Best experience of my work history. Detouring into site structure, information design, and doing actual USABILITY (behind a 2 way mirror watching real people use your app) was amazing.
Jacob Nielson was blowhard even then. His "all links must be blue and underlined" mantra was tired even then. It takes a lot for me to say this, but his pedantry at the time puts peak Richard Stallman to shame!
They are apparently still dancing around the edges of this topic: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/clickable-elements/
Now older and wiser, candidly a lot of folks would be well served by default blue links, og html submit buttons and tables for layouts. A fair bit of modern UI is complete trash: it's the product of a designer and a product person putting the next bullet point on their resume.
If I were emperor of the world I’d make every consumer program pass a battery of tests that included demonstrating sufficient usability for a panel of users from a nursing home, a panel of users with sub-90 IQ who were in a stressful environment and trying to complete other tasks at the same time, blind users, deaf users, et c.
I expect the outcome would be a hell of a lot less twee “on brand” UI elements and a lot more leaning on proven design systems and frameworks, including fucking crucially for appearance. And also a lot less popping shit up on the screen without user interaction (omg those damn “look what’s new!” sorts of pop ups or focused tabs—congrats, some of your users are now totally lost)
There is some merit to what I assume is your underlying argument, but the way you phrase it isn't helpful.
Or we could just give the Product manager, designer, and JS engineer a 5 year old laptop with 8 gigs of ram at least 10 browser plug ins and every corporate security package...
We have gone from "go fast, break things" to moving at the speed of stupid. Slowing these three groups down might help.
So long Vim or Emacs ;)
I understand that your example is somewhat tongue in cheek, serving illustrative purposes, but I think good UX is about trade-offs more than a one-dimensional spectrum of convenient vs. inconvenient, and you can't optimize it for the sake of stressed out sub-90 IQ users without hurting the usability for some other groups.
For me, the first task would be to make absolutely sure that I block any apps designed by you. Such lack of empathy in your wording proves that you cannot possibly be a decent, half-decent, or even mediocre UI designer.
Material design, and a lot of the related nonsense was one of the worst things to happen to modern computing. It sure _looks_ pretty, in the way an expensive, glossy brochure looks pretty, but the usability is garbage. A good UX should signal intent and function at all times. Anything less is doing a disservice to your users.
And that'd be an understatement! I feel Nielsen spent most of his professional career calling himself a guru mostly to boost his consultancy firm. He also reminds me of Norman in the way that their contributions to the field are lofty aphorisms that don't provide any actual solutions.
Also sobering to read how much of his career seems obvious in hindsight, but also was shaped so much by randomness and chance (such as taking not taking the job at Apple).
I suspect that goes for most creative/engineering vocations.
However, one aspect of formal education, that is often missed, in OJT, is a very broad base, and an early understanding of “the basics.”
Also, people with formal education, are often able to work in a very formal, structured manner, early in their career. This (IMO), is pretty important, in engineering and research.
That said, I’m a high school dropout, with a GED. I ended up doing OK, but YMMV.
Are you saying the UI is your fault ;-)
Serious question though: how come over the last 15 to 20 years UI's have got considerably worse?
1.) The move to the Web, where the browser's interface gets in the way once you start doing something more fancy than just viewing basic HTML documents.
2.) Trying to make a program work well both on a small touchscreen and on a large screen + mouse + keyboard : this is literally impossible without the result being a worse experience for both.
Regarding 2: A paramount program utilizing responsiveness at it's finest won't take compromises for different screen sizes, but it takes longer to develop. Compromises like these usually emerge through the economic circumstances of software development.
Early html was surely reinvention, but CSS gave us the first fine grained presentation customization mechanism.
Material design? If I was a Soviet despot... Well anyway.
Ui is alas more fashion than function. I remember the original iPhone and is realistic apps, which angered UI designers so much that we now have buttons with no visible feedback as to if they are clicked, and anonymous unicolor squares everywhere.
Many of those lectures are online. I was not able to find the 1998 one he mentioned, but here is one that Jakob Neilsen gave on May 20, 1994 called "Heuristic Evaluation of User Interfaces, Jakob Nielsen, Sunsoft".
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/vj346zm2128
He gave another one on October 4 1996 entitled "Ensuring the Usability of the Next Computing Paradigm", but I can't find it in the online collection, although it exists in the inventory of video recordings, however I can't find any 1998 talks by Jakob Nielsen in this list:
https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/c82b926h/entire_tex...
Here is the entire online collection (it's kind of hard to search the 25 pages of the extensive collection, thanks to bad web site design!):
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/catalog?f%5Bcollection%5D%5...
The oldest (most interesting to me) ones are at the end (page 25):
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/?f%5Bcollection%5D%5B%5D=a1...
