For something that was supposedly everywhere in the IBM/Microsoft world in the 80's and 90's, I cannot find a single copy online of IBM's Common User Access specifications.

#retrocomputing #userInterfaces

"The #userinterfaces of the late ’90s were the last ones designed by people who actually cared, by people who approached the whole process with the end user in mind, rooted in scientific data collected by simply looking at people use their ideas. They were optimised for the user as best they could, instead of being optimised for the company’s bottom line.
It’s been downhill ever since."

From:
The #Windows 95 user interface: a case study in #usability engineering
https://www.osnews.com/story/144509/the-windows-95-user-interface-a-case-study-in-usability-engineering/

#Win95 #Microsoft #Apple #macOS #UI #UX

Shifting UI paradigms: Feed. Story. Chat.

Every five to ten years software engineering and computer interfaces seem to be getting a newer user interface control. Every new such UI control seems to be more popular than the previous era’s hero UI control. Right now, we are in what I call the “Chat” generation. The generation before was all about the “Story” UI — which gave way to “reels” or “shorts”, and even the base interactions in live video streams. The era before that saw the rise of the “Feed” UI, with my earliest memories of such interfaces dating back to Facebook’s Wall, or Orkut’s post feed.

The Chat era started in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT. It was preceded by the Story era, starting around 2014 with Snapchat’s rise in popularity. Snapchat’s user interface control to tell vanishing visual stories with highlights and text overlays became popular and eventually pervasive. While it started with social media, it soon found its way to places like LinkedIn1 and Signal. Going as far back as 2008, we got the first draft of the modern-day social Feed, when Facebook first introduced the Wall. Facebook’s take was a refined version of feeds in MySpace or Orkut. But it paved the way to follow not just friends but social influencers.

None of these UI controls were new when they exploded in popularity. We have always had chat interfaces for instant messaging. RSS feeds with their focus on links likely seeded the idea for social media feeds. IRC chat streams gave way to information feeds we find ourselves in — both for group chats and microblogging feeds. The Story/Reel UI was a re-imagination of the photo carousel in portrait mode.

I sound reductive – although not intentionally. Truth is that these UI controls have undergone numerous iterations to situate themselves in newer information and interaction contexts. And while those iterations were key, such evolutions were driven by the demands and contexts of the time.

AI changed chat. The Chat interface had to evolve from a human-to-human paradigm to a human-to-bot paradigm. An explosion of multimedia – images and videos – compelled the creation of the Story control. The creators of the Story UI control needed fuse the complexity of annotations, fonts, colors and text boxes in PowerPoint presentations with the simplicity of photo slideshows. Social networking changed how we think about feeds in general. The feed of links had to iterate from serving a single-user experience in RSS readers to a social, multi-user experience that we find in modern social networks.

It is easy to pigeon-hole these advances as a product of social media. But the recent uptick in “chat” implementations has bucked that trend with applications in domains ranging from enterprise to programming. The Chat UI is a peculiar case for a different reason as well. Larger paradigm shifts like AI certainly evolved Chat as user interface control. But the UI control itself re-defined what social networks looked like. Even before AI took center stage, IM apps’ natural evolution to group messages reshaped what social media is. Think Slack, WhatsApp Telegram. Group messaging platforms took the 1-to-1 instant messaging interface, and expanded it to multiple users with one chat feed visible to all. At one point it caused Twitter to be relegated as nothing more than a public group chat. It also elevated IM apps like WhatsApp to a “social-network” status.

Each era offers a rich body for work for software engineers, designers, and product managers. That work entails reworking the whole software and product stack in light of these newer interfaces. In particular, think of — (a) implementing these frontend interfaces; (b) redesigning and re-implementing existing user-workflows around these newer interface paradigms; and (c) rewiring or tooling bank-end systems to support the evolving frontend.

The Chat era has been particularly replete with work, or re-work in many cases. So much so that we are now rethinking what browsers are. Interesting to see what UI control we get next, and what work it spurs.

