Our interfaces have lost their senses

Maybe if I can make a counter-point: a lot of these patterns are common place right now! And much more so than whatever golden era we want to imagine existed long ago.

- Gestures in a lot of applications have made things more confusing by hiding functionality that you now need to stumble into to discover.

- Sound cues are used all over the place. Anyone who's ever worked in a kitchen hears the godforsaken ubereats alert sound in their nightmares.

- About ten minutes ago, I got startled by my phone deciding that the "you should stand up" vibration pattern should be three long BZZZZ-es... amplified by it sitting on my hollow-sounding printer.

- If another fucking god damn website asks me to chat with an AI agent in it's stupid little floating chat bubble, only appearing AFTER I interact with the page so it's allowed to also make an annoying "chirp!" sound, I WILL become a chicken farmer in some remote forest eating only twigs, berries, and improperly-raised chicken eggs.

All of these things annoy me, and actively make me hate computers. A silent glass brick can go in my pocket because I know it's not going to bother me or beg me to talk outloud to it. If it was some sensory-overload distraction machine (which, by default, it is) it would find itself over the side of a bridge rather quickly. It's getting in the way of my human experience! The one where I'm the human, not the computer!!

This is a beautifully designed and illustrated page.

But I couldn't disagree more with the premise. It complains that computers have been reduced from physical, tactile, hulking mainframes to neutered generic text interfaces, but I've watched the opposite happen over the past two decades.

My phone is physical -- I swipe, pinch, and tap. It buzzes and dings and flashes. I squeeze my AirPods, I pay by holding my wrist up to a sensor, I tilt my iPad to play video games and draw on it with a pencil.

Everything the article complains about, we've already solved. All of its suggestions, we already have. It wants "multi-modality" but we already have that too -- I can change the volume on my iPhone with physical buttons while I dictate. I can listen to music while I scroll.

Our interfaces haven't lost their senses. Our interfaces have more senses than they've ever had before.

Disagree: Our malaise is not boredom from simplicity, but fatigue from inconsistency.

"Flat" interfaces aren't bad because they lack an ineffable whimsy of embodied human experience, they're bad because they threw out the baby the bathwater, tossing decades of conventions and hard-learned accessibility lessons in the name of supporting a touchscreen.

Compared to 20 years ago, everyone is shipping half-website-half-desktop abominations (e.g. with Electron[0]) and reinventing UX wheels. Too many apps/sites impose "their own look" instead of following what the user has already learned. [1] Often users must guess whether certain things are even clickable, how a certain toggle looks when enabled, whether certain settings are a single-select option or a multi-select tickbox... And memorize those rules with per-app or per-website granularity.

> You can talk while clicking, listen while reading, look at an image while spinning a knob, gesture while talking.

Those are all things people do after "make computer do what I want" has become automatic.

Now when--for example--trying to find the 21st item they just added inside a list that is vertically limited to 20 and the custom grey-on-grey scrollbar is always hidden unless you've currently hovering a mouse exactly in the right 5-pixel-wide strip between two columns of the interface.

[0] A sample listing of software readers may be familiar with: https://www.electronjs.org/apps

[1] That may be due to deliberate "remember us" branding, whatever was fastest-to-ship, because things to look new to get somebody a promotion, because they want to create a switching-cost so current users feel bad trying to use a competitor's product... Or because someone like the blog-poster has misguidedly tried to make a "richer experience."

These beautiful images (AI generated, perhaps?) make for a great showcase, but I find myself disagreeing with almost everything here - except for the core desire to make interfaces more engaging.

The real challenge is that UI designs are ultimately constrained by their hardware. This means major interface innovations often limit where the software can actually be used.

Take tablet-optimized apps, for instance. They can fully embrace touch interaction, but this leaves desktop-only users completely out of the loop.

So unfortunately, truly revolutionary interfaces tend to require equally revolutionary hardware to match .

Fantastic design. Normally pages with funky scrolling behavior and boxes whizzing all over the place and all that are annoying but it really works here. Not to mention the adorable visuals.

