Comment by mhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mhd | Hacker News Reader

Not surprisingly, most screenshots don't present a lot of data, which is where things usually get problematic. Programmers often get criticized for their fruit salad GUIs, but usually that's the result of having to present plenty of options and data.

Sure, the first thing you'll hear to that issue is "Do you really need to have that many options/paths/data?". And granted, quite often this is applicable, although not always in the same way (hiding rarely used options vs. eliminating them, i.e. "advanced options" vs. "only one friggin mouse button").

But often enough, presenting lots of data and hierarchies is the whole point of an app, especially when it gets more about enterprise systems than "what pancakes do my friends like" web 2.0 frippery. And that's where the ideas coming from ad design and typography kinda fail.

Which is why people like Tufte are so respected, as they go beyond this. If I recall correctly, in the initial review of the iPhone Tufte recommended against even the minimal margins of the photo gallery, removing white space for a better experience. And yes, knowing the rules before you break them might be a part of that...

If you don't do this as your full-time job, I'd very much recommend going for "usable" instead of "gorgeous". The latter is very much a 80/20 deal, where you spend insane amounts of time, asking co-workers and A/B tests just to get that final ratio or pixel size right. Whereas most of your customers still have Nappa Valley as a background picture behind their copy of IE9...

I don't really miss under construction signs and rotating skulls, but I do have the slight feeling that a lot of what designers are doing will be like early 20th century typography in a few years, where even some of its major proponents aren't quite sure about it anymore...

> ideas coming from ad design

One of the things that bugs me most about many "modern" product pages is that they are often designed to look like brochures. Flashy and eye-catching, but with very little content or meaningful organization.

Most of the time I was brought to the page by an actual advertisement, or some content performing a similar function, and I am on the page now, looking for information. It's a bit like going to a restaurant and getting a pamphlet promoting the atmosphere and decor instead of a menu.

I scrolled though many sites advertising devices, looking for that elusive little table that summarizes the data I'm looking for, variously called 'features' or 'specs' or whatever. But these days even those sections are full of non-information like "all day battery life* " (That star is pointing nowhere).

I'm open to the possibility that I'm using the internet wrong. Perhaps there's a very good reason that the last place I should expect to find information about a product is on the product's own page.

I've also noticed it's sometimes easier to get a gadget's specs from the summary table on a review than from that gadget's product page.

> Programmers often get criticized for their fruit salad GUIs, but usually that's the result of having to present plenty of options and data.

Simplicity is only one kind of beauty. It's certainly possible to have a gorgeous interface that still presents a ton of options and data. You often see these in sci-fi movies, like Oblivion, and the aesthetic is in fact about hyper-complexity: http://www.josephychan.com/Oblivion

I'd say that this is the most common computer aesthetic even in "contemporary" movies and shows -- just think of all the random scrolling code you see whenever something gets hacked or when perp pictures are searched/compared. Not all about beauty, more about trying to present something as arcane as possibly to signify that the character knows what he or she is doing. (One reason for the recent infantile obsession about tiling window managers)

Most of that is pretty unusable or superfluous, too. Which is okay, when it comes to movies, of course.

But sadly this also sells in big business. Enterprise software is often defined as programs where the one buying is not the one using it. And just show a big screen with plenty of chartbarf and managers will flow to it, yet ordinary call center/sysadmin users are none the wiser.

And this is where help would be needed, yet it's quite a bit harder than "use Helvetica and white space". Although you'd be allowed to make it quite a bit less "gorgeous" when you're not -- as in most webapps -- trying to do ad and ux work at the same time.

> (One reason for the recent infantile obsession about tiling window managers)

Wait, are you saying that tiling window managers are unusable, superfluous, arcane? Or do you simply object to cargo-culting?

I can't actually use stacking window managers anymore. It's a little like the difference between auto-arranging icons, and milling about manually organizing them into little piles. It may seem like you've lost some control with automatic, but it's control over frivolous minutiae. You've shed the responsibility of micro-managing the little file-fiefdoms and their petty squabbles.

Who would not prefer a desk where all the papers sorted themselves and squared the corners of their piles?

People who don't have a room for a 10'x10' desk but have ample room for drawers? I'd say that for a lot of people, constant access to other windows and constant re-arrangement (whether manual or automatic) isn't a big issue, so elaborate positioning constraints are barely an improvement over alt-tab. The primary solution for both kinds of users who need to keep several sets of different windows seems to be virtual desktops (or "tags") anyways, whether it's tiling or not. Moving windows between sets is rare enough...

And then you've got the problem with in-application windows, e.g. Firefox' tabs or vim/emacs buffers or tmux/screen windows. Yet another nested set of layout methods, constraints and shortcuts.

Which is why I fail to see it as inherently better, just like there's nothing wrong with on-desktop icons or scrolling desktops. Don't get me wrong, I'm using i3 myself, as the grid/stacking nature makes for some convenient keyboard shortcuts and I'm fine with the looks, but I doubt that this saves me a lot of time compared with my previous long-term staple of lwm...

But yes, the cargo-culting is pretty annoying. Ncurses apps aren't that minimalistic (esp. when you hear this from late-game Plan 9 fanboys), and if your screenshots are just a bunch of music players and IRC windows, I doubt any claims of huge productivity gains.

"Ncurses apps aren't that minimalistic"

Or, generally, that composable.

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