#chat #feed #product #reels #rss #snapchat #socialMedia #software #stories #userExperience #userInterfaces #whatsapp

To the user-interface designers and programmers out there: If the unfortunate event happens and you have to show an error message, please make sure the message is actually helpful for identifying the issue. You might think that hiding technical details is user-friendly, but in fact, the opposite is true. Do not make us guess what is wrong, tell us what you know!

You might be afraid that this confuses users who are less tech-savvy. Not necessarily, if you give them a rough idea first (maybe in a more emphasized font) and then continue with the details you have (maybe in a smaller font). I am quite sure users are able to ignore the parts they do not understand, and if they need support, at least the person giving support has something to work with.

Some simple examples:

❌ "Cannot connect to bluetooth device."
❓ "Okay, but why?"
✅ "Cannot connect to bluetooth device 'foo' (maybe it is turned off?): The device does not respond."

❌ "Cannot open file."
❓ "Which file? And again, why?"
✅ "Cannot open file 'testfile.txt' for reading: Permission denied"

❌ "Something went wrong when trying to load the website."
❓ "Again, what's the problem? Is the network interface down? Is the DNS server down? Is the target server itself down? Give me a hint, please!"
✅ "Cannot load the website. Maybe your computer is not connected to the Internet? Details: No route to host (192.168.10.1) when attempting to connect to the DNS server."

This is nothing new. In fact, it is just an adaptation of the top-down writing approach we also use when writing scientific papers, for example: You begin with a rough overview and give increasingly more details later in the text.
But do not omit the details completely!

#usability #userinterfaces #userinterfacedesign #errormessages #programming #writing #technicalwriting

Configuration files are user interfaces

https://ochagavia.nl/blog/configuration-files-are-user-interfaces/

#HackerNews #ConfigurationFiles #UserInterfaces #TechBlog #SoftwareDevelopment #UserExperience

"Your" vs. "My" in user interfaces

https://adamsilver.io/blog/your-vs-my-in-user-interfaces/

#HackerNews #YourVsMy #UserInterfaces #DesignThinking #UXDesign #WebAccessibility

Accessibility.

This is one of the air conditioner/room climate control units I encountered during my recent storm chasing trip.

I woke up in the middle of the night, wanting to change the temperature the unit was trying to achieve. As I stumbled around in the dark in an unfamiliar hotel room, it was the sixth or seventh night of the stay, I found myself groping for buttons on the front of the panel.

There are none. Zero. Like everything aiming to be modern, hip, and edgy today, this unit has nothing but a touch panel, with the added bonus of providing absolutely no clue as to where on the touch panel I’m suppose to touch. Forget about trying to navigate the user interface in a darkened, unfamiliar hotel room. I found a light switch, flipped it, and was blinded by the light.

This is when I realized how idiotic user interfaces on standard pieces of technology have become, all in the name of growing profits.

There’s no reason to not put some sort of physical button, or even a raised area to indicate where one is suppose to interact, on this device. None. When I’m staying in a cheap hotel, I’m not really impressed by the smooth, sleek lines of an air conditioner propped up by wood blocks on the outside of the room. The unit was making quite a racket while it was doing its thing, so I don’t know if I was suppose to be impressed with the touch interface or not, but overall I was not impressed with the experience of this unit.

Then I got to realizing, as I sat there in my underwear under a bunch of lights I didn’t want to turn on so I could see what the heck I was doing: how in the world do blind people navigate all these newfangled electronic doo-dads? At least when we had membrane type buttons and other such things (in the interest of cost cutting and forced obsolescence), there could be a raised pad or mark or something so the person who can not see would know they’re actually touching a button. But this monstrosity had nothing of the sort, just a smooth piece of plastic with words screened in such a way that they had absolutely no texture.

What an absolutely awful design for our folks that don’t have the gift of sight!

The manufacturer of this device is GE, or more likely has licensed the GE brand. A quick look at Wikipedia reveals GE Appliances was sold to Haier in the mid 2010s. Haier has rights to the brand until 2056.

I hope they figure out how to bring buttons back by then.

#accessibility #userInterfaces #uxDesign