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Comment by derleth | Hacker News Reader

> I hate bad UIs

You hate UIs you don't like. Which is a tautology. The interesting part here is that you've managed to convince yourself that UIs you don't like are objectively bad, and that anyone who does like such UIs is wrong in some factual way, as opposed to being 'wrong' in the purely subjective way everyone who disagrees with us on a matter of taste is.

Go too far in this direction and you end up with Jef Raskin, who disdained configurability because he thought he knew better than the people actually using the software how software should work.

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There are plenty of things about UIs that are pretty objectively bad. Inconsistency, for one. I don't think there are lots of people who like having to memorize multiple ways of doing the same thing depending on the view.

Unless it's clear how to get from one view to the other and which view you use is optional. Then that might be a feature :)

All UIs are inconsistent to some extent, like with menus, or with how the steering wheel behaves when backing a car up. All we demand is that it be done well, which is a tautology.

Right, except it wasn't done well in this case. The game is great, the UI not so much. Some menus require the arrow keys to navigate, some +-, others hjkl.

It's been a while since I last played, but there is a "Designation" menu which orders your dwarves to perform specific tasks. You want them to build a staircase where there was some rock before? Awesome, they'll do it. You want them to build a staircase after you already mined the block? No can do. No warning, no error message, simply nothing happens. You need to go through the other menus, build a staircase and move it there.

Except it makes sense if you realize that designations are for changing existing terrain and the language reflects that, so using it to "carve [a] staircase" out of thin air doesn't really make sense. Building one from the buildings menu in a space that has been mined out does.

I admit there are problems with the dwarf fortress interface, major ones, like job management. However this is not one of those problems.

I'm afraid it is still a UI problem.

Or rather - it's also a problem of information architecture to borrow the parlance from another field. The internal logical structure shouldn't be reflected in the external UI unless it's intuitive or discoverable.

> Right, except it wasn't done well in this case.

According to you. Is it so hard to imagine others may disagree? Must you downvote?

Your 'this is all a tautology' point is neither interesting nor moves the conversation forward.

This is like making the point that the sky isn't really blue it just looks blue - technically correct, but unless you are answering the question of why it is blue, correcting somebody on this is boorish, not interesting.

In this case we are talking about Dwarf Fortress, near universally reviled for its interface, so yes, arguing that some people may theoretically prefer it is both hard to believe and makes it seem like you are just being contrarian.

Well, even Tarn Adams himself agrees: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1avszc/im_tarn_adams_o...

> Must you downvote?

I must not. I have refrained from voting because opinions.

In interaction design we say that you can't design an experience, but you can design for an experience. We know quite a bit about humans, the psychology they approach an interface with, their physical abilities to use an interface. With this information and a target experience you want to design for, the design choices follow.

We can objectively measure things like whether a user approaching an interface can easily understand what options are available to them, whether the user can intuitively tell what actions to take to activate those options, whether at every point the user can tell what state the system is in through its interface.

It is absolutely true that if you are developing for, say, ascii-loving adult S.U.D. gamers your design requirements will be different than if you are developing for casual gaming tweens. But we can still say that the DF interface is pretty bad for the vast majority of users who want to play the game.

> But we can still say that the DF interface is pretty bad for the vast majority of users who want to play the game.

But instead UI people just say it's bad, period. That's the problem.

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