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Experts Say Gestural Interfaces Are a Step Backwards In Usability

Posted by samzenpus on from the wave-to-the-past dept.

smitty777 writes "Veteran usability experts Donald A. Norman and Jakob Nielsen wrote an interesting article lamenting the current state of the art in gesture interfaces. According to them, the lack of standards for interacting with these devices puts us on par with the '94 vintage in web design, when designers discovered they could make the buttons and UI look like anything they wanted."

6 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. It has been a generation since 1994. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's not surprising that this has come about again. It has been roughly one full generation of developers since 1994. During that time, those developers who actually learned proper usability techniques either retired or moved on to other endeavors. They knowledge they acquired and the methods they developed have basically been lost to the sands of time.

    Today, we have a whole new generation of developers creating this shitty software. They'll spend the next 10 to 15 years learning what the previous generation had learned. There'll be a few years of good UI design before these developers move on, at which time the cycle will repeat.

    1. Re:It has been a generation since 1994. by jon_doh2.0 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "It has been roughly one full generation of developers since 1994"

      Its not as if generations move through the industry in a block, like tribal age-group initiates.

    2. Re:It has been a generation since 1994. by TapeCutter · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Marketing types would like us all to believe generations can be packaged up and tagged as "boomers", "GenY", ect, which then take on certain attributes that sales people can target. Back in the "real world" there is no syncronised changing of the guard, what we have is a shared continuum of ideas and experience that is not bounded by time, place, DOB, or target markets. It is only bounded by how far nature can go in evolving our talent for using complex language and in evolutionary terms she has only just started experimenting.

      --
      And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
    3. Re:It has been a generation since 1994. by MrBandersnatch · · Score: 3, Insightful

      younger programmers, or programmers in India/China/Shanghai etc.

      And there's the key to this entire mess. Never leave UI design to programmers. They are fundamentally different jobs requiring different skill-sets and methodologies. Now if you will excuse me, I need to see how well my landscape designer is doing with the gardening,

  2. Best interface ever developed was... by syousef · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...the slashdot April fools ohmigodponies interface. It was the pinnacle of web design and nothing has come close since.

    --
    These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
  3. I've got a gesture by DigitalSorceress · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I've got a single gesture in mind for folks who think that gesture-based interfaces are where it's at...

    Actually, I do like the intuitive "pinch, spin, slide" type gestures with iOS, but for PC-based stuff, I can't stand a lot of the new, shiny crap folks are pushing. Removing useful things like status bars, and replacing intuitive "I don't know what I'm looking for, but I'll know it when I see it" menus with those "trying to view the Grand Canyon through a toilet paper tube" restrictiveness of these ribbons and such... it just really gets annoying.

    --

    The Digital Sorceress