Past and Present Futures of User Interface Design
13 comments
·March 17, 2025gyomu
inhumantsar
I'm 100% with you on this but I will admit there was one concept / short run project that actually looked like it was on the right track: The Optimus Maximus keyboard[1].
The keyboard itself was not good for a bunch of reasons, but the idea was gold. Individual, mechanical keys which could change their legends to suit the current context. You wouldn't have to memorize every possible layout before using it, and you could change the layout to suit whatever you're currently doing.
The closest equivalent I've seen would be the pre-mouse-era keyboards which could accept laminated paper legends for specific applications. The next closest, tho in the opposite direction, would be modern configurable keyboards with support for multiple layers layers.
skydhash
I was recommending laptop to someone and the only criteria he had was a number pad and a big screen because he mostly use Excel. I think input method is fairly context sensitive. Touch is the most versatile one as it acts directly on the output, but I still prefers a joystick for playing game, a midi keyboard for creating music, a stylus for drawing, and voice when I'm driving or simple tasks. Even a simple remote is better than mouse+keyboard for an entertainment center (as long as you're not entering text). We need to bring the human aspect of interface instead of the marketing one (branding and aesthetics).
kurthr
I may have worked for that company, but I came away with a different take.
People are User Interface bigots!
People get used to something and that's all they want. The amazing thing Apple was able to do was get people to use the mouse, then the scrollwheel, and then the touchscreen. Usually, that doesn't mean that you get rid of an interface that already exists, but when you create a new device you can rethink the interface. I used the scroll wheel for the iPod before it came out and it was not intuitive, but the ads showed how it worked, and once you used it 20-50x it just seemed right... and everything else was wrong! People would tell me how intuitive it was, and I would laugh, because without the ads and other people using it, it was not at all.
Now we're in a weird space, because an entire generation is growing up with swipe interfaces (and a bit of game controller), and that's going to shape their UI attitudes for another generation. I think the keyboard will have a large space, but with LLM prediction, maybe not as much as we've come to expect.
I could go on about Fitts testing and cognitive load and the performance of various interfaces, but frankly people ignore it.
RossBencina
> People get used to something and that's all they want.
It's more than "getting used to." Learning to type (or to edit text fast using a mouse) is a non-trivial investment of time and energy. I don't think wanting to leverage hard-earned skills is bigotry, seems more like pragmatism to me. Unless the "new way" has obvious advantages (and is not handicapped by suboptimal implementation) the switching cost will seem too high.
null
tony-allan
I know that most developers prefer keyboard shortcuts when developing software but I prefer using the mouse mostly because I cannot remember all of the shortcuts in a range of different environments.
Given my preference it would be interesting to explore a more tactile interface.
- a series of physical knobs to skip back and forward by function, variable reference, etc
- a separate touch screen with haptic feedback for common functions and jump to predefined functions in my code
- a macro-pad with real buttons to do the above
When watching videos physical buttons and knobs would be good. I know professional video and audio engineers already use these technologies but i've never tried them myself.
lolinder
> I prefer using the mouse mostly because I cannot remember all of the shortcuts in a range of different environments.
This is why one of the greatest changes in power user tooling in recent years is the "find anywhere" hotkey, which is now available almost everywhere.
Mouse interaction is slow and hardly a panacea for finding features buried in menus. "Find anywhere" type interactions with fuzzy search allow you to use they keyboard and highly mnemonic abbreviations to turn up what you're looking for. With a few exceptions, I tend to lean on them even for things that I use regularly, because it's easier to learn which few keystrokes will turn up the option I'm looking for than it is to rebind a fresh hotkey in each environment or, as you say, memorize the built-in one.
RossBencina
> "find anywhere" hotkey, which is now available almost everywhere
Almost everywhere? I'd love to see a list of other examples.
The only place I can name is the vscode Ctrl-Shift-P thing, and in that case it's a wholesale replacement for an explorable/discoverable UI (i.e. traditional menu bar).
Sure there are search boxes in other places, but usually that's literally for finding things, not for performing application domain commands/actions/manipulations, which is what I understood the parent to be describing.
skydhash
> one of the greatest changes in power user tooling in recent years
Alt+x in Emacs was here for ages. Even the command prompt in vim follows the same pattern. And while it's useful, I still prefers to bind commonly use commands to keybinding, especially if there can be prefix.
lolinder
There's a reason I didn't say "innovation"—I knew that people would immediately point out it's been around forever. What's new is that it's in mainstream tooling.
furyofantares
This is a lot of fairly interesting build up and background leading to a very short and shallow takedown of voice control that's all about audio as IO for a couple practical reasons.
No discussion of whether natural language will be a powerful addition to or replacement of current UI, which of course can just be text you type and read.
DidYaWipe
Pretty superficial.
And no mention of the much-hyped "Minority Report" UI that failed spectacularly for obvious reasons.
I once worked in a design research lab for a famous company. There was a fairly senior, respected guy there who was determined to kill the keyboard as an input mechanism.
I was there for about a decade and every year he'd have some new take on how he'd take down the keyboard. I eventually heard every argument and strategy against the keyboard you can come up with - the QWERTY layout is over a century old, surely we can do better now. We have touchscreens/voice input/etc., surely we can do better now. Keyboards lead to RSI, surely we can come up with input mechanisms that don't cause RSI. If we design an input mechanism that works really well for children, then they'll grow up not wanting to use keyboards, and that's how we kill the keyboard. Etc etc.
Every time his team would come up with some wacky input demos that were certainly interesting from an academic HCI point of view, and were theoretically so much better than a keyboard on a key dimension or two... but when you actually used them, they sucked way more than a keyboard.
My takeaway from that as an interface designer is that you have to be descriptivist, not prescriptivist, when it comes to interfaces. If people are using something, it's usually not because they're idiots who don't know any better or who haven't seen the Truth, it's because it works for them.
I think the keyboard is here to stay, just as touchscreens are here to stay and yes, even voice input is here to stay. People do lots of different things with computers, it makes sense that we'd have all these different modalities to do these things. Pro video editors want keyboard shortcuts, not voice commands. Illustrators want to draw on touch screens with styluses, not a mouse. People rushing on their way to work with a kid in tow want to quickly dictate a voice message, not type.
The last thing I'll add is that it's also super important, when you're designing interfaces, to actually design prototypes people can try and use to do things. I've encountered way too many "interface designers" in my career who are actually video editors (whether they realize it or not). They'll come up with really slick demo videos that look super cool, but make no sense as an interface because "looking cool in video form" and "being a good interface to use" are just 2 completely different things. This is why all those scifi movies and video commercials should not be used as starting points for interface design.