HN

Comments (89)

• Menu

  jhhh
  I understand the desire to want to fix user pain points. There are plenty to choose from. I think the problem is that most of the UI changes don't seem to fix any particular issue I have. They are just different, and when some changes do create even more problems there's never any configuration to disable them. You're trying to create a perfect, coherent system for everyone absent the ability to configure it to our liking. He even mentioned how unpopular making things configurable is in the UI community.A perfect pain point example was mentioned in the video: Text selection on mobile is trash. But each app seems to have different solutions, even from the same developer. Google Messages doesn't allow any text selection of content below an entire message. Some other apps have opted in to a 'smart' text select which when you select text will guess and randomly group select adjacent words. And lastly, some apps will only ever select a single word when you double tap which seemed to be the standard on mobile for a long time. All of this is inconsistent and often I'll want to do something like look up a word and realize oh I can't select the word at all (G message), or the system 'smartly' selected 4 words instead, or that it did what I want and actually just picked one word. Each application designer decided they wanted to make their own change and made the whole system fragmented and worse overall.
• Menu

  linguae
  I enjoyed this talk, and I want to learn more about the concept of “learning loops” for interface design.Personally, I wish there were a champion of desktop usability like how Apple was in the 1980s and 1990s. I feel that Microsoft, Apple, and Google lost the plot in the 2010s due to two factors: (1) the rise of mobile and Web computing, and (2) the realization that software platforms are excellent platforms for milking users for cash via pushing ads and services upon a captive audience. To elaborate on the first point, UI elements from mobile and Web computing have been applied to desktops even when they are not effective, probably to save development costs, and probably since mobile and Web UI elements are seen as “modern” compared to an “old-fashioned” desktop. The result is a degraded desktop experience in 2025 compared to 2009 when Windows 7 and Snow Leopard were released. It’s hamburger windows, title bars becoming toolbars (making it harder to identify areas to drag windows), hidden scroll bars, and memory-hungry Electron apps galore, plus pushy notifications, nag screens, and ads for services.I don’t foresee any innovation from Microsoft, Apple, or Google in desktop computing that doesn’t have strings attached for monetization purposes.The open-source world is better positioned to make productive desktops, but without coordinated efforts, it seems like herding cats, and it seems that one must cobble together a system instead of having a system that works as coherently as the Mac or Windows.With that said, I won’t be too negative. KDE and GNOME are consistent when sticking to Qt/GTK applications, respectively, and there are good desktop Linux distributions out there.
• Menu

  scottjenson
  I've given dozens of talks, but this one seems to have struck a chord, as it's my most popular video in quite a while. It's got over 14k views in less than a day.I'm excited so many people are interested in desktop UX!
• Menu

  analogpixel
  Why didn't Star Trek ever tackle the big issues, like them constantly updating the LCARS interface every few episodes to make it better, or having Geordi La Forge re-writing the warp core controllers in Rust?
• Menu

  xnx
  I felt rage baited when he crossed out Jakob Nielsen and promoted Ed Zitron (https://youtu.be/1fZTOjd_bOQt=1852). Bad AI is not good UI, but objecting based on AI being "not ethically trained" and "burning the planet" aren't great reasons.
• joelkesler
  Great talk about the future of desktop user-interfaces.“…Scott Jenson gives examples of how focusing on UX -- instead of UI -- frees us to think bigger. This is especially true for the desktop, where the user experience has so much potential to grow well beyond its current interaction models. The desktop UX is certainly not dead, and this talk suggests some future directions we could take.”“Scott Jenson has been a leader in UX design and strategic planning for over 35 years. He was the first member of Apple’s Human Interface group in the late '80s, and has since held key roles at several major tech companies. He served as Director of Product Design for Symbian in London, managed Mobile UX design at Google, and was Creative Director at frog design in San Francisco. He returned to Google to do UX research for Android and is now a UX strategist in the open-source community for Mastodon and Home Assistant.”
• christophilus
  No, we’re not. Niri + Dank Material Shell is a different and mostly excellent approach.
• mattkevan
  Really interesting. Going to have to watch in detail.I’m in the process of designing an os interface that tries to move beyond the current desktop metaphor or the mobile grid of apps.Instead it’s going to use ‘frames’ of content that are acted on by capabilities that provide functionality. Very much inspired by Newton OS, HyperCard and the early, pre-Web thinking around hypermedia.A newton-like content soup combined with a persistent LLM intelligence layer, RAG and knowledge graphs could provide a powerful way to create, connect and manage content that breaks out of the standard document model.
• Menu

