The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)

nninglor about 3 hours ago 13 commentsRead Article on nngroup.com

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LeoPanthera•about 2 hours ago

"If we want to order food in a country where we don't know the language at all, we're forced to go into the kitchen and use a see-and-point interface. With a little understanding of the language, we can point at menus to select our dinner from the dining room. But language allows us to discuss exactly what we would like to eat with the waiter or chef."

Ironically, Japanese menus almost universally have pictures of the food, and often (amazingly detailed) plastic models* of the dish in the window.

I frequently wish this was adopted by western restaurants, as being surprised by what actually arrives on my plate after I order is a regular occurrence.

I'm fully onboard with see-and-point.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_model

Terr_•34 minutes ago

> pictures of the food

It may partly a legal thing: Japanese law is big on not-misleading consumers. Depictions are promises of what you'll actually get.

As opposed to, say, an artistic free-expression of a shared aspirational dream of a platonic perfect product, and/or a bunch of things which are meant to evoke the feelings they hope you will have after purchasing.

I'm not sure how well it could be adopted and adapted for American law, but I wish someone'd try.

hyperhello•about 2 hours ago

I got to use a real Magic Cap, one of the examples of alternative metaphors, in the article, a black and white view of a room with a desk full of old office oddities. It was the worst user interface that may have ever been designed, like an Alice In Wonderland nightmare. Click an envelope on a desk or a clock, and it starts some other metaphor like an image of a spreadsheet in a dialog, or something, which might appeal to some kind of “grand adventure” logic, but in today’s context…I’ll avoid ending with a negative comment.

giantrobot•about 1 hour ago

I own a Sony Magic Link and you are 100% correct. The UI is the worst sort of point-n-click adventure game memes. Not only do you have to guess what visual elements actually do something you need to figure out what functionality they represent. The spacial metaphor is insipid because it takes a lot of taps to get from one "room" to another.

None of this is helped by how slow the Magic Link is. Supposedly the DataRover 840 was much faster but I've never owned one to tell for sure.

The UI of the Newton MessagePad (I own several) is far from perfect but makes much more sense than MagicCap. It also requires fewer taps to reach different functions.

Every once in a while I'll pull out my Magic Link but the insanity of the UI just inspires me to put it back in a box.

pstuart•25 minutes ago

Skeuomorphism was an interesting idea but should have been basically just that -- a design inspiration, not a full fledged embrace of extending old school ways of things.

The folder metaphor for the Mac desktop was reasonable, but it effectively stopped there (as it should), rather than try to embed filing cabinets and document archives into pretty pictures to click and point as if it were a game to be played once rather than a daily driver.

JSR_FDED•about 1 hour ago

This was a thought experiment about UIs if the windows and mouse metaphor hadn’t taken off.

As developers we have the best of both worlds: direct visual manipulation, but also a language-centric control of richer objects in the terminal.

Being able to flip between these has always felt like a superpower.

annzabelle•about 1 hour ago

LLMs, for better or worse, bring some of that capability to users who aren't fluent in scripting. It allows language centric control, but a couple more layers of abstraction up from direct coding, especially with the rise of agents.

Though, I do find that breaking down instructions into concrete specific steps and validating the LLM output is its own skill that is not too dissimilar to the mindset needed for coding.

annzabelle•about 2 hours ago

The description of interacting with a computer through language seems oddly prescient of LLMs.

Affric•about 1 hour ago

I was thinking the same thing.

I think what it describes is about right too: computers programs should have a REPL and we should have agents that can input them for us if we don't want to get into the weeds and wish to automate tasks, in some ways anticipating the browser too.

chaostheory•29 minutes ago

I feel that it’s time that we stop spending our focus on designing UX inside boxes, but we are in VR and AR winter at the moment.

sublinear•about 2 hours ago

> Most computer programmers gave up complete control some time ago when they stopped writing in machine language and let assemblers, compilers, and interpreters worry about all the little details.

Ah, there it is. The slippery slope that has stubbornly refused to be slippery for many decades now. Perhaps the author is completely misunderstanding these "metaphors".

jacobgkau•about 1 hour ago

What do you mean? With so many average users hopping onboard the LLM train to do what they could basically already do but with less effort (and less control), it seems like the slope's been slippery as predicted.

(And even setting AI aside, I think many people would agree that e.g. Windows 11 gives them less "control" than versions of Windows from decades ago, with the advantage of being harder to break in some ways. Same on the Mac side, and even in the GNU/Linux ecosystem in some ways.)

sublinear•16 minutes ago

Abstractions don't give up control. They remove options.

In the best cases, those options were redundant or irrelevant to your goals anyway (compilers most of the time).

In most cases, they add mild inefficiencies (OSes, libraries, frameworks, build tools, etc. and sometimes the compiler).

In the cases of LLMs, WYSIWYG, low-code, etc. you're straight up throwing the baby out with the bathwater and setting the house on fire while you're at it too.

This distinction between control over the outcome and the available options is no longer as subtle as it once was in the bad old days when everyone was more naive. It is genuinely interesting. I'm not wanting to be negative for the sake of it. I actually think we've had glimpses of more reasonable compromises in the highly constrained by committee environments of app/web dev.

There is a degree to which you can retain control with those higher-level abstractions, but it tends to be just as much or more work to maintain the illusion for their less experienced end users. You end up with more scaffolding than building. This is ultimately why we hire devs anyway and abandon those tools.