<story><title>Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces</title><url>https://brandur.org/interfaces</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fpgaminer</author><text>I wrote a comment under a different post just a few days ago.  My comment got _way_ out of hand and wasn&amp;#x27;t as articulate as I had hoped.  But the salient point I made with it is simple and applies equally well to this article.&lt;p&gt;UI is hard.&lt;p&gt;User interfaces seems really simple.  Every programmer I know has looked at a UI and thought to themselves &amp;quot;I can code that in an hour!&amp;quot; and then ended up spending weeks, sometimes _months_ building the UI.&lt;p&gt;I believe UI is a big, unsolved problem in modern computer science.  Just as hard as any other unsolved problem in our field.  Right up there with general artificial intelligence and P=?NP.  I&amp;#x27;m not even joking.&lt;p&gt;We will eventually solve the problem of UI.  But there are a thousand and one articles posted every day either A) complaining about existing UI or B) telling everyone the solution (without providing real, concrete new libraries, frameworks, code, etc).  No one wants to admit that this stuff is just plain hard and we shouldn&amp;#x27;t beat ourselves up over the fact that we haven&amp;#x27;t solved it yet.&lt;p&gt;In other words, it&amp;#x27;s easy to complain.  It&amp;#x27;s easy to display hubris.  It&amp;#x27;s hard to put forth real, practical solutions.  Or at least be humble and admit that we _don&amp;#x27;t_ have the solution.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>013a</author><text>I think that&amp;#x27;s absolutely fair. The pace at which the industry is starting to solve really big, hairy problems in standard ways is ever accelerating; the devops space right now is undergoing massive solidification under the Cloud and Kubernetes. UI is one of those problems I hope we&amp;#x27;re humble enough to admit that we got horribly wrong with HTML&amp;#x2F;CSS, and maybe we need to go back to square one.&lt;p&gt;But at the same time, lets pick on Slack. There&amp;#x27;s no good reason that it needs to take more than 5 seconds per team to load. Maybe its Electron, HTML, and CSS. Maybe they&amp;#x27;re loading too much data at the start. Maybe their Ruby servers are a little slow.&lt;p&gt;All of that could be true, but one thing is &lt;i&gt;definitely&lt;/i&gt; true: There&amp;#x27;s a Product Manager or an Engineering Lead somewhere in San Francisco who looked at what their engineers had built and said &amp;quot;Yup, this lives up to the quality our users expect, ship it.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Jira is the same way. Its dog slow. Its full of UI bugs and inconsistencies. But people still buy it, and someone at Atlassian has to have said &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;ll worry about this UI bug later, we have more reports for middle management we want to add to the product.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Our best minds will solve the tremendously difficult UI problem one day. But today, the best thing most of us can focus on is the People problem. Expect and Pay for better. Reach out to leaders at these companies on Twitter. A core problem in the software purchasing process is that, often, the people who buy the software aren&amp;#x27;t the people who have to use it day-in day-out, and often there&amp;#x27;s obvious lost productivity between the feature bullets on the marketing page and an engineer on an old PC her company won&amp;#x27;t upgrade for another year.</text></comment>
<story><title>Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces</title><url>https://brandur.org/interfaces</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>fpgaminer</author><text>I wrote a comment under a different post just a few days ago.  My comment got _way_ out of hand and wasn&amp;#x27;t as articulate as I had hoped.  But the salient point I made with it is simple and applies equally well to this article.&lt;p&gt;UI is hard.&lt;p&gt;User interfaces seems really simple.  Every programmer I know has looked at a UI and thought to themselves &amp;quot;I can code that in an hour!&amp;quot; and then ended up spending weeks, sometimes _months_ building the UI.&lt;p&gt;I believe UI is a big, unsolved problem in modern computer science.  Just as hard as any other unsolved problem in our field.  Right up there with general artificial intelligence and P=?NP.  I&amp;#x27;m not even joking.&lt;p&gt;We will eventually solve the problem of UI.  But there are a thousand and one articles posted every day either A) complaining about existing UI or B) telling everyone the solution (without providing real, concrete new libraries, frameworks, code, etc).  No one wants to admit that this stuff is just plain hard and we shouldn&amp;#x27;t beat ourselves up over the fact that we haven&amp;#x27;t solved it yet.&lt;p&gt;In other words, it&amp;#x27;s easy to complain.  It&amp;#x27;s easy to display hubris.  It&amp;#x27;s hard to put forth real, practical solutions.  Or at least be humble and admit that we _don&amp;#x27;t_ have the solution.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sleepyams</author><text>Will we ever solve UI?  UI is the meeting place of tech and user, and in a sense it is THE problem for humanity right now.  UI informs how we tend to use the internet, and for example we are currently involved with UIs that tend towards consumption (e.g. discovery mechanisms, feeds, etc).  To solve UI would imply a certain optimal way to live our lives, if that exists.  I agree with you that UI is unsolved and extremely complex, but I don&amp;#x27;t think it something to be solved as much as it is the political heart of technology.</text></comment>