[robviren]

I feel like wishing for UI innovation is using the Monkey's paw. My web experience feels far too innovative and not enough consistent. I go to the Internet to read and do business not explore the labyrinth of concepts UI designers feel I should want. Take me back to standards, shortcuts, and consistency.

[gary_0]

Yes! I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering. I don't want a huge amount of creativity to go into how my light switches work. I don't want shoes that "reinvent" walking for me (whatever the marketing tagline might say).

Some stuff has been solved. A massive number of annoyances in my daily life are due to people un-solving problems with more or less standardized solutions due to perverse economic incentives.

[grvbck]

> I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering.

99.5 % agree, because I would love to try SAAB:s drive-by-wire concept from 1992: https://www.saabplanet.com/saab-9000-drive-by-wire-1992/

[KellyCriterion]

The thing why this was only a research project and never came into mass production was regulatory stuff, IIRC? (most EU countries require, still until today, a "physical connection between steering wheel and wheels" in their trafic regulation)

[grvbck]

This was a few years before Sweden joined the EU, but yes, I think the lack of a physical connection was one of the main problems.

From what I've read the test drivers also thought the car was too difficult to drive, with the joystick being too reactive. I wonder how much of that could be solved today with modern software and stability control tech.

I can't find it now, but I do remember a similar prototype with mechanical wires (not electrical) that was supposed to solve the regulatory requirements. That joystick looked more like a cyclic control from a helicopter.

[mrgoldenbrown]

Having played enough video games that use joysticks for steering I don't want to drive a real car with a joystick. Crashing in Mario kart or Grand theft Auto because I sneezed is fine but not in real life.

[publicdebates]

Exactly. The control needs to have both an intentional and major motor movement from the driver. Modern steering wheels have the same benefit as the original iPod wheel. Easy for small movements, even accidental ones; possible for big movements.

Also funny that they had the ability to swap to the passenger to drive it. So acceleration/break for one person, steering for another? Really not a good idea.

[sublinear]

I think there's a ton of innovation left to be done regarding steering and light switches.

You're right that it's not going to be better designs, but paradigm shifts.

We still don't know what it means to provide input to a mostly self-driving car. It hasn't been solved and people continue to complain about attention fatigue and anxiety. Is the driving position really optimal for that? Are accident fatalities reduced if the driver is sitting somewhere else? Even lane assist still sucks on traditionally designed cars. Is having to fight a motorized wheel to override steering really all that safe?

Light switches may be reliable and never go away, but we have many well-established everyday examples of automatic lights: door switches, motion sensing, proximity sensing, etc. You never think about it and that's the point.

[dijit]

> Yes! I don't want a car with an "innovative" way of steering.

You might, but you'll never really know.

I mean, steering wheels themselves were once novel inventions. Before those there was "tillers" (a rod with handle essentially)[0], and before those: reigns, to pull the front in the direction you want.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benz_Patent-Motorwagen

[gary_0]

I highly doubt there's a steering input device so superior to the current wheel shape that it's worth throwing out the existing standard. Yes, at one point how steering should work (or how you should navigate the Web) was uncertain, but eventually everyone settled on something that worked well enough that it was no longer worthwhile to mess with it.

Although, one thought I had is that there's nothing wrong with experimenting with non-standard interfaces as long as you still have the option to still just buy, say, a Toyota with a standard steering wheel instead of 3D Moebius Steering or whatever. The problem is when the biggest manufacturers keep forcing changes by top-down worldwide fiat, forcing customers to either grin and bear it or quit driving (or using the Web) entirely.

[dijit]

I sympathise with the frustration, but I think the issue isn't innovation itself: it's that we've lost the ability to distinguish between solving actual problems and just making things different.

Take mobile interfaces. When touchscreens arrived, we genuinely needed new patterns. A mouse pointer paradigm on a 3.5" screen with fat fingers simply doesn't work. Swipe gestures, pull-down menus, bottom navigation—these emerged because the constraints demanded it, not because someone thought "wouldn't it be novel if..."

The problem now is that innovation has become cargo-culted. Companies innovate because they think they should, not because they've identified a genuine problem. Every app wants its own navigation paradigm, its own gesture language, its own idea of where the back button lives. That's not innovation, that's just noise.

However, I'd have to push back on the car analogy: steering wheels were an innovation over tillers, and a crucial one. Tillers gave you poor mechanical advantage and required constant two-handed attention. The steering wheel solved real problems: better control, one-handed operation, more space for passengers. It succeeded because it was genuinely better, and then it standardised because there was no reason to keep experimenting.

