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by mrbrowning
2298 days ago
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> I like their TLI ideas, but I am honestly a bit alergic against designers who lack the phantasy of realizing that sometimes a UIs complexity is a reflection of the complexity of the problem it helps to solve in conjunction with the level of control you want to give to the user. I think what's key here, and why I like the direction of the work in the linked post, is that none of the affordances of the UI they're augmenting -- the command line -- are being taken away,* merely made more visible based on context. I think that gets at a hole in the notion that UI complexity mirrors domain complexity -- in the case of Premiere, surely the entirety of what's on the screen doesn't mirror the complexity of the workflow you're executing right now, it's much closer to the sum total of everything you might ever do. Not that a UI based on progressive disclosure would be trivial or maybe even possible to implement effectively for something like a professional video-editing application, but it's worth considering whether something like that is merely a local maximum in the space of all possible UIs. * I guess in the case where you know exactly what you want to do and the added context might distract or slow you down, that's an affordance being removed, but I think it's outside the scope of what we're talking about here -- especially because, given the scope of the command line, you will inevitably have to do something with it that involves an invocation that isn't right at the tip of your fingers. |
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And existing editing GUIs might very well be a local maxima — however we designers need to be careful in quickly condemning existing solutions that we don't understand by calling them "unfocused", "slow" or "ugly".
It is the responsibility of any designer to be more aware than the rest of tradeoffs like these — making it look good is merely a nice to have you can achieve as well. To decide that for a domain as complex as editing demands at least some degree of awareness of the common problems an editor needs to solve, as your software or UI will have to solve them as well.
Sometimes this comes with a learning curve, as your user will have to learn how to tell the computer what they want. They will have to learn some language that allows them to express this, if they don't want the computer to take the wheel and just assume what they want. And that very language is what makes it complex and hard to learn, and there is not much way around it. Might there be a different language that lets you express more things with better ease while beeing easier to learn? Sure. But will it still be harder to learn a language which allows you to express a lot, compared to a language which allows you to express only little? Yes - as well.
That beeing said: I they made all the right usability choices on their own thing there, my comment was more an aside stemming from my own values as a designer.