  whatever1
  Desktop is dead. Gamers will move to consoles and Valve-like platforms. Rest of productivity is done on a single window browser anyway. Llms will accelerate thisCoders are the only ones who still should be interested in desktop UX, but even in that segment many just need a terminal window.
• johnea
  A) I'm not going to watch the video because it's hosted by goggle, and I'm not interested in being goggled.B) However, even without watching the video, it must be describing corporate product UI, because in the free software world, there is a huge variety of selections for desktop (and phone) UI choices.C) The big question I continue to come back to in HN comments: why does any technically astute person continue to run these monopolistic, and therefore beige, boring, bland, corporate UIs?You can have free software with free choice, or you can have whatever goggle tells you...
• Menu

  sprash
  Unpopular take: Windows 95 was the peak of Desktop UX.GUI elements were easily distinguishable from content and there was 100% consistency down to the last little detail (e.g. right click always gave you a meaningful context menu). The innovations after that are tiny in comparison and more opinionated (things like macos making the taskbar obsolete with the introduction of Exposé).
• migueldeicaza
  Scrubbed the talk, saw “M$” in a slide, flipped the bozo bit
• rolph
  problem is with pushing a UX at users and enforcing that model when the user changes it to something comfortable when you should be looking at what the users are throwing away, and what they are replacing it with.MS is a prime example, dont do what MS has been doing, remember whos hardware it actually is, remain aware that what a developer, and a board room understands as improvement, is not experienced in the same way by average retail consumers.
• Menu

  fortyseven
  You know, sometimes things just work. They get whittled way at until we end up with a very refined endpoint. Just look at cell phones. Black rectangles as far as the eye can see. For good reason. I'm not saying don't explore new avenues ( foldables, etc. ), but it's perfectly fine to come to settle into a metaphor that just works.
• DonHopkins
  Golan Levin quotes Joy Mountford in his "TED Talk, 2009: Art that looks back at you":>A lot of my work is about trying to get away from this. This a photograph of the desktop of a student of mine. And when I say desktop, I don't just mean the actual desk where his mouse has worn away the surface of the desk. If you look carefully, you can even see a hint of the Apple menu, up here in the upper left, where the virtual world has literally punched through to the physical. So this is, as Joy Mountford once said, "The mouse is probably the narrowest straw you could try to suck all of human expression through." (Laughter)https://flong.com/archive/texts/lectures/lecture_ted_09/inde...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_Levinhttps://www.flong.com/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy_Mountfordhttps://www.joymountford.com/
• Menu

  calmbonsai
  For desktops, basically, yes. And that's OK.Take any other praxis that's reached the 'appliance' stage that you use in your daily life from washing machines, ovens, coffee makers, cars, smartphones, flip-phones, televisions, toilets, vacuums, microwaves, refrigerators, ranges, etc.It takes ~30 years to optimize the UX to make it "appliance-worthy" and then everything afterwards consists of edge-case features, personalization, or regulatory compliance.Desktop Computers are no exception.
• immibis
  I don't want to see what any of today's companies would come up with to replace the desktop. Microsoft has tried a few times and they all sucked.
• Menu

  AndrewKemendo
  The computer form factor hasn’t changed since the mainframe: look into a screen for where to give input, select visual icons via a pointer, type text via keyboard into a text entry box, hit an action button, recieve result, repeatit’s just all gotten miniaturizedHumans have outright rejected all other possible computer form factors presented to them to date including:Purely NLP with no screenhead worn augmented realitycontact lenses,head worn virtual realityimplanted touch sensorsetc…Every other possible form factor gets shit on, on this website and in every other technology newspaper.This is despite almost a century of a attempts at doing all those and making zero progress in sustained consumer penetration.Had people liked those form factors they would’ve been invested in them early on, such that they would develop the same way the laptops and iPads and iPhones and desktops have evolved.However nobody’s even interested at any type of scale in the early days of AR for example.I have a litany of augmented and virtual reality devices scattered around my home and work that are incredibly compelling technology - but are totally seen as straight up dogshit from the consumer perspective.Like everything it’s not a machine problem, it’s a human people in society problem
• Menu

  ares623
  Are we stuck with the same toothbrush UX forever?
• Menu

  eek2121
  For the same reason we don't reinvent the wheel. Or perhaps, the same reason we don't constantly change things like a vehicle. It works well, and introducing something new means a learning curve that 99% of folks won't want to deal with, so at that point, you are designing something new for the other 1% of folks willing to tackle it. Unless it's an amazing concept, it won't take off.
• anon
  undefined