<story><title>The Anti-Mac Interface (1996)</title><url>http://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>m_mueller</author><text>One thing that almost always gets overlooked when critizing &amp;#x2F; trying to innovate on Xerox Parc-like interfaces, is discoverability. Look at departures from this interface (or predecessors of it) and you&amp;#x27;ll almost always find a system where it&amp;#x27;s hard for users to discover what they can do and how their actions will affect the state. Most prominently:&lt;p&gt;* iOS style gestures&lt;p&gt;* Office Ribbons (where has my feature XY been moved to? I guess I have to google now..)&lt;p&gt;* CLI (what does parameter -p do again?)&lt;p&gt;* Metro style swipes&lt;p&gt;* Voice commands&lt;p&gt;The only interface that has &lt;i&gt;improved&lt;/i&gt; on discoverability so far, is OSX, especially with its integrated spotlight search in each application&amp;#x27;s help menu.&lt;p&gt;What I&amp;#x27;d like to see is a CLI that (a) understands objects by default (i.e. PowerShell) and (b) is discoverable, for example by using mouse interactions when you&amp;#x27;re trying to learn.&lt;p&gt;(a) would mean that the command line applications become much easier to compose. Imagine something like list &amp;#x2F; dict comprehensions in the command line:&lt;p&gt;ls | [entry.created for entry in $@ if entry.filename[0] == &amp;#x27;a&amp;#x27;] | sort&lt;p&gt;(b) would mean that you could hover each of the commands above, inspect the possible parameters, default values, examples without having to execute anything. The whole interface could get much richer as well, for example if the output of your commands is a list of objects that have the same attributes (e.g. `ls`), it would display it in a table where each column is sortable using &lt;i&gt;gasp&lt;/i&gt; the mouse.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Anti-Mac Interface (1996)</title><url>http://www.nngroup.com/articles/anti-mac-interface/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>vbezhenar</author><text>&amp;gt; We seem to have settled on the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) model, and there is very little real innovation in interface design anymore.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s an interesting exercise to compare this to the mobile platforms, e.g. iOS. Windows are gone. Icons are here. Menus are changed. Pointer is changed too (your finger is pointer, not an abstract arrow).&lt;p&gt;Though on OS X desktop I don&amp;#x27;t see any innovations at all! May be I&amp;#x27;m missing something? Windows, icons, menu, pointer, that&amp;#x27;s all. Probably gestures are an innovation, but it isn&amp;#x27;t used widely except in operating system windows manager and Safari. Can we think of a tabs as an innovation? I never really liked them, I believe that tabs could be replaced by better window management. It&amp;#x27;s something that tied to application now, but it should be tied to a window manager and probably in better ways.&lt;p&gt;Desktop user interface is definitely stagnating, if we&amp;#x27;re talking about OS X. I don&amp;#x27;t know much about new Windows releases, but in Windows 7 it was the same story.</text></comment>