Bruce Tognazzini

Certain designers may have hated Nielsen, but their users hated them, and they have more users hating them than Nielsen has designers hating him, and users matter much more than designers, so I think he came out way ahead.

Bruce Tognazzini is the OG GUI Guru of 80's user interface design!

https://asktog.com/atc/about-bruce-tognazzini/

Tog not just invented and implemented, but also deeply rationalized and documented a lot of great user interface techniques, like the "mile high menu bar", which partially exploits Fitts' Law (in the "up" direction), but made more sense on the original single small Mac screens. (While pie menus more fully exploit Fitts' law (in "all" directions") and they work great on large screens, giving you even more "leverage".)

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/27/designing-for-people-who-have-better-things-to-do-with-their-lives-part-two/

>When the Macintosh was new, Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini wrote a column in Apple’s developer magazine on UI. In his column, people wrote in with lots of interesting UI design problems, which he discussed. These columns continue to this day on his web site. They’ve also been collected and embellished in a couple of great books, like Tog on Software Design, which is a lot of fun and a great introduction to UI design. (Tog on Interface was even better, but it’s out of print.)

>Tog invented the concept of the mile high menu bar to explain why the menu bar on the Macintosh, which is always glued to the top of the…

I think this is something apple doesn't realize.

They used to have a really good human factors/ui team. I remember Bruce Tognazzini and reading his blog.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Tognazzini

https://www.asktog.com/

I think I noticed around ios 7 things were getting bad. buttons didn't look like buttons, on-screen controls started being hidden, and form trumped function. Then like you said, ports disappeared and to me "do the wrong thing correctly" started winning.

but the worst thing is that apple sets an example. The same "simplify for sales, but not usability" technique has happened to countless other products in many industries. all laptops have elegant looking keys that have no curve to fit and center your fingers. Tesla cars have a pleasing-looking design, but when you drive them, you can't lean on the touchscreen to hit targets, you don't have drive selection or turn signal stalks to help you get into a parking space easily, and "elegant simplicity" is "cost cutting for the peons".

sigh.

> But the question is: do the standard components that the vendor ships do it? I argue: KDE is consistent.

Well yes, I do agree with this. Internally it's mostly consistent, at least more so than Windows. Never analysed its UI structures though.

> I don't want my desktop UI to dictate how an app draws its UI (or games would be impossible).

As a platform, ensuring applications running on top of it stay consistent to varying degree is the job of the desktop/OS IMO. To what degree depends on the context, https://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/#consistency is a great read.

Even games need it, missing input field features has plagued PC games for decades and can be crippling for input method users, Skyrim's console needs mods to support copy and paste. Custom mouse acceleration curves is the reason everyone disabled it, zero acceleration is the easiest way to make different games handle mouse input consistently.

A shame Linux isn't standardised enough.

>My bet is that they were receiving complaints of Firefox breaking due to bad migration of settings between versions, so instead of fixing the migrations, they decided that this user-hostile anti-feature was good enough.

I think this is actually a good feature, one of the few introductions which I think if worthwhile, even if the implementation is a bit lacking.

You have to balance the user being able to see the message with not annoying them, and it's not difficult to achieve.

Configuration bloat is a real problem in most applications which allow third-party extensions, and I've seen some stunning examples of extensions bloat on some people's computers, Chrome users included. On the other hand, when I question it, they tell me, "I use all those!"

This article I came across here on HN really enlightened me: https://www.asktog.com/columns/000maxscrns.html

The title is misleading. The message is really:

Stop using unlabeled icons in data tables.

It says, "Norman Nielson argues that text + icon has the highest cognitive recall and lowest error rate"

Here's what the Nielsen Norman Group says about Icon Usability:
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/icon-usability/

The conclusion: "Always include a visible text label. As Bruce Tognazzini once said, 'a word is worth a thousand pictures.'"

Here's the quote in context: https://www.asktog.com/columns/038MacUITrends.html

"In 1985, after a year of finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple human interface group took on the motto 'A word is worth a thousand pictures.' This still holds true."

Apple discovered fairly early on that while using a keyboard shortcut seems faster, using the mouse is almost always quicker, even for very advanced users. The illusion stems from how we perceive time when performing the different tasks - we remember time spent searching for the correct target to click, but we forget time spent remembering the right incantation.

This paradox is one of the big reasons why I don't use Vi or EMACS - I think that the productivity gains are nowhere near as great as users make out, but the sense of mastery over such arcane tools is inherently satisfying to the kind of person that spends a lot of time in a text editor.

http://www.asktog.com/TOI/toi06KeyboardVMouse1.html