> At recent user interface conferences, several speakers have lamented that the human interface is stuck. We seem to have settled on the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) model, and there is very little real innovation in interface design anymore.
Alternately, you can say that UX design stabilized on a known good pattern.
This reminds me of how some people will refer to stable software projects that only receive the occasional security patch as "abandoned". They're not abandoned, they're just stable.
I completely agree. The design of a hammer hasn't changed much in centuries because it's already designed well for its purpose. Same thing with sharks, I don't hear biologists say "there hasn't been much innovation in sharks for millions of years."
The design of a hammer has actually changed substantially over time. More recently, there's been a trend towards specialization in the framing hammer alone. 100 years ago most hammers looked like the classic hammers I remember from childhood: relatively small, sharply curved claws, a smooth face. As production framing exploded in the US after WWII, framers were pushing for more efficiency.
The framing hammer got heavier with a longer handle, broader face, straighter claw, and waffled face better for gripping nails (also why most loose framing nails have a cross-hatched pattern: so they can mate with the hammer face). From there, materials science really kicked in, and we saw steel-handled models, followed by fiberglass and other composite handles.
The latest developments (that I'm aware of) are products like the Stiletto (http://www.stiletto.com/p-80-ti-bone-iii-hammer-with-milled-...), which leverage materials like titanium to reduce weight while maintaining driving power, and include a replaceable steel face to prolong hammer life and allow using different faces for different applications.
Modern hammers with advanced material properties and functions can cost hundreds of dollars, but deliver much higher efficiency with less fatigue and a longer life. I compare that with the Sears hammer in my grandfather's garage and see a whole new generation of evolution.
Noted. What has been stable for a long time and remains frustratingly static and unrefined is the field of surgcial instruments. There are a few exceptions but most haven't changed in the 20years I have been a surgeon.
The regulatory costs of developing new instruments and intertia of manufacturers doesnt help. Once a manufacturer gains a market share they try and keep by not innovating which keeps their deveopment costs down and the consumer volume is comparatively low. I don't get the feeling there is any sense of patient altruism.
I have been using the same 4mm dia endoscope 25cm long since 2007 when the first iphone came out. It is very simple, made of glass fibres with a sony 3chip camera that is 10y old. We get some v slow progression on video output and have just got 4k.
Compared to consumer tech the advances are ridiculously slow.
We need a camera (the iphone camera is small enough) on a steerable stick. How hard an engineering task can that be?.
> The regulatory costs of developing new instruments and intertia of manufacturers doesnt help.
I work on (mostly non-critical) medical devices and I would like to remind that regulatory is there for a purpose.
If anything the 737 Max fiasco should remind people what can happen when regulatory is considered a cost that need to be cut in a field where there can be some hazards, and where some people in the chain do not have the best interest of the public in mind.
And yes, in the medical industry too, there can be some people who care more about optimizing profits than about patients.
Maybe there are some undue regulatory rules, but hopefully there are not the majority.
In the case of what I work on, regulatory does not prevent us from using state of the art CPUs and GPUs, so yes R&D may need somehow longer cycles from consumer electronics to get a return of investment, but let's be honest it is not too much scandalous to get some features a few years after you get similar things in consumer electronics, especially in cases where there are diminishing returns of improving X or Y.
And yes it is easier to build things when you don't have to care about e.g. ability to disinfect materials, you can cope with more bugs, etc.
Half of that is the manor manufacturer, and the other half is the FDA. These huge companies that can afford lots of money intentionally get the FDA to set a high bar with lots of expensive testing in the regulations. This creates a HUGE barrier to entry. Right now I'm working with a pathology lab who are buying a pathology slide scanner. This is basically a slide handling robot with a high end camera hooked to a PC with an image viewer. The combined system costs over $300,000 from companies like Leica and Philips. The software is incredibly basic, it's basically Thumbs Plus with Irfanview and that's $100,000 alone, aside from the scanner. But they charge that because it's incredibly expensive for a startup to come in and challenge their pricing.
