[kunzhi]

> But if you need to do actual work you want maximum information density. You want icons that are easy to tell apart by color, not some sleek minimalist grey in grey.

IMHO Photoshop is still the classic example of this. The UI can feel overwhelming at first, like dropping into a helicopter cockpit. But once you start getting a hang of what you're doing, anything more "minimal" just feels like dumbing things down for the lowest common denominator.

From what I've seen in large enterprises, it's also why OG users are so attached to their mainframe terminal UIs. Yes, it's very hard to learn, but once you've developed some facility, everything else feels unusably slow.

I've never had a bad experience designing like I respect the users intelligence. Humans are insanely smart and capable, treat them that way and good results occur.

[jimmaswell]

GIMP's icon redeisign and new tool layout were a massive mistake IMO, first thing I do on a new install is disable tool groups and change the color scheme to "legacy"

[GuinansEyebrows]

> IMHO Photoshop is still the classic example of this. The UI can feel overwhelming at first, like dropping into a helicopter cockpit. But once you start getting a hang of what you're doing, anything more "minimal" just feels like dumbing things down for the lowest common denominator.

while i agree, i wish more dense applications like Photoshop took the Rhino3D approach of integrating a CLI directly into the interface. yes, you can click the icons or select tools from the menu, but being able to just type a command and arguments (or have it prompt for the arguments ex-post-facto) feels just incredible in an otherwise-GUI application, in a way that memorizing keyboard shortcuts just doesn't compare.

[falcor84]

> Humans are insanely smart and capable, treat them that way and good results occur.

My experience isn't quite that. While most humans can be capable when they want to, in typical situations they often don't and aren't. People who have put in years to become proficient in mainframe terminals aren't representative people in a typical situation; most people (myself definitely included) perform most daily actions on autopilot.

[skydhash]

And autopilot rely on consistent environment. Full focus isn't sustainable. Training and practice rely on this capability, ingraining something in muscle memory so you don't have to pay that much attention. When someone wants to fill a form or process some data, the less he/she pays attention to each action, the better it is.

EDIT

And that's why I like Vim and most TUI that much. I don't need to follow the cursor or wait an abitrary amount of time because "reasons". It's all muscle memory, and my attention is more on what I'm trying to do than how I'm doing it.

[neepi]

The mainframe terminal user interface was shown to me in all its glory by Italian gate staff at the airport in Rome. Literally hammered through a security check after I was flagged as having two return flights. It was no less than a form of kata.

I can imagine how shit it would have been if you have to log into windows and open a web app and use the mouse and stuff to click through a web form hacked up to do the job.

[rondini]

How is photoshop a classic example when all of the icons and controls are quite literally grey in grey like the person you quoted was denouncing?

[skydhash]

It's not grey on grey. It has cleanly delineated section, and most of them has been in the same place for ages. And there's thing like tooltips that help.

[DiggyJohnson]

because of the information / functionality density and the fact that it's optimized for power users

[starkparker]

> Humans are insanely smart and capable, treat them that way and good results occur

Obviously, maybe more obviouisly now than ever in recorded history, not all humans are smart or capable.

Regardless of capability, however, many humans excel at memorizing complex routes across obscure paths that they experience through spaced repetition, which research suggests can alter memory pathways in the brain to facilitate easier recall[1] and also engages memory functions in our nervous systems beyond our brain.[2]

Any UI, including bad ones, can foster efficient workflows in any user _if_ it accomplishes things compatible with repetitive use:

- the UI's behaviors and interactions are minimally interally consistent

- the UI has pathways from a starting point to a result that are discoverable through those behaviors and interactions

- the UI's reactions to input are sufficiently efficient to avoid arbitrary or dynamic pauses, which can disrupt effective repetition

- the UI's interactions are minimally accessible to people; if they use buttons, shapes, colors, sounds, controls, etc., a person can consistently distinguish between and physically access them when necessary

- a person interacts with the UI long enough to find those pathways from starting points to results, and does so repetitively over long time spans

Modern UI design often attempts to reduce the time to value for users at arbitrary experience levels, at the expense of maintaining the consistency of pathways that reward longtime users who have accumulated training.

The only people using the UI when the change happens are people with a non-zero amount of accumulated training. Any change disrupts consistency. It's a net negative to the people who are around to complain about it, and also resets the often competitive field of users; not only do experienced users have to relearn their workflows to avoid committing errors or wasting time, they also have to compete with new users who have easier access to results that previously required experience through repetition to efficiently reach.

For example, a UI designer might change the UI to surface a feature that they want users to access more easily by making it require 1 or 2 interactions to reach, but a veteran user already has "easy" access to that feature even if it takes 6 or 7 interactions to reach it, some of them obscure. If the change removes the result from the end of the old pathway and moves it to a new one that experienced users don't know, the new UI becomes less efficient for them no matter how smart or capable they are (or aren't). Both the new user and experienced user might be smart and capable or stupid and incompetent; the differentiating factor is experience.

Arguably, the "smart and capable humans" who use complex UIs are either the ones who achieve a level of power to prevent UI changes that degrade consistency of existing pathways to preserve their productivity at the expense of less-experienced users needing more time and training (at which point they probably don't need to use that UI anymore anyway, and the act mostly rewards other experienced users), or the ones who divert time that might be spent complaining about UI changes toward adapting to the new UI's pathways.

The truly disruptive UI/UX changes for repetitively used workflows are the ones that introduce unpredictable delays between interactions. Repetition rewards rhythm and consistent feedback, and unpredictable interaction delays destroy both.

1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07425-w

2: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-53922-x