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0 pointsold-gregg5y ago0 comments

> GUIs are a discoverability nightmare.

Badly made GUIs are. I started my career developing desktop software. Both Apple and Microsoft used to publish guides for building proper GUIs for their platforms. Our UX designers and PMs were enforcing those vigorously.

On Windows, every feature had to be represented in the menu of the main window. See, right there, by going (not even clicking on) every menu item you will learn about existence of every feature. Photoshop is still like that.

Most frequently used actions deserved two additional things: a hot key and a toolbar button. Each toolbar button had to have a tooltip. See? Right there, by going over the toolbar one could quickly learned the most important features.

Using windows, splitters, panes, tree views and tabs - there was logic behind those choices, and having standardized set of UI controls allowed users to learn software much more rapidly.

Modern web "applications" are crude by comparison. There's no standardized way to discover anything. Is it a button? Is it a dropdown? Is it just a strange background to display an error? Things auto-hide and auto-appear for no reason, you have to move mouse around (or practice every swipe variation you're familiar on mobile). Hotkeys are an afterthought, even resizing the browser or even scrolling sometimes breaks things.

I am not going to name names, but we tried to use one of web-based conferencing apps a few years ago. The UI it offered for joining a call (the URL you'd include into a meeting invite) was so bad that nearly 30% of people could not find out how to join. That's basically the only thing that page needed to provide, yet their UX people managed to obfuscate it so much that users sat waiting & thinking that something is about to happen instead of clicking the "join" button... Ughh.

There's so much demand for software right now, every industry needs more... There is severe shortage of talent for everything, from engineers to UX designers and product managers. Eventually there will be an equilibrium and we'll have professionals design and program GUIs again.

I am a CLI-first person, but there's no doubt in my mind that a well-done GUI massively flattens the learning curve for a new app.

0 comments

jsrcout5y ago

I fondly remember Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for the Macintosh, and software that followed it. Even if you'd never seen a given application before you could easily discover its features and how to operate it.

Having said that, I think CLI programs tend to not get enough credit for discoverability. It's just a different kind of discoverability (man $program, $program --help).

falcolas5y ago

> Badly made GUIs are.

So pretty much every browser out there? Without knowing ahead of time from random pilfering through various menus, how can you tell if your browser is up-to-date or not?

How do you find the extensions page? Or is it add-ons? Depends, I guess.

How do I figure out which tab of (potentially) hundreds is consuming CPU and memory?

I won't claim that CLIs are better, but GUIs are definitely not made for discoverability these days.

Tagbert5y ago

I blame Chrome pissing on the menus for how hidden most functions are. Once they hid the menus, the others fell in line.

millimeterman5y ago

Counterpoint: the vast, vast majority of users never do any of that. I’m sure Google collects tons of analytics on how people use Chrome and the current design is tailored to fit the needs of the majority. Common functions like tabs, the address bar, and maybe bookmarks are front and center while everything is shoved into menus to declutter the top-level UI.

Austin_Conlon5y ago

Why past tense for guidelines from Apple? They're here: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline....

lokedhs5y ago

They may still be published, but GUI guidelines are generally not followed anymore. The rise of Electron applications is just one reason why this happened.

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