I don't suppose you'd count something like the da Vinci robots as a step forward? I got to try out a demo unit once (on a dummy! not on a real human), really cool stuff. I'm really glad I tried it _after_ I had my laparoscopic appendectomy - it was somehow a little terrifying how clumsy it felt holding the "regular" tools used, compared to using the robot.
Yes, tho they have been around now for about 20y, are big (no
good for eg neurosurgery, ent) and cost $2m.
You don't need that for lap appendicectomy, - just a better scope, and a good surgeon.
Robots have no advantage over human dexterity. They have a few niche roles eg where we can't get our hands in eg the prostate.
The metaphor of a hammer has barely changed over time. What you're describing are implementation improvements - not trivial, but you could take a modern hammer back a few centuries and it would still be recognisable as a hammer. Albeit a very unusual one.
UX/UI has the same issues. Everything is a metaphor anyway. You don't get to choose whether your interface is a metaphor, because there is no other option for interfaces. You only get to choose the type of metaphor, and its affordances - from hand-editing binary in a "file" (...which is also a metaphor) to voice recognition.
There are some good points in the article, but they're maybe 10% of the way to a full understanding of this issue. Most of the complaints are about inconsistencies and expert-level operation (written scripting) vs beginner-level operation. But there's also a point about contextual metadata.
Modern operating systems are pretty bad at all of the above, but that's because designing intuitive and powerful interfaces that incorporate expert-level features with some workable built-in intelligence - and preferably some form of composability - is incredibly hard.
It's so hard it's barely been attempted, never mind done successfully. So most operations in userland are explicitly task-oriented. Their settings are customisable, but not the menu of operations on offer.
As a non-expert if you want to rename a folder full of files, you buy a file renamer. You don't try to write a script, because even trivial scripting requires a level of comfort with abstractions that most users simply don't have.
Experts do have that skill level, but they can already use $scripting_lang.
It's possible to imagine an OS that would be more open-ended and wouldn't silo data inside task-oriented applications. But this runs into huge problems with efficient representations and the most appropriate schema for each domain, and just the concept on its own is far outside anything most users would want to deal with.
That’s a really good counter example because it’s still easily and immediately recognisable as a hammer. Anyone picking it up knows how to use it without even thinking about it. In fact they might not even concously notice the changes and how they improve the tool except that it seems better. That’s great incremental UX improvement.
A lot of the critics of lack of innovation in computer UX design don’t want incremental improvements of the existing building blocks of modern UIs, they want to tear it all down and start from scratch. They want VR interfaces, Jeff Raskins The Humane Environment, Button-less UI, etc. They don't care about better hammers, they want nail screwdrivers or handle-less hammers.
The think this supports the OPs argument that we're refining, not inventing. Everything you've said here is about refining, it's not a completely new way to attach materials together.
Yeah, probably should have clarified that I intended no comment on the OPs comment about innovation in computer UI. Just wanted to point out that there's actually a surprising amount of evolution in design of the hammer.
Something that seems to be so simple, and has existed for thousands of years, can still be made better. I'm not a professional carpenter, but I've used a hammer a lot to do things like framing, and can confirm that many of these innovations are meaningful in function, not just form.
Going back to the OP though that talked about settling on the WIMP model, you're not really contradicting their point.
If you take a hammer from 1920 and lay it next to the most jazzed up hammer from 2020, they would be recognised as the same tool/having the same general purpose. A carpenter from 1920 wouldn't need to change the way he used a hammer if he picked up the 2020 model, even if the 2020 model might enable new ways of actually using it (or improve old ways of using it).
So while there is evolution and development going on, we're not replacing the hammer metaphor as it were.
The WIMP model has also seen evolution and refinement, but it's still recognisable as the same model. I think the analogy holds.
It may be splitting hairs, but I think certain changes to hammers must qualify as invention, certainly, including the crosshatch innovation, the material science involved for both fiberglass and titanium handles, and the improved weight distribution. It's not clear to me what would be considered a complete reimagining of the hammer, as a hammer is such a broad category of tool. Is a mallet a hammer? When I smack something with the backside of an impact driver, is it a hammer? I sure use wrenches as hammers occasionally.
