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On previous OS releases, major UI changes were always driven by human-factors concerns. There are entire college majors in human factors, and courses in it are available to nearly every CS major. ACM has a whole group dedicated to it. So it would of course be utterly irresponsible and unprofessional to make UI changes that haven't been analyzed by experts for their impact on the user. I know in the past seemingly odd GUI decisions have been explained to me by human factors experts rationally.

So go ahead and hit me, Internet. I want to see the Human Factors explanation for why low resolution and color icons and flat no-shadowed controls like I used to have on my SunView workstation in 1986 is actually a superior way to design an interface on my 1024x3840 home PC in 2015.

This kind of gross behaviourism can be found in physiology and psychology when they interface with modern biology. Physiologists, for example, like to describe humans as "behavioural homeostatic regulators" (at least, my second-year professors did), implying that there is some direct stimulatory link between feeling hot and removing one's sweater. (And certain kinds of psychologists make much more grievous reductionisms regarding evolution.)

In the former case, the researchers themselves are making rather outdated (and suspiciously Hobbesian...) philosophical statements that derive from their own experiences as clinicians and the traditions of their mentors, whereas in the latter case, I feel the article's interpretation of social sciences pursuing in-vogue theories applies rather neatly.

For the record, biologists tend to subscribe to a kind of emulated dualism: the mind is a black box that contains its own arrangement of notions which, while they may not be as real as physical matter, should be treated as real. It's only when you stray near psychology that you start seeing stupid shit like this. I suspect this more reveals the limits of the author's experience.

Lastly, you dont need the start button if you learn how to use whats there.. Thats like complaining when going from Win 3.1 to 95. They got rid of my Program Manager I wish they gave me a way to turn it back on..

They did, from 95 up until XP SP1 ( http://support.microsoft.com/kb/142255 ). Of course back then they actually had people who thought about the impact of new interface design on users:

http://www.sigchi.org/chi96/proceedings/desbrief/Sullivan/kds_txt.htm

At one point in the design of Windows 95 they considered having two separate UIs, the windowed interface we know and a separate, simplified interface they thought might be suitable for beginners, and which seems to have featured a set of tiles that launched the various applications. Although the design "tested well, because it successfully constrained user actions to a very small set", it was abandoned because "If just one function a user needed was not supported in the beginner shell, s/he would have to abandon it (at least temporarily)", learning "would not necessarily transfer well to the standard shell", and "users had to learn two ways of interacting with the computer, which was confusing". I wonder if the Windows 8 design team were aware of this document..?

Aside from the fact that you're a troll, there's a deeper meme here worth debunking: that accessibility features are just for the "impaired".

Gregg Vanderheiden gave the closing plenary talk at the SIGCHI 2001 conference. The subject was how creative integration of accessibility features can greatly improve functionality for all users, including examples of products originally designed for people with impairments which went on to wider commercial success. As an example of this kind of thinking, with portable devices (mobile phones, music players, PDAs) we're all "blind" at some time or another -- we cannot or do not want to redirect our visual attention to the device. So what happens when the normal function of the device includes cues to operation that don't require vision (via audio, haptics, etc.)? The device becomes more useful to everyone, including those with visual impairment. Likewise, by including design elements that work when users can't hear a device that device is more useful to both the hearing impaired and to users in loud environments.

There's a summary of this presentation with more details here: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/chi/ Scroll down past the stuff about Bill Gates' opening keynote (which was utterly lame in comparison to Vanderheiden's talk, IMO).

Various pieces of research (such as http://www.sigchi.org/chi97/proceedings/paper/koh.htm) show that reading from a screen is not as effective for learning based activities as reading from paper. The major problems focus on reading from the screen being slower than reading from paper, the perception of text on-screen less accurately than paper and higher fatigue when reading from a screen than from paper due to the backlit screen. Furthermore, prolonged usage of screens can lead to eyestrain, a common argument for restricting children from watching T.V too much, and with most children already watching hours of TV/Games/YouTube etc, do parents really want them spending another 6+ hours per schoolday (plus homework) stuck in front of a screen?

I know that I start to lose focus on the road when I am doing NOTHING ELSE

I started to write a post on a similar topic and my draft was blown away by browser lossage, so I'm glad someone made this point in the interim.

This is probably a complicated optimization space involving multiple variables, of which this research only explores one, and one should be wary of premature conclusions because they will likely lead to overly political effects ... like someone claiming we would be safer if we all rode motorcycles because there will be fewer passengers to distract us and it will be harder to comb our hair while driving.

For example, I totally agree that they need to control this experiment against research on drivers falling asleep at the wheel, since it seems unlikely that those who choose to have someone along to talk to in order to keep them awake are making it more likely they will crash. Now you might wish they wouldn't be driving at all in that state, but it's an imperfect world, and if we only allowed people to drive under optimal conditions, so few people would be able to drive that they'd probably just outlaw it as a frivolous extravagance. For example, global warming will probably mean a lot more carpooling, and hence a lot more conversation, and we aren't going to make it more likely that people do that if we tell them they can't talk while they ride along.

Also, the study mentions people 18-25, which car rental places won't even rent to, probably not just because they're more prone to have friends along, but maybe the entire way they think about driving, being new to it, is different. I found (just speaking about intuitions here, so not scientific, but maybe suggesting an area of continued investigation) over the decades I've been driving that it's become more automatic in some ways, not that it doesn't require judgment, but that I'm more aware of more things without having to try hard. I can look in the mirror and just directly understand the scene without having to interpret it. I think "I should slow" and my foot slows without me having to say "which is the brake". And many other more subtle things. Newell and Simon in studies decades ago made observations about the progression from short term to long term memory, and I suspect there are (and probably even documented in research) analogous effects related to the wiring of neural pathways for efficient use over time, so that what starts out as a cognitive process becomes a wired-in wetware and mechanical subroutine, freeing the brain for other tasks as one gets better. And there's been recent research (though I couldn't find a pointer on a quick web search) that I think was talking about the idea that people perceive certain kinds of interfaces as if they were extensions of their bodies--actual limbs--which I can imagine is how cars come to feel to experienced drivers. But anyone in the 18-25 range may not have been driving long enough to exhibit that... I seem to recall it took me a number of years before I felt those responses were truly automatic.

It's hard to tell if the research took issues like this into account from this news article because, although it cites the underlying research paper by name, it doesn't make the research paper clickable--it may not be web accessible.

Probably for some tasks it can be useful, like marking which part will be kept and which discarded in a crop operation. Basically for things that are deeply related. But for some things that are unrelated, like menus and the thing they hide, it just slows down people, as the background thing is not important anymore compared to the menu options. And probably causes a higher visual stress, thing the study did not cover but I would like to see tested.

Early this year, I saw some fairly sophisticated interaction using a flexible input device called ShapeTape, made by Canada's Measurand. While the company is marketing it as a motion-capture and 3D modeling technology, Tovi Grossman at the University of Toronto's Dynamic Graphics Project has been working under Ravin Balakrishnan to explore other applications for ShapeTape, including as a general input device. For example, you can use it in computer-assisted design or animation to make and perform some fairly complex 3D curves and manipulations in far less time than it would take with keyboards, mice or drawing tablets.

The Association of Computing Machinery's computer-human interaction publication CHI Letters' latest edition includes their paper on the use of ShapeTape (2 MB PDF), which was presented at the ACM CHI 2003 conference on human factors in computing systems along with MPEG demonstration videos. (3 min. basic - 15 MB | 15 min. complete - 190 MB)

Grossman's Web page includes links to other videos and previous papers.

Computer graphics and animation tool-maker Alias|Wavefront also has several videos that featured former chief scientist Bill Buxton demonstrating ShapeTape in use:

• 3D Tapedrawing On The Wall 4:33 min. - 11MB
• Digital Tape Drawing 2:33 min. - 8.2MB
• Modeling With Shapetape 1:14 min. 3.9MB

And, of course, ShapeTape maker Measurand also has further information and videos.

Context sensitive seems to be a significant trend. ... remove several superfluous panels. ... displayed some options for whatever tool was being used. ... automatically displays the relevant tools for what you're working on.... Context-sensitivity is a great help since it basically does work for you, finding the stuff you need when you need it.

As a developer I can appreciate how much context-aware processes can help the user, but doing too much behind the user's back can annoy users, or have too many ways to do the same thing will increase the learning curve.

But on topic to the original post, [and I'm sure it has already been mentioned, but I'll do it anyway] there are a number of IEEE and ACM sponsored conferences that relate to complex user interfaces. SIGChi, the SIG on Computer Human Interaction, sponsors a bunch of conferences, most of them have several papers each year relating to the original question.

frob.

This is the sort of thing one would expect to see in SIGCHI conference proceedings. Although there were no experimental controls or peer review of the results, it is telling of Slashdot's influence that such results are published on Slashdot first. As is, the quality would be top notch for a commercial rag such as Dr. Dobbs, and with just a bit of polishing would be published in an academic journal, serve as a Master's thesis, or even -- with quite a bit of "pushing" (expanding) of the ideas -- serve as a PhD at some schools.

The HCIL at the University of Maryland is another strong entry in the list of schools doing HCI work.