That being said I think it misses what made the old physical interfaces so appealing and useful. It's not that there's something inherently superior about multimodality; it's that physical interfaces are permanent, with defined edges and definite shape. Unlike screens you know exactly what's where, building muscle memory every time you use it. There are no hidden menus or moving parts.

Multimodality - such as being able to see the position of a slider at a glance, or feel its position by touch - is useful because it reinforces the absolute existence of a control and its state across multiple senses. Interfaces using voice and gestures like suggested are the exact opposite of that, because each point of interaction becomes even more disconnected and vague.

This kinda reminds me of how, in the wake of the smartphone, for a few years every company thought they needed to boost engagement with their product. Even if their product was something in the background that people are happiest not thinking about. Do we need to engage with our oil filters? With our clothes washers? With our insurance policies?

Some things are best if they stay simple, efficient, reliable stable, and quiet. Not needy, demanding, high-maintenance, attempting to ensnare us through as many of our senses as they can get their claws on.

Some things are an experience, other things should just be quietly useful. Do we ask ourselves which we should be, before adding another colorful icon, with a red dot in the corner, with a number inside the red dot, to the poor user's screen?

And I hate haptic feedback. I keep my phone on silent 24/7 just to not feel my phone creepily zapping my fingers, and for some reason silent mode is the only way I can accomplish that.

Hm, no reference to Bret Victor?

https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDes...

It's a lovely set of sentiments. I think another aspect of UI that has been lost is discoverability - finding out how to do things in a new interface seems harder than it used to be when there was one app-level menu bar. Too many things are hidden in context menus, found only by right-clicking or long pressing on just the right spot. A set of multi-modal interfaces might just make discoverability even worse.

I was reflecting on something similar to this this while photographing the recent lunar eclipse with a Fujifilm X-T5, a highly tactile camera that is just an absolute joy to operate.

I was on my roof in the dark at 1:30 in the morning in the cold and wind. I'm tired, can't really see much, but still need to actively work with the camera's controls. Thankfully, the X-T5 is covered in physical dials, switches and buttons. Without looking at the camera's screen, I can quickly change shooting modes and the majority of the settings I care about and be confident that I changed the right things.

The same cannot be said about a large number of modern cameras, which opt instead for a more digital approach.

In terms of modern "computing" devices, my cameras are an absolute joy to use compared to most of my other hardware.

So much so that I've recently been finding myself looking to recreate this tactile experience on my general purpose computers. I've been looking at weird bespoke dials, switches and various input hardware to make processing the photos (among other tasks) feel more tactile.

I got agitated looking through that due to the excess of flourishes. Fancy elements should punctuate focal points. If there's too many, the focus is lost.

I think the article laments over a lack of something that interfaces have legitimately embraced for some time. Gestures, audio control, interactivity, visualizations, and so on are all things we’ve seen an increase in over the decades, not vise versa. Whether it’s done to a degree and in a manner that suits the author is another matter. That in itself leads to another rebuttal: As someone who is easily overwhelmed by their senses, simplicity and accessibility should be the priority. Surely, there are times when a rich interaction can be extremely useful (why just talk about physics when you can also let the reader interact with the concepts[0]). On the other hand, it’s easy to become flustered when someone imposes their artistic flair, conceptual model, or worse (when businesses weaponize interfaces against the user). I look at the author’s note organization mock up and I feel legitimate anxiety as it looks like little more than chaos on the screen.

0 - https://ciechanow.ski/airfoil/

There is a certain beauty of a webpage about user interfaces failing to load under strains from traffic volume. I couldn’t read much, but it would appear the best interfaces are the ones that work!

Yes and no.

Yes, flat design is too flat, and AI chat is too devoid of friction.

But mobile and tablets are better at certain things [1], and we shouldn't get rid of that either.

I saw somewhere (Bret Victor?) that tools have two parts: the part that fits the problem, and the part that fits the human. The example was a hammer; the head fit the problem (the nail), and the handle fit the human (the hand).

Notably, the two parts must fit their respective things, but they also have to work together.

That is what we should be doing: creating harmonious tools that fit the problem and the human. What that looks like will be different for every tool.