So, what's the line between inventing and refining?
A slide hammer, a dead blow hammer, a flooring hammer, a nail gun, a staple gun, liquid nails/glue, screws and a screw driver (powered or not), a jackhammer, a power chisel.
If the idea behind a hammer is to use the momentum of a relatively large mass to drive a relatively small mass into a material, then the idea of a piece of steel on a handle is just the simplest thing you can manufacture as admittedly a versatile one but not necessarily the best one. If your task as the user is to join two materials together then hammer and nail won’t necessarily even look like hammer and nail (glue, screws). If the goal is to separate material like you might with a chisel, depending on the material you might not be using a manual hammer but something that looks very different, like a saw, a file, a jackhammer, etc.
What the person who mentioned the evolution of framing hammers is pointing out refinement of the hammer as it is. Creating a tool better suited to the user’s task is closer to what TFA is about.
I just want to say thank you for posting this. I had no idea about the evolution of hammers, and this little bit of depth from an unfamiliar domain brightened my day :)
They're actually not that different. specialization not withstanding, it's a handle with a perpendicular weight at the end. 40% down this page is one from 20,000 years ago, instantly recognizable as a hammer. http://oldeuropeanculture.blogspot.com/2015/12/baba-hammer-a...
“Longer this, shorter that, better materials” is refinement, not “substantial redesign”.
The point is the essential form and function has remained the same for thousands of years. Knives, forks, spoons etc. are still knives, forks, spoons etc.
The hammer analogy has its limitations here. When the task is simple (hitting a nail), a simple and good design lasts. When the task(s) is/are complicated, depend on context, are tied to human understanding, knowledge or training in using machines, then design could benefit from both refinements as well as radical and creative thinking. I also don’t think that just because we have a good design, even for a hammer, we should stop people from challenging norms and thinking in bold ways. Here’s a contrasting example to hammers - chairs. The objective is simple, to sit on it. The design innovations still continue to this day, on how a chair can be structured. There have been interpretations of chairs that challenge the very notion that chairs need legs.
And yet being a shorter person I still have to hunt far and wide for a chair that doesn't leave my feet dangling or cut into my thighs. Lately I've taken to cutting things down or upcycling to get a reasonable fit.
I consider myself one of those people who would comment about the design of hammer being stuck and more people should, that is how we innovate. The real world is always changing and evolving with time, so are technologies be it for computers - UI that allowed for the desktop GUI paradigm in the 90's to today where Alexa, Siri can help us do lot of those tasks just by commanding over voice. We need to certainly move on and innovate the user interface for desktop GUI or for other devices.
Instead of whamming in a pointy cylinder, that stress and vibration might work it out back against the force of our whamming, we TWIST in a similar bit of hardware, only we wrap an inclined plane around the cylinder so that it cuts as we twist, making a walled channel that resists working out backwards under vibration.
Pneumatic press, nail gun, screwdriver, impact wrench, seems like these could work, while maybe not a direct dirivative. Some things persist, and are stable as others have noted. A cool thing about innovation is that the ideas are often things people didn't know they wanted until they see it.
These are not improvements of a hammer design, but completely different things. Screws do not play well with deformation, but let’s ignore that: you’ll probably have both a hammer and one of these things in your toolbox, and you’ll miss a hammer if it’s not there. It is a general-purpose hit-force tool for hitting anything, not only nails. A better design for a hammer itself could include a claw or new hitting surface geometry, handle amortizer and so on, which are successfully done in variety, despite gp thinks that it’s “stuck”. First, it’s not, we just waited for better materials, advanced tasks, etc. Second, it is not much to do with hitting something with inertia-accumulated force.
Anyway my point is that if you change all hammers in the world overnight (like software does) you better have done a good job of century-testing your changes in all situations. If your reasoning is just “it gets old”, well, this site’s rules do not allow me to express what I think of that.
But can’t you just question the need for a hammer in the first place. You don’t need one if you don’t have nails. You don’t need nails if you find a better way to fasten things. That’s the job to be done. Soo instead of a better hammer, let’s get rid of the nails. And with it goes the entire industry.
But why? Hammer/nail is essential, cheap and natural for crafting, and honestly I do programming in a somewhat handcrafted way, i.e. I don’t need sophisticated stock market frameworks for e.g. sending a request for quotelevel2. And many people seem to do that, that’s why deprecating ‘request’ instantly gave birth/popularity to ‘got’. There is no reason to complicate simple, battle-tested things until there really, really is a big reason. There is no such thing as “new”, until your task is “new” in any way. Using new things for the same old purpose is called fast fashion.
Ok, let's play do this imaginative exercise - Hammer looks simple but actually if you're few inches off while slamming it down, you can seriously injure yourself if you're holding the nails with your other hand. I'm sure we have all experienced that. How about a sensor that always drives the motion in the right location, it can be done by having sensors that feel your muscle twitches and angle then recalibrate using camera to the right angle and nails it in (pun intended). Another idea is a Swiss army knife but something that combines hammer, screwdriver, wrench into one design design offsetting the need to by separate tools.
Many framing hammers have a nail set on top which is a t-shaped depression with a magnet in it to hold a nail. Set the nail on top, swing and set the nail int he wood up to half depth, then hit it two more times to finish nailing.
Idk what professional woodworkers do today, but I just hit very easy for first few times (bait? non-native speaker) and then the nail holds with its “spearhead”, so you can remove your hand away from the danger zone. Or use pliers. I agree with the commenter above, hitting fingers is frankly a noob’s issue that is completely avoidable without rocket tech.
Even if that were true (which it doesn't appear to be... see other comments) I'm not sure that would apply to a field as broad, and as new, as software.
Software does radically different things, things as different as, say, hammering and opening cans. It is difficult for me to believe that the WIMP interface as we know it is actually optimal for all those different software tasks.
I mean, sure, you could probably open a can with a claw hammer, if you used some care, and you might be even able to drive a nail with a can opener.
You wouldn't want to, though.
Note that we still drive cars by using steering wheels and foot pedals. We haven't gone to some "click on the menu item" interface, even though such an interface could easily be written for many modern cars.
Put me in the camp that believes that UIs are stuck in a rut, and need to be fundamentally rethought.
Raskin's humane interface had some interesting ideas, though it does not seem to have caught on.
On the other hand, sometimes it's just that people get so used to something, they don't take a close look at how it could be improved. Bows stayed much the same for centuries until the compound bow appeared in the 1960s.
It’s sad that things got so interconnected that I expect hammers to require security updates any time now. I hope there will be a counter-trend. It is feature bloat scaled to the extreme, at industry level.
Im not of the opinion that we've found the "best" user interface. I think the biggest hurdle is that "best" is so different to different people. One part is familiarity, as many power users know, your setup would be utterly useless to an unfamiliar person. I guess the current paradigm is a local maxima of the convergence of discoverability and efficiency and still working on our diverse device specifications (display sizes, input devices and performance).
Just look at browsers — no more status bar, title bar reused for tabs or controls, hidden menu bar.
Web does not value menus and window manipulations either. I don't get it too, tiling window manager optimizes geometry, multiple desktops available by shortcut.
Shell is a manual mode of automation tool. It stores history, I can easily call previous command, combine several commands into new one.
If you read the article, much of criticisms about the state of the art at the time (mid-90s) has been addressed, and to great benefit. To take just one example, the use of natural language via voice commands to allow the user to discover new commands beyond what can be expressed with a visual UI - but there are many more examples.
The discoverability of voice commands is terrible.
I have no idea how to find out what I can do with Alexa, or which particular magic phrasing Alexa will understand.
My personal biggest issue, as means of illustration, is that I have no idea how to play the latest episode of something on the BBC app, rather than continuing from where I left off.
I'm sure there is a way, but none of my "natural language" attempts are recognised, and I can't find any way to find out what the true commands might be. Given that I mostly listen to news shows while doing something else (and hence rarely finish a particular episode) this makes the whole system near useless.
I may be missing something basic, or if you have any tips on the discoverability of Alexa commands, I'd be very grateful. But in my experience, the discoverability of voice commands is the worst I've ever come across; at least with CLI you have man pages, and with a GUI, even in the worst case of no documentation and obscure icons, there are buttons to explore through trial and error.
It's a problem that will be solved better and better as technology improves. GPT-3 is holding a lot of promise in taking input from one domain (language) and generating an outcome in a different domain (commands).
Not sure how bad/good Alexa is, but everyone (myself included) in my household are talking to Google and Siri all the time to do tasks that would have taken multiple clicks on a screen, and a bunch of typing. A huge reduction in friction. The state of the art isn't perfect, but as it improves, it's undoubtedly taking UX in a direction that is popular and desirable to consumers.
Does anyone know any interesting attempts of alternative models to WIMP? Everytime I think about it WIMP just makes more sense to me (productivity wise), it's really hard to think outside the box for this one..
Instead of pointer, you can do keyboard-everything, which some UX enhancements go for, like the browser extension Tridactyl.
If you look at a lot of interfaces that are built for a specialized power user (e.g. cashiers), they avoid pointers and have keys for everything. Also, AutoCAD, the last I used it, looked to be centered around command-line primacy.
Sadly, POS terminals these days seem to be going in the direction of high-latency touch interfaces. Those old curses-based terminals were so fast to get things done in.
Magit[1] is another modern example of a TUI done right: discoverable, good dwim[2] inference that doesn't get in the way of experts, plus an escape hatch for typing out the exact git commands for those 5% usecases.
The research done for the original Macintosh UI showed that keyboard users aren’t actually faster than mouse users, but think they are because they lose track of time while concentrating.
Do you have a link? I suspect there's some asterisks there. I used to operate a photo minilab and could process a roll's worth of photos in 1-2 minutes. That's 4 seconds at the outside to evaluate a photo, make brightness and color corrections, next photo. No way I'd be able to sustain the same rate by having to mouse around and click at least four different targets, bouncing from brightness to magenta/green to blue/yellow back to magenta/green to cyan/red before giving brightness a final tweak. Fitt's Law[1] is death to speed for all sorts of workflows.
I'm not saying that keyboard-based operation is superior in all cases, but a good keyboard-centric interface can eliminate the need to acquire a target (e.g. menu/toolbar item) for the most common operations because there's a hotkey. Well-understood operations can go almost at the speed of thought (either the operator's or the machine's).
Thanks for the link. Unfortunately without any details on the experiment design it's hard for us to get anything out of it. What was the task, who were the participants, what was their familiarity with the software they were being tested on?
I can say that this talk of using the keyboard being so fascinating that it takes up significant mental resources to be not represent my experience using and seeing others use keyboard-centric interfaces. When I use magit, or when I was operating the minilab I mentioned above, I don't have to think about what key to press to do the thing I want. I am in fact "so disengaged [with the mechanics of manipulating the interface] that [I] have been able to continue thinking about the task they are trying to accomplish". Competitive StarCraft is another example that illustrates the same point without relying on personal anecdote.
A command-based interface is one alternative, either a text box or voice control (Siri/Cortana/Alexa,Google assistant etc.). But it's always something you sacrifice. In that case I think it's overview, especially when multi tasking.
Another is full screen applications, pretty much what we have on phones and tablets. Accessable VR/AR might open up new models.
I imagine the next revolution in UI will be because our computers change form and present in a completely different way, for example a virtual assistant that lives in the cloud and talks to you via AR visualisations and plain old speech.
Revolutions are not usually a reworking of the dominant mode but a displacement to another medium - e.g. iphone replacing computers for many people.
They are local maxima for normal people. No reason to believe better global maxima don’t exist, or that they can’t be improved to work better for more people (e.g., better accessibility features).
> Alternately, you can say that UX design stabilized on a known good pattern.
Or maybe known-good-enough: We evolved this specific design through a path-dependent fashion, so it could have been different had other designs survived, but nobody else has come up with a new UX paradigm which is sufficiently better to displace it yet.
Various kinds of large dinosaurs were dominant for millions of years, and birds still exist.