The web needs more of that approach: innovate when there's a genuine problem, then standardise when you've found something that works. The issue isn't innovation, it's the perverse incentive to differentiate for its own sake.

[gary_0]

Leaving aside the externalities of constantly breaking everyone's workflow and potentially introducing disastrous bugs, there's an opportunity cost to innovating where there isn’t a clear need. Google and others are wasting massive resources endlessly tweaking browsers and the Web because that's all they know how to do, their users are locked in and without recourse, and they don't feel threatened by any competitors or upstarts. I would argue the web and smartphones and similar tech are boring now but because the market is controlled by only a few huge companies, the tech hasn't been allowed to become low-margin, standardized cookie-cutter commodities. Instead these attempts to make this old boring tech seem exciting is getting to the point where it's sad and comical.

[tosti]

Your last paragraph reminded me of HTML5 and the WHATWG which led to official W3C adoption.

Back when that started W3C was still strongly embedded in the XML hellhole.

[bigfishrunning]

You need to be careful here, because we have a real tendency to get stuck in local maxima with technology. For instance, the QWERTY keyboard layout exists to prevent typewriter keys from jamming, but we're stuck with it because it's the "standardized solution" and you can't really buy a non-QWERTY keyboard without getting into the enthusiast market.

I do agree changing things for the sake of change isn't a good thing, but we should also be afraid of being stuck in a rut

[1dom]

I agree with you, but I'm completely aware that the point you're making is the same point that's causing the problem.

"Stuck in a rut" is a matter of perspective. A good marketer can make even the most established best practice be perceived as a "rut", that's the first step of selling someone something: convince them they have a problem.

It's easy to get a non-QWERTY keyboard. I'm typing on a split orthlinear one now. I'm sure we agree it would not be productive for society if 99% of regular QWERTY keyboards deviated a little in search of that new innovation that will turn their company into the next Xerox or Hoover or Google. People need some stability to learn how to make the most of new features.

Technology evolves in cycles, there's a boom of innovation and mass adoption which inevitably levels out with stabilisation and maturity. It's probably time for browser vendors to accept it's time to transition into stability and maturity. The cost of not doing that is things like adblockers, noscript, justthebrowser etc will gain popularity and remove any anti-consumer innovations they try. Maybe they'll get to a position where they realise their "innovative" features are being disable by so many users that it makes sense to shift dev spending to maintenance and improvement of existing features, instead of "innovation".

[jaapz]

> For instance, the QWERTY keyboard layout exists to prevent typewriter keys from jamming, but we're stuck with it because it's the "standardized solution" and you can't really buy a non-QWERTY keyboard without getting into the enthusiast market.

So, we are "stuck" with something that apparently seems to work fine for most people, and when it doesn't there is an option to also use something else?

Not sure if that's a great example

Sometimes good enough is just good enough

[matkoniecz]

> the QWERTY keyboard layout exists to prevent typewriter keys from jamming

even if it is true (is it a myth by any chance?), it does not mean that alternatives are better at say typing speed

[cons0le]

As someone that makes my own keyboard firmware, 100% agree. For most people, typing speed isn't a bottleneck. There is a whole community of people that type faster than 250wpm on custom, chording-enabled keyboards. The tradeoff is that it takes years to relearn how to type. Its the same as being a stenographer at that point. Its not worth it for most people.

Even if there was a new layout that did suddenly allow everyone to type twice as fast, what would we get with that? Maybe twice as many social media posts, but nothing actually useful.

[zdragnar]

I'd imagine at this point that most social media posts are done by swiping or tapping a phone's virtual keyboard (if one is used at all).

[Yizahi]

One don't need to be a scientist to take a look at own hands and fingers, to see that they are not crooked to the left. Ortholinear keyboard would be objectively better, even with the same keymap like QWERTY, but we don't produce those for masses for a variety of reasons. Same with many other ideas.

[matkoniecz]

> to see that they are not crooked to the left

how it makes ortholinear keyboards better?

[II2II]

If I recall correctly, QWERTY was designed to minimize jamming. The myth is that it was designed to slow people down.

Whether it does slow people down, as a side effect, is not as well established since, as another person pointed out, typing speed isn't the bottleneck for most people. Learning the layout and figuring out what to write is. On top of that, most of the claims for faster layouts come from marketing materials. It doesn't mean they are wrong, but there is a vested interest.

