undefined | Better HN

0 pointsblueboo7y ago0 comments

Well, let's challenge ourselves: what is the best designed (digital) interface with the deepest usability? Or some outstanding interfaces that square that circle?

I'm familiar with 3d software suites, and they're (mostly) all highly-configurable, permitting custom layouts, panels, toolbars, and even enabling intermediate users to create UI tools.

To your point, they're also ferociously complicated for novices.

Bloomberg is a funny example. It's a well-indexed reference, rather than an expressive tool, so mastering its shortcut-dense interface is an affordable cost to professionals of modest technical sophistication.

I wonder if TurboTax is in the running; for all its blandness, in 2019 it's exceedingly transparent and clear guide to doing an extremely complicated task. I hasten to acknowledge that's hardly going to be a universal belief.

Maybe Gmail? But again the functionality is fairly shallow...

0 comments

TeMPOraL7y ago

Gmail is a bad example. It's way too limited, very low-density in default settings, and generally slow. Thunderbird would be better, but it's far from the peak of what's possible. If you redesigned Thunderbird around the principles of terminal or Emacs-based mail apps - in particular the keyboard-first focus and high performance, with Thunderbird's rich content rendering, then it would be much closer to e-mail perfection.

3D software suites like 3DS Max or Blender are perfect examples of software that's a tool, not a toy. The learning curve is roughly proportional to the breadth and complexity of the problem domain, so training is required, but the software itself doesn't waste your time and patience with slow and low-density UIs.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse