Experts Say Gestural Interfaces Are a Step Backwards In Usability 254
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."
It has been a generation since 1994. (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.
Best interface ever developed was... (Score:5, Insightful)
...the slashdot April fools ohmigodponies interface. It was the pinnacle of web design and nothing has come close since.
I've got a gesture (Score:5, 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.
Re:It has been a generation since 1994. (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not as if generations move through the industry in a block, like tribal age-group initiates.
Re:It has been a generation since 1994. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It has been a generation since 1994. (Score:4, 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,