If there was a demonstrably much faster input method for most users, I suspect it would have been adopted long ago.

[IAmBroom]

It's been debunked by both research (no such mention at the time) and practice on extant machines.

[account42]

These days QWERTY keyboards are optimal because programs, programming languages and text formats are optimized for QWERTY keyboards.

[hrimfaxi]

Depends on the language no? Qwerty isn't great for APL.

[shevy-java]

I have a QWERTZ keyboard!

Is my digital life at a natural end now?

[account42]

If you mean the default German keyboard layout then, yes, putting backslashes, braces and brackets behind AtlGr makes it sub-optimal in my book. Thankfully what's printed on the keys is not that important so you too can have a QWERRTY keyboard if you want.

[basch]

I wish for browser ui innovation.

The labyrinth of ways to interact with the temporal path between pages is a cluster. History, bookmark, tab, window,, tab groups.

There are many different reasons to have a tab, bookmark, or history entry. They dont all mean the same thing. Even something as simple as comparison shopping could have a completely different workflow of sorting and bucketing the results, including marking items as leading candidate, candidate, no, no but. Contextualizing why I am leaving something open vs closing it is information ONLY stored in my head, that would be useful to have stored elsewhere.

Think about when you use the back button vs the close tab button. What does the difference between those two concepts mean to you? When do you choose to open a new tab vs click? There is much to be explored and innovated. People have tried radical redesigns, havent seen anything stick , yet.

[the_other]

If you expect the browser to help you manage your various workflows beyond generic containers (tabs, tab groups), then you become tied into the browser's way of doing things. Are you sure you want that?

I'm not saying your hopes are bad, exactly. I'm interested in what such workflows might look like. Maybe there _is_ a good UX for a web shopping assistant. I have an inkling you could cobble something interesting together quite fast with an agentic browser and a note-taking webapp. But I do worry that such a app will become yet another way for its owner to surveil their users in some of the more accurate and intimate areas of their lives. Careful what you wish for, I reckon.

In the meantime, what's so hard about curating a Notepad/Notes/Obsidian/Org mode file, or Trello/Notion board to help you manage your projects?

[basch]

shopping assistant was a specific example, but in the process of research, brainstorming, etc theres a bunch of different ways id like to see visualization and record of how i got somewhere, what was discarded, summary of what was retained, whats coming next, options for branching.

the web is a document structure, but browsing it doesnt need to be linear.

[gettingoverit]

We had that ability in Firefox, through XUL. Then it was removed. Tree Style Tab addon doesn't work properly to this day because of this.

We had that ability in Chrome, through Chrome Apps. You could make a browser app, load pages in webviews, with the whole browser frame customizable. Then it was removed.

We had an ability to make a new innovative browser, until Google infested all the standartization committees, and increased complexity of standards on a daily basis for well over a decade. Now they monetize their effort on making Chrome by removing adblockers and enforcing their own ads, knowing full well that even keeping a fork that supports manifest v2 is infeasible for a free open-source project.

There is no way forward with the web we have right now. No innovation will happen anymore.

[noduerme]

Kinda yeah, kinda no. Big-thinking drastic UI experiences are usually shit. But small, thoughtful touches made with care can still make a big difference between a website that just delivers the data you need and one that's pleasant to interact with.

There's a similar amateurs-do-too-much effect with typography and design. I studied typography for four semesters in college, as well as creative writing. The best lessons I learned were:

In writing, show, don't tell.

In typography, use the type to clarify the text - the typography itself should be transparent and only lead to greater immersion, never take the reader out of the text.

Good UI follows those same principles. Good UX is the UI you don't notice.

[brnaftr361]

It definitely feels like it is gone. Of course I'm largely talking about the applications that I use, e.g. MS Word which is still using the searchless 1980s character map and has a crazy esoteric add-on installation process. It's hilariously bad when we consider the half-screen UI which obscures a considerable amount of the ribbon.

The UX is also awful.

But I think this is a compounding problem that spans generations of applications. Consider the page convention — a great deal of the writing content we typically publish, at a societal level, will be digital-only so why are we still defaulting to paper document formats? Why is it so fucking hard to set a picture in?

And it's that kind of ossification and familiar demand that reinforces the continuum that we see, I think. And when a company does get creative and sees some breakthrough success it is constrained to nascency before it gets swallowed by conglomerate interests and strangled.

And Google's alternative ecosystem has all of these parallels. It's crazy to see these monolithic companies floundering like this. That's what I don't understand.