| > GUIs are a discoverability nightmare. Badly made GUIs are. I started my career developing desktop software. Both Apple and Microsoft used to publish guides for building proper GUIs for their platforms. Our UX designers and PMs were enforcing those vigorously. On Windows, every feature had to be represented in the menu of the main window. See, right there, by going (not even clicking on) every menu item you will learn about existence of every feature. Photoshop is still like that. Most frequently used actions deserved two additional things: a hot key and a toolbar button. Each toolbar button had to have a tooltip. See? Right there, by going over the toolbar one could quickly learned the most important features. Using windows, splitters, panes, tree views and tabs - there was logic behind those choices, and having standardized set of UI controls allowed users to learn software much more rapidly. Modern web "applications" are crude by comparison. There's no standardized way to discover anything. Is it a button? Is it a dropdown? Is it just a strange background to display an error? Things auto-hide and auto-appear for no reason, you have to move mouse around (or practice every swipe variation you're familiar on mobile). Hotkeys are an afterthought, even resizing the browser or even scrolling sometimes breaks things. I am not going to name names, but we tried to use one of web-based conferencing apps a few years ago. The UI it offered for joining a call (the URL you'd include into a meeting invite) was so bad that nearly 30% of people could not find out how to join. That's basically the only thing that page needed to provide, yet their UX people managed to obfuscate it so much that users sat waiting & thinking that something is about to happen instead of clicking the "join" button... Ughh. There's so much demand for software right now, every industry needs more... There is severe shortage of talent for everything, from engineers to UX designers and product managers. Eventually there will be an equilibrium and we'll have professionals design and program GUIs again. I am a CLI-first person, but there's no doubt in my mind that a well-done GUI massively flattens the learning curve for a new app. |
Having said that, I think CLI programs tend to not get enough credit for discoverability. It's just a different kind of discoverability (man $program, $program --help).