Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

It's because companies are no longer run by engineers. The MBAs and accountants are in charge and they could care less about making good products.

At Microsoft, Satya Nadella has an engineering background, but it seems like he didn't spend much time as an engineer before getting an MBA and playing the management advancement game.

Our industry isn't what it used to be and I'm not sure it ever could.

Fantastic talk, I found myself nodding in agreement a lot. In my research on next-generation desktop interfaces, I was referred to Ink & Switch as well and man, I sure wish they were hiring. I missed out on the Xerox and Bell Labs eras. I'm also reading this book, "Inventing the Future" by John Buck that details early Apple (there's no reason the Jonathan Computer wouldn't sell like hotcakes today, IMHO).

In my downtime I'm working on my future computing concept[1]. The direction I'm going for the UI is context awareness and the desktop being more of an endless canvas. I need to flesh out my ideas into code one of these days.

P.S. Just learned we're on the same Mastodon server, that's dope.

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[1]: https://systemsoft.works

I concur though per my earlier post I do feel "desktop stagnation" is inevitable and we're already there. You were channeling Don Norman https://jnd.org/ in the best of ways.

Thanks for that nice talk, it felt like a breeze of fresh air with basic & simple yet powerful but alas "forgotten" concepts of UX.

Will look into your other talks.

It was quite interesting.

Because, something that a lot of tech-obsessed Trek fans never seem to really come to terms with, is that Trek didn't fetishize technology.

In the Trek universe, LCARS wasn't getting continuous UI updates because they would have advanced, culturally, to a point where they recognized that continuous UI updates are frustrating for users. They would have invested the time and research effort required to better understand the right kind of interface for the given devices, and then... just built that. And, sure, it probably would get updates from time to time, but nothing like the way we do things now.

Because the way we do things now is immature. It's driven often by individual developers' needs to leave their fingerprints on something, to be able to say, "this project is now MY project", to be able to use it as a portfolio item that helps them get a bigger paycheck in the future.

Likewise, Geordi was regularly shown to be making constant improvements to the ship's systems. If I remember right, some of his designs were picked up by Starfleet and integrated into other ships. He took risks, too, like experimental propulsion upgrades. But, each time, it was an upgrade in service of better meeting some present or future mission objective. Geordi might have rewritten some software modules in whatever counted as a "language" in that universe at some point, but if he had done so, he would have done extensive testing and tried very hard to do it in a way that wouldn't've disrupted ship operations, and he would only do so if it gained some kind of improvement that directly impacted the success or safety of the whole ship.

Really cool technology is a key component of the Trek universe, but Trek isn't about technology. It's about people. Technology is just a thing that's in the background, and, sometimes, becomes a part of the story -- when it impacts some people in the story.

Mostly i believe its that the writers envisioned and were able to wrldbuildinsucha way that the tech was not a subject but was rather a part of the scenery/background with the main object being the people and their relationships. Additionally in some cases where alien tech was interfaced with the characters inthe storysome UI/code rewites were written in, for example in DS9 where the Cardassian interfaces/AI are frustrating to Chief O'Brien and his efforts to remedy/upgrade such gets a recurring role in the story.

Conversly recent versions have taken the view of foregrounding tech aidied with flashy CGI to handwave through a lot.Basically using it as a plot device when the writing is weak.

Because the LCARS GUI is only for simple recurring tasks, so it's easy to find an optimal interface.

Complex tasks are done vibe coding style, like La Forge vibe video editing a recording to find an alien: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Faiu360W7Q

I do wonder if conversational interfaces will put an end to our GUI churn eventually...

Man, I should hope that the warp core controllers on the USS Enterprise were not written in C.

On the other hand, if the writers of Star Trek The Next Generation were writing the show now, rather than 35-40 years ago - and therefore had a more expansive understanding of computer technology and were writing for an audience that could be relied upon to understand computers better than was actually the case - maybe there would've been more episodes involving dealing with the details of Future Sci-Fi Computer Systems in ways a programmer today might find recognizable.