UX, like evolution, once it goes down one particular path, tends to get stuck there, fiddling with the details at best. Radical innovation becomes really hard to effect: in evolution’s case because any new feature can only extend/adapt what is already there; in UI’s case because users tend to reject anything that doesn’t fit into what they already know.
It’s the distinction between stability and stagnancy. Stability is good in that it’s predictable; its benefit vs cost ratio is known. Stagnancy is not so hot: that ratio cannot (or will not) improve. WIMP is both stable and stagnant; trapped by its own early success with no obvious path forward.
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Very relevant: after an early 8-bit dalliance I cut my adult teeth on Macs. Some of WIMP’s productivity gains were significant, but in other aspects it was just the same (or more!) drudge work in a cutsier skin. it wasn’t until I taught myself automation (via frustration and AppleScript) that I really put a decent dent in the latter.
And these were automations that built on my existing understanding of WIMP applications (unlike, say, the nix CLI which ignores all that knowledge and invents a whole new unrelated world entirely from scratch). All the Models were exactly the same; all my knowledge of how to manipulate my data in those apps was fully transferrable, not to mention all my existing documents. The only difference was the View-Controller I was using: RPC vs GUI. And whenever I got to a point in my workflow where it was easier/necessary to do something manually, I could freely switch back and forth between those two UIs.
Achieving 10x productivity gains over WIMP on frequent repetitive tasks is embarrassingly trivial* with even modest automations. The hard part is creating an automation UX that’s efficient and accessible to the large majority of less/non-technical users (AppleScript failed, but at least it tried).
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When will we see another attempt? Dog knows. Voice tech like Siri is obviously trying, but is starting from the hardest end of the problem and trying to work back from there.
I believe there’s much quicker, easier pickings to be had by revisiting the AppleScript strategy—“server” applications exposing multiple View-Controllers for different interaction modes, and a really simple, textual “client” command language along the lines of Papert’s Logo (which 8 year-olds could learn how to use and compose), combined with modern auto-suggest, auto-correct, auto-complete to provide the transparency and discoverability that traditional CLIs fail so hard at.
The written word has 10,000 years of learning and practice behind it. And the most powerful word in the world is the word that expresses exactly what you want to say, whenever you want to say it. If that’s not an opportunity for some smart young coders with a desire to make a better world for all, I don’t know what is. You just gotta know history is all.
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“It’s a curious thing about our industry: not only do we not learn from our mistakes, we also don’t learn from our successes.” – Keith Braithwaite
Apple's other attempt right now (on iOS) is Shortcuts, which is graphical-programming-y. But it's disadvantaged a bit because it started life (as a third-party app Workflow) outside the system, unlike Applescript.
I didn’t go into Shortcuts as it has its own set of flaws: poor granularity, poor composability, excessively complex and expensive to extend. And it’s still not quite clear how Apple mean to position it so that it connects to users’ aspirations and needs. Within Siri? within Apps? In between? All fixable, but ultimately depends on Apple’s priorities and investment, not to mention how good a handle they have on the problem themselves.
What Shortcuts does undeniably have is youth, looks, and an established following; and never underestimate the value of those. AppleScript may be built on a better technical foundation, but that don’t mean squat if it can’t bums on seats. And the bottom fell out the AppleScript market a decade ago.
However, being an outside product is absolutely no disadvantage. I’ll rate a passionate team of third-party devs with a vision over in-house chair-warmers going through vague motions with zero direction or objective. Being within Apple can be a huge advantage in that it offers prime positioning within the OS itself; but that’s of no use if you’ve got no clue how to deliver a desirable product and sell it to customers in the first place (<cough>Soghoian</cough>).
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of their product, the Shortcuts team cut their teeth and proved themselves out in the real world. I don’t doubt Apple bought WorkflowHQ as much to get those people as their product. As change of blood goes that was badly overdue.
Alternately, you can say that UX design stabilized on a known good pattern.
This reminds me of how some people will refer to stable software projects that only receive the occasional security patch as "abandoned". They're not abandoned, they're just stable.