Btw, I loathe the term UX, because 'interface' (in UI) should already be a big enough term to not just mean pretty graphics, but the whole _interface_ between user and program. But such is the euphemism treadmill.
I always found MacOS Finder's spatial file placement a good example (Non-MacOS users - Finder has this thing where it remembers windows locations and file locations in window, so one can arrange files as they please and they stick). Given that that feature is removed the UI stays the same (there are file icons, some windows, same layout), but it does remove some of the cognitive load.
UX is impacted by many non-UI things: load times, responsivity to input, reliability (hello dreaded printer dialogs that promise to print, but never will).
Anti-pattern I hate with passion is MacOS update bar. I want to do some work in the morning, I open my computer and it's friggin' updating. This sucks, but happens, we got forced into this. And then there's this progress bar that jumps: 20%, 80%, 50%, 30%, 90%. Colleague asks when I'm going to be online - "oh, 10% left, probably soon" - ding - progress bar backs to 30%.
UI is the same from observers point of view (it shows the progress, which I suppose is correct and takes into consideration multiple update phases) but UX is dropping ball here.
A window is a program window not an actual window. A folder is not the same as a folder in a filing cabinet and a save icon is a save icon not a floppy disk.they dont have to stand for or emulate physical things
The Xerox demo was definitely trying to make near-as-possible 1-to-1 correspondences because their entire approach was "discovery is easier if the UI abstractions are couched in known physical abstractions." UIs that hewed very closely to the original Xerox demo did things like pop open one window per folder (because when you open a folder and there's a folder inside, you still have the original folder).
As time went on and users became more comfortable with computerized abstractions in general, much of that fluff fell by the wayside. MacOSX system 7, for instance, would open one window per double-click by default; modern desktop MacOS opens a folder into the current window, with the option to command-double-click it to open it into its own... tab? (Thanks browsers; you made users comfortable enough with tabbed windows that this is a metaphor the file system browser can adopt!).
There are situations where I don't exactly care how far something has progressed but I want to see that it at least has not hung. Fedora's dnf doing SELinux autorelabeling for two hours without any indication of progress is one of those things I hate with passion.
But we apparently chose to make things complicated in other ways.
The timer also jumps. Once I had ~40 minutes update that was hope-feeding me with "2 minutes left" for most of the time.
My guess is that it's not worth optimizing, but nowadays I shy from updates if I don't have 2h of time buffer (not because I am afraid something will break, but because I know I'll be locked out).
Funnily, Linux (KDE) got very good at their estimations for some time now. Better behaving storage also has a role, I presume.
But in the industry the focus turned to aesthetics, so a new term was invented to differentiate between focusing on the entire interface ("experience") vs just the look.
Just like "design" encompasses all of it, but we add qualifiers to ensure it's not misunderstood for "pretty".
Eg I'm colourblind, and a careful revision of a colourscheme can make my life easier. (Though I would suggest also using other attributes to differentiate like size, placement, texture, saturation, brightness etc.)
UX has become equivalent with crap. Give me back GUI.
We can call an excellent story teller a “writer”. A good story can be described as “good writing”. A great story, let’s say a film being adapted as a book, can become a terrible book if it is “let down by the writing”.
In the context of books and storytelling, “writing” is the all-encompassing word that experts use to describe the whole thing. Just like “UI” used to mean the whole thing.
UX is just a weaselly sales term, "Our product is not some mere (sneers) interface, no, over here it is a whole experience, you want an experience don't you?"
I found a paper that was definitely taking the perspective that the "user interface" encompasses all the ways in which the user can accomplish something via the software. It rated the effectiveness of a user interface in terms of the time taken to complete various specific tasks. (While remarking that other metrics matter to the concept too, and also measuring user satisfaction and error rates.)
But that paper also suggested how the term might have specialized - four pieces of software were studied, and they are presented in a table that gives their "interface technology", in two cases a "character-based interface" and in the other two a "graphical user interface".
Enough usage like that and you can see how "interface" might come to mean "what the user interacts with" as opposed to "how tasks are performed".
( https://www.nngroup.com/articles/iterative-design/ . It really is dated 1993, which I made a point of checking because Google assigns the "date" of a search result based on textual analysis, and it is frequently very badly wrong. I can't really slam the approach, which I assume was necessary to get the right answer here, but the implementation isn't working.)
It's just the euphemism treadmill. Just like people perennially come up with new technical terms for the not-so-smart that are meant to be just technically and inoffensive, and over time they always become offensive, so someone has to come up with new technical terms.
See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot
> 'Idiot' was formerly a technical term in legal and psychiatric contexts for some kinds of profound intellectual disability where the mental age is two years or less, and the person cannot guard themself against common physical dangers. The term was gradually replaced by 'profound mental retardation', which has since been replaced by other terms.[1] Along with terms like moron, imbecile, retard and cretin, its use to describe people with mental disabilities is considered archaic and offensive.[2]
Yeah, just look at Windows {10,11} and Android. They simplified so much that it's unusable.
When I was at university, I attended a UI class which - although in the CS department - was taught by a senior psychologist. Here, the premise was very much on how to design interfaces in such a way that the user can intuitively operate a system with minimal error. That is, the design should enable the user to work with the system optimally.
I only heard the term UX much later, and when I first became aware of it, it seemed to be much less about designing for use and more about designing for feel. That is, the user should walk away from a system saying "that was quite enjoyable".
And these two concepts are, of course, not entirely orthogonal. For instance, you can hardly enjoy using a system when you just don't seem to get the damn thing to do what you want. But they still have different focuses.
If I had to put in a nutshell how I conceptualize the two disciplines, it would be "UI: psychology; UX: graphics design".
And of course such a simplification will create an outcry if you're conceptualization is completely different. But that just takes us back to my very first sentence: not well-defined names are open to interpretation.
> Here, the premise was very much on how to design interfaces in such a way that the user can intuitively operate a system with minimal error.
Yes, that's a good default goal for most software, but not always appropriate.
Eg for safety critical equipment to be used only by trained professionals (think airplane controls or nuclear power plant controls) you'd put a lot more emphasis on 'minimal error' than on 'intuitive'.
We can also learn a lot from how games interact with their users. Most games want their interface to be a joy to use and easy to learn. So they are good example for what you normally want to do!
But for some select few having a clunky interface is part of the point. 'Her Story' might be an interesting example of that: the game has you searching through a video database, and it's only a game, because that search feature is horribly broken.