Heck, maybe this is in fact the case for the recently-written episodes of Star Trek coming out in the past few years (that seem to be much less popular than TNG, probably because the entire media environment around broadcast television has changed drastically since TNG was made). Someone who writes for television today is more likely to have had the experience of taking a Python class in middle school than anyone writing for television decades ago (before Python existed), and maybe something of that experience might make it into an episode of television sci-fi.

As an additional point, my recollection is that the LCARS interface did in fact look slightly different over time - in early TNG seasons it was more orange-y, and in later seasons/Voyager/the TNG movies it generally had more of a purple tinge. Maybe we can attribute this in-universe to a Federation-wide UX redesign (imagine throwing in a scene where Barclay and La Forge are walking down a corridor having a friendly argument about whether the new redesign is better or worse immediately before a Red Alert that starts the main plot of the episode!). From a television production standpoint, we can attribute this to things like "the set designers were actually trying to suggest the passage of time and technology changing in the context of the show", or "the set designers wanted to have fun making a new thing" or "over the period of time that the 80s/90s incarnations of Star Trek were being made, television VFX technology itself was advancing rapidly and people wanted to try out new things that were not previously possible" - all of which have implications for real-world technology as well as fake television sci-fi technology.

I have often thought that Star Trek is supposed to show a future in which computer technology and user interfaces have evolved to a steady state that don't need to change that much, and which is superior to our own in ways that we don't yet understand. And because it hasn't been invented yet, the show does not invent it either.

It is for the audience to imagine that those printed transparencies back-lit with light bulbs behind coloured gel are the most intuitive, easy to use, precise user interfaces that the actors pretend that they are.

Trek needs to visibly "sci-fi-up" extant tech in order to have the poetic narrative license to tell its present-day parables.

Things just need to "look futuristic". The don't actually need to have practical function outside whatever narrative constraints are imposed in order to provide pace and tension to the story.

I forget who said it first, but "Warp is really the speed of plot".

Because it’s a fantasy space opera show that has nothing to do with reality

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fZTOjd_bOQ&t=1852s You're missing the ampersand.

It's really strange how he spins off on this mini-rant about AI ethics towards the end. I clicked on a video about UI design.

Is it dead because people don’t want the desktop, or is it dead because Big Tech won’t invest in the desktop beyond what’s necessary for their business?

Whether intentional or not, it seems like the trend is increasingly locked-down devices running locked-down software, and I’m also disturbed by the prospect of Big Tech gobbling up hardware (see the RAM shortage, for example), making it unaffordable for regular people, and then renting this hardware back to us in the form of cloud services.

It’s disturbing and I wish we could stop this.

For content consumption sure.

For content creation though, desktop still rules.

It's not dead. It's being murdered. Microsoft, Apple, Gnome and KDE are making the experience worse with each update. Productive work becomes a chore. And the last thing we need is more experiments. We need more performance, responsiveness, consistency and less latency. Everything got worse on all 4 points for every desktop environment despite hardware getting faster by several orders of magnitude.

This also means that I heavily disagree with one of the points of the presenter. We should not use the next gen hardware to develop for the future Desktop. This is the most nonsensical thing I heard all day. We need to focus on the basics.

>productivity is done on a single window browser anyway

When I need to get productive, sometimes I disable the browser to stop myself from wasting time on the web.

Heh, the number of points you've probably gotten for that comment, I don't think that it's that unpopular. Win 98 was my jam but it looks hella dated today, but as you said, buttons were clearly marked, but also menus were navigatible via keyboard, soms support for themes and custom coloring, UIs were designable via a GUI builder in VB or Visual Studio using MFC which was very resource friendly compared to using Electron today. Because smartphones and tablets, but even the wide variety of screen sizes also didn't exist so it was a simpler time. I can't believe how much of a step back Electron is for UI creation compared to MFC, but that wasn't cross-platform and usually elements were absolute positioned instead of the relative resizable layout that's required today.