open the file again, and the history is preserved

its a much nicer experience in a lot of situations

I know this isn't 100% relevant to your post, but AOL used to have undo on sent emails (to other aol members)

The one way AOL was better than the rest of the internet.

IIRC, this was one of the design principles for ErosOS. Everything was transparently persistable and undoable, so you could reverse closing that document, or editing it, and so on.

Actually, millions will not thank you, because they would not have had to deal with that pesky dialog box in the first place!

they interacted with other dialog boxes in the past

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