Our interfaces currently have two problems:

* Because they can have any appearance, appearance gets more attention than being a good tool. Example: flat design (good appearance) overriding skeuomorphic design (human fit).

* No one wants to redesign everything, so we all reuse the same base stuff (Electron, Qt, etc.) even if the result won't fit (one or both ends) or harmonize.

I would love to fix both of those problems, but because people are lazy, it essentially means creating a GUI framework that is flexible enough to fit almost any problem and any human (accessibility included) while making sure that flexibility does not destroy harmony.

While I am working on that, it is a tall order, and I am almost certain I will not succeed.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43350339

This feels like a article against the fur trade that was written on a rare animal skin.

Reminds me of Bret Victor's article,"A brief rant on the future of Interaction design".

https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDes...

I guess one on the reasons why he's building Dynamic Land.

This is a nice and visually pleasing manifesto.

It is also hard to read.

An article on user interfaces that is barely usable on a mobile phone due to scroll hijacking is hardly making a convincing point.

I think of this trend every time I try to connect my bluetooth headphones to a third device. They'll tolerate two just fine but if you want a third you have to puzzle out which other two they're connected to, go find one of them and disable bluetooth on it. Then you can power cycle the headphones and your third device will now be your second.

I want some kind of magical piece of string which I can touch to both devices as a way of saying:

"you two, communicate now"

And then later, to break the spell, I'll just touch the ends of that string together.

I don't want to have to dig through settings, I want to manipulate physical objects around me.

It might just be me but I find the thesis of the article to be very confusing.

> but we should have made typing feel like painting.

Maybe painting should should feel like painting and typing should feel like typing? I don't know about others but when I type, I just want to type, as efficiently and quickly as possible. I definitely don't want typing to feel like painting.

By the way, loading 92 MB of images to make me read 6 KB of text is brutal!

There is a reason we are using a keyboard to interface with this stuff. We’ve been writing to think for millennia. Using a keyboard to do it is just marginally more efficient and less of a strain on your wrist.

In The Great Flattening section of the post the author literally argues that the way we interacted with computers back in the 50s-70s was better because it was more of a full-body experience. That's a silly argument to make. As far as the status quo HCI paradigm goes, we've obviously made a lot of progress over the last 50 years.

However, I think the post is striking a chord because it's pointing to a deeper truth: after 70 years, we are still only scratching the surface of all the ways that humans and computers can potentially interact with each other.

Seems to be a call for the return of skeuomorphic UI, and combining it with things like haptics (actually, fairly classic).

TBH, I'm not especially against the idea, except that, if you make something look like a real-world object, it's important to make it behave like one.

There's a hell of a lot of digital interfaces (not just touchscreen stuff -digital dials and switches can also have the issue), that look like they should behave a certain way, but don't actually do it.

I understand the sentiment, but I believe Brad Woods explained it better in https://garden.bradwoods.io/notes/design/juice .

Flat design is much more of a blank canvas than old desktop UI toolkits were, but companies are loathe to invest in "Juice" because it requires a level of attention to detail that works against fast iteration.

There is a niceness to more kinesthetic input devices, to dials, knobs, and pens. I'm always experimenting with trying more. The unfortunate thing is they tend to be niche and unsupported. Try finding a nice dial to control things like zoom or volume, it's harder than it should be and costs over $100 or is not a great experience.

First of all: this is utterly beautiful, thank you!

There is an important thing about computer interfaces which does not hold for playing an instrument, or woodworking, or dancing, etc: it very often needs to be done privately and discreetly enough, both to avoid publicizing your private affairs, and to allow several people work near each other, or work near people who are not working, without bothering them.

This significantly limits the use of the body language (finger gestures are OK; gestures, so-so; poses, no), sound (listening is OK provided headphones, speaking or singing, much less so), haptics (some force feedback is OK, noisy vibration and clicking, less so).

This does not mean that all these things are useless! Not at all; audio feedback may be welcome, haptic feedback may be welcome, but both should be optional (e.g. in a game), unless sound is what you work with anyway (e.g. in a DAW).

