Prototypr is a Medium publication where designers and developers write about UI design, product design, and interface history.
HN commenters draw on its posts for design principles like Gall's Law and Miller's Law, and it is linked in debates over material design and interfaces.
It's been decades since Apple had competent compassionate trained UI designers instead of narcissistic showboating cosmeticians, who'd even heard of, let alone read or actually written, Apple's own Human Interface Guidelines from 1978 onward, and aren't just motivated and addled by cocaine and a burning desire to prove to the world they're actually sensitive artists joyfully expressing their deeply unique spiritual creativity and not mere usability engineers navigating difficult tradeoffs and conventions and applying sound scientific principles so users can actually get work done, instead pointlessly changing and hiding practical pixels that were there for reasons they're blissfully unaware of, which they wouldn't give a shit about even if Bruce Tognazzini, Bill Atkinson, Don Norman, and the ghost of Jeff Raskin themselves begged them to, simply to polish their resumes and burnish their egos, by spraying their sweaty cloying musk over every possible surface merely to express their ownership, just like the Cat in Red Dwarf. [But I digress...]
Red Dwarf - The Cat - That be mine!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q54lVO7elt0
How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name (2015)
https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-design-a-bad-name
A history of Apple HIG table of contents – the philosophy and principles
https://modelessdesign.com/backdrop/401
Rediscovering Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines from 1987:
UX Lessons from the Dawn of the Personal…
Learning with Lucy[0], a beginner excel course.
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curated direct links from searching hackernews / search engines on 'excel'
* excel for everything : https://benn.substack.com/p/the-next-billion-programmers
* The World Cup of MS Excel : https://archive.ph/DgDYQ
* user-centered approach to user functions in excel : https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/excel.pdf
* MS opens up Excel to custom data types with images, arrays and more : https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/2/22759149/microsoft-excel-javascript-api-custom-data-types-feature
* Lambda: the ultimate excel worksheet function : https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ultimatae-excel-worksheet-function/
* lambda-2d: An exploration of drawingas a programming Language, featureing ideas from lambda calculus : https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/2d-an-exploration-of-drawing-as-programming-language-featuring-ideas-from-lambda-calculus/overview/
* Using Java script functions in excel : https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-adds-support-for-javascript-functions-in-excel/
* spreadsheet as software paradigm : https://medium.com/@vlapiner/spreadsheet-is-a-software-development-paradigm-70c871ff5f49
* make excel spreadsheet behave as an integrated development environment (IDE) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY6ri3blTQM
* spreadsheets are graphs : https://neo4j.com/blog/spreadsheets-are-graphs-too/
* excel turning machine :…
I'm glad you recognize that there isn't a path yet; many people don't!
The short answer today is: you have to ramp up on creating content in 3D engines. If you can't build out all of the content yourself, you can't effectively work. That means, to some degree, creating original 2D and 3D assets. The #1 thing Microsoft tells designers who want to work with Hololens, is learn Unity and learn the workflow to deploy Unity content into a Hololens yourself, without developer/engineer assistance. (UnrealEngine4 is the other major option.)
As a web-based designer, tools like React VR and A-Frame might be useful, but your tooling there is always going to be a distant second to the established 3D players, and so your content quality will also lag behind.
YC's guide: https://blog.ycombinator.com/how-to-get-into-vr/
Some other Medium post that wasn't bad: https://blog.prototypr.io/designing-for-vr-a-beginners-guide-d2fe37902146
As far as using real hardware, your AR options are kind of limited if you can't afford a Hololens. You could try and find a second-hand CastAR Kickstarter developer prototype headset. You could maybe fake something with the Vive's front-facing camera or the Leap Motion as a camera on an Oculus Rift. You could cobble together a Pepper's Ghost-style Google Cardboard-alike, like Aryzon: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aryzon/aryzon-3d-augmented-reality-for-every-smartphone or this DIY version:…
> If programming and designing is communication
There's a research field called Semiotics of Human-Computer Interaction studying user interfaces from that angle. Developers usually have a technical background from maths or engineering, and often are not aware of the importance of linguistics in our field.
Both programming languages and GUIs are languages (artificial, sure, but linguistics also study those) which are used to write expressions that can be read by humans. Semiotics, the study of signs and their meaning, provide methods to analyze how users make sense of the software artifacts (products and tools) delivered to them.
One researcher called the user interface a designer's deputy, i.e. a messenger that conveys in its entirety a message that the programmers wants to communicate to the users.
This deputy must stand on its own, since it's the only information available to the user.
Users then perform sense-making on the symbols in the interface, to infer the meanings of all elements [1]. Notice that the user can't see what each interface element actually does, since they don't have access to the code; they can only guess what it does from the available symbols. If the symbols lead the user to infer an incorrect meaning, communication breaks.
[1] https://blog.prototypr.io/how-semiotics-can-help-us-in-ux-on-deconstructing-experience-eaf3e55fb0e1
Broken windows theory.
In case of Linux and Windows you can see their effort to improve things. Their failures and shortcomings stem from either decades of legacy (Windows) or lack of overarching vision and resources (Linux).
Whereas MacOS... It has always been billed (and billed itself) as the UI/UX front runner. It was (or was trying to be) polished, consistent, good.
Apple had Human Interface Guidelines in as early as 1987[1]. Apple was the definitive yardstick interfaces would be measured by.
But in the recent year(s)... Apple has been consistently dropping the ball themselves. When their own first-party apps break almost every single HIG [2], how can one expect third-party developers to create quality apps. When their own third-party apps are locked in to landscape mode (iOS dashboard and iOS books interface), how can one expect third-party developers spend any significant amount of time creating seamless experiences across multiple screen sizes (and Apple’s own Marzipan apps like Newsstand and Home are barely ok at best).
When your OS is no better than the competition, what’s to stop people from using the competition (which actually shows willingness to improve).
[1] https://blog.prototypr.io/rediscovering-apples-human-interface-guidelines-1987-59731376b39e
[2] https://grumpy.website/post/0RsaxCu3P
The point of the HIG is to make everything look and work the same on the platform: https://blog.prototypr.io/rediscovering-apples-human-interface-guidelines-1987-59731376b39e
> “The purpose of visual consistency is to construct a believable environment for users… The transfer of skills is one of the most important benefits of a consistent interface, especially for beginning users.” pg. 10
> “…consistency makes it easier for a user to learn new applications; it also makes it less likely that a user who follows habits learned from one application will make a disastrous mistake when using a different one.” pg. xi
The HIG goes beyond simply expressing principles of what makes for a good UI. The consistency in and of itself allows users to develop an intuition and muscle memory for how their computer will work. That intuition is destroyed when different apps look and behave differently. In that sense, it's better to be less intuitive according to some abstract principle if necessary to achieve consistency. It will take the user longer to understand a "more intuitive" UI starting from first principles than to understand a UI that exhibits the quirks embedded in the HIG they already know.