Here are some of the older ones that I think are historically important and especially interesting (but there are so many I haven't watched them all, so there are certainly more that are worth watching):
R. Carr, GO, "Mobile Pen-based Computing", October 21, 1992:
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/jm095fy2355
Cliff Nass, Computers Are Social Actors: A New Paradigm and Some Suprising Results [November 4, 1992]:
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/jh333ht2903
Unistrokes: Pen computing for experts, David Goldberg, Xerox PARC [November 5, 1993]:
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/gw943dj4628
Putting "Feel" into "Look and Feel": Interaction with the Sense of Touch, Margaret Minsky, Interval Research [October 1, 1993]:
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/kk938rh3332
Harry Saddler & L. Alba, Apple & Albert Farris, "Making It Macintosh: Interactive Media, Interpersonal Design" [October 15, 1993]:
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/gs214qy7233
Design of New Media Interfaces, Joy Mountford [May 12, 1993]:
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/rm437wv9779
Animated Programs, Ken Kahn, Stanford CSLI [December 3, 1993]:
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/fk686sy4072
The Magic Lens Interface, Eric Bier, Xerox PARC [December 9, 1994]:
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/ss855db5288
Proactive and Reactive Agents in User Interface, Ted Selker, IBM [April 29, 1994]:
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/pv655pr7635
Computing in the Year 2004, Bruce Tognazzini, Sunsoft [February 18, 1994]:
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/nf237zt2615
Andy Hertzfeld, General Magic, "Magic Cap and Telescript" [January 21, 1994]:
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/mp885xf4366
An Academic Discovers the Realities of Design, Don Norman, Apple Computer [December 2, 1994]:
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/dd753rg7554
Interfacing to Microworlds, Will Wright, Maxis [April 26, 1996]:
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/yj113jt5999
I was working with Terry Winograd at Interval Research at the time of this talk, which he invited me to attend, and I asked Will some skeptical questions, and his amazing in-depth answers convinced me to go to Maxis to work with him on the "Dollhouse" game he demonstrated. I uploaded the video to youtube and proofread the closed captions, and updated my description of the video:
Will Wright - Maxis - Interfacing to Microworlds - 1996-4-26:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxoZXaYJSk
>Video of Will Wright's talk about "Interfacing to Microworlds" presented to Terry Winograd's user interface class at Stanford University, April 26, 1996.
>He demonstrates and gives postmortems for SimEarth, SimAnt, and SimCity 2000, then previews an extremely early pre-release prototype version of Dollhouse (which eventually became The Sims), describing how the AI models personalities and behavior, and is distributed throughout extensible plug-in programmable objects in the environment, and he thoughtfully answers many interesting questions from the audience.
>This is the lecture described in "Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996)": A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis.
Will Wright on Designing User Interfaces to Simulation Games (1996) (2023 Video Update):
https://donhopkins.medium.com/designing-user-interfaces-to-s...
>A summary of Will Wright’s talk to Terry Winograd’s User Interface Class at Stanford, written in 1996 by Don Hopkins, before they worked together on The Sims at Maxis. Now including a video and snapshots of the original talk!
>Will Wright, the designer of SimCity, SimEarth, SimAnt, and other popular games from Maxis, gave a talk at Terry Winograd’s user interface class at Stanford, in 1996 (before the release of The Sims in 2000).
>At the end of the talk, he demonstrated an early version of The Sims, called Dollhouse at the time. I attended the talk and took notes, which this article elaborates on. [...]
Bringing Behavior to the Internet, James Gosling, SUN Microsystems [December 1, 1995]:
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/bz890ng3047
I also uploaded this historically interesting video to youtube to generate closed captions and make it more accessible and findable, and I was planning on proofreading them like I did for this Will Wright talk, but haven't gotten around to it yet (any volunteers? ;):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgrNeyuwA8k
This is an early talk by James Gosling on Java, which I attended and appeared on camera asking a couple questions about security (44:53, 1:00:35), and I also spotted Ken Kahn asking a question (50:20). Can anyone identify other people in the audience?
My questions about the “optical illusion attack” and security at 44:53 got kind of awkward, and his defensive "shrug" answer hasn't aged too well! ;)
No hard feelings of course, since we’d known each other for years before (working on Emacs and NeWS) and we’re still friends, but I’d recently been working on Kaleida ScriptX, which lost out to Java in part because Java was touted as being so “secure”, and I didn’t appreciate how Sun was promoting Java by throwing the word “secure” around without defining what it really meant or what its limitations were (expecting people to read more into it than it really meant, on purpose, to hype up Java).
Judging by the comments, they set the text via viewport units only on smaller viewports.