What I miss is the richness of erstwhile interfaces, with their colors, shapes, textures, pseudo-3D effects, the occasional skeumorphism. They gave so many clues, helpful hints that encouraged exploration, and provided large amounts of subtle feedback. Sadly, they were considered "noisy" and removed by æsthetics purists, likely the same people who designed the sharp, wrist-biting "clean" edges of certain Macbook models. This regress needs to be revested.

Something has to be said about non-keyboard controls. They are few, and non-standard, with the exception of touchpad / touchscreen and mice. They allowed direct manipulation and gestures to flourish! But, unlike knobs, these cannot give reasonable haptic feedback. Musicians have all the best devices like that, and those who need such controls repurpose MIDI devices with their knobs and faders; GIMP, a raster graphics editor, even has a special MIDI device configuration section in settings. Another good source of haptic controls are mice with their wheels, and, more rare, game pads with joysticks. Neither is assumed to be connected to an average laptop though, which limits their use in interfaces, however optional.

> Compare the feeling of doomscrolling to kneading dough, playing an instrument, sketching

The whole article felt disconnected from reality to me, and this might be the core part that underlies it all.

The author seems to be hostile enough to smartphones that they don't really see much more physical using them has got. In particular in the last decade or so we got rid of so much of frequent polling to see if something needs attention or not, and notification management has become leaps and bounds better, at least on android.

But the author's focus seems to be more on social media ?

And they also idealize what people were doing before smartphones.

People scrolling Twitter rage thread today would probably not have been sketching birds in their backyard. Some perhaps, most surely not. TV was already widely popular for a reason.

A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interaction Design [1] was great. The comments in this thread are my first time hearing about that blog post. Send me more blogs/books/videos/etc. like that, please.

[1] https://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDes...

Is this completely AI-generated; the illustrations, the website, and the text too? I'd suspect so.

This feels Bret Victor-esque.

The problem I see here is the more senses you engage - really, the more coordination you demand of the user, the harder it is to make the interface feel intuitive.

Maybe interfaces are self-interested instead of interested in the outcomes of the user, which might not align with the creators of the interface.

We can say whatever we want, but aesthetically the site just delivers. :)

Obligatory & highly relevant: Humane Representation of Thought by Bret Victor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agOdP2Bmieg

And of course: https://dynamicland.org/

It lost me when it encourages websites to have sound.

I very much liked this:

> We made painting feel like typing, but we should have made typing feel like painting.

I think this quote is worth ruminating for a few while. It reminds me of some Bret Victor talks.

I think what UI needs is talented people to come up with new ideas.

When it was purely utilitarian only a minority of people could use it.

When it became tailored to a wider audience it was bland and uninspired.

The further it goes towards art\skeumorphism the more niche the userbase.

The further it goes towards corporate capture the angrier the userbase.

I think we shouldn't pretend like there's a big obvious solution that everyone else has ignored.

Shit I remember reading the Windows 8 designer blogs. Microsoft did serious testing to come up with the most hated interface in their history. From an academic perspective they did a lot of things correctly. Still shit. In fact Microsoft have form here, I remember being one of the few people who enjoyed the original Xbox controller, which was fairly rapidly redesigned due to market angst.

When you think that your primary relationship with a machine is "telling it what you want" you've already taken the first step to an inevitable hell.

ironic how broken this site on my phone

I'm very impressed with the visuals here! Wow

I'm imagining this post as a 360 VR experience with on demand narration and heavy on ASMR. I'd like to spend time in that world quite frankly

This is a beautiful article with great visuals, like many other comments have said. But the actual point being made is worth paying attention to:

> Computers used to be physical beasts.

> We programmed them by punching cards, plugging in wires, and flipping switches. Programmers walked among banks of switches and cables, physically choreographing their logic. Being on a computer used to be a full-body experience.

It’s about working in a physical environment and not just isolated digital interfaces, which is how many different jobs work today (not just programmers). The personal touch is lost. But I’m not sure it can be fixed. There is no commercial justification for making using computers or phones “enjoyable”.