Sheer Ugliness Of User Interfaces

Something EM wrote about MacOsx's Aqua made me think.

Beyond all the sins of HCI and ID perpetrated by PUI developers, there's the sheer look of it. By far the most overused look is brushed steel. Its purpose is to harken back to the industrial age, to make immaterial objects look exactly like material objects, to compensate for their not behaving like physical objects. The poverty of imagination embodied in this is utterly repulsive to me.

Another example of meaningless physicality is the 3D look of the task and title bars in Windows XP. The same with buttons when I think about it. Hell, it's their sheer physicality that has me so convinced that ButtonsAreEvil.

Or how about the "softly rounded borders" around windows? As if we needed borders in the first place! Well, I don't in any case. So why not have something interesting like gradually merging the background of the objects' contents with the background of the node (eg, desktop) the object is in? At least Enlightenment allowed you to have transparent terminals, damn but I miss it.

The look I'm settling on resembles deep space. I had a deep blue background in mind from the very beginning and more recently I added ghostly coloured auras around selected objects. Ding ding! Suddenly I've got stars in space. Well not quite since the background is an anisotropic (light blue at one pole, black at the other) but otherwise uniform blue (no stars or other junk). I think I'll adopt the borderless objects look too (even though it's just the first option that came to my mind a minute ago). Looks different from all the other ugly UIs in any case.

-- RK

While I'm not going to agree or disagree with any part of this in particular, I would remind you that aesthetic concerns like this are in the eye of the beholder. (Which is why "themes" are a good thing IMHO). While you may not like the brushed metal look (I don't care either way), some people like it. Others may want a 60s flower child motif, like a bad Austin Powers movie (is there any other kind of Austin Powers movie?). Others may want their PC to resemble the bridge of the Enterprise, etc... At any rate, some aspects of usability can be suitably researched, and certain things deemed "good" and others "bad". Others are matters of taste, and should be in the control of the user (and beyond the concern of the InteractionDesigner). -- ScottJohnson

The problem with the "it's all up to personal taste" hypothesis is that it's false. Software that visually conveys an impression which it will refuse or otherwise fail to uphold is engaging in an act we call lying.

In the case of brushed steel, it's clearly giving users a false impression of physicality which impression is a most loathsome and reprehensible lie. There is nothing subjective about this. -- RK

I seem to recall hearing somewhere that Apple originally intended "brushed steel" to be used only in applications which mimicked a physical piece of equipment, like a CD player, but that it's now being used all over the place so even that doesn't make any sense any more. I may be wrong, though. -- EarleMartin

Catering to developers who'll mimick something physical is unconscionably bad policy. If they actually had that policy, it would be an indictment. -- RK

This discussion is reminiscent of those that artistic communities have periodically conducted: "Form must follow function!" "No, humans must aspire to environments that uplift them!" "Truth is beauty!" "No, beauty is truth!"

I'd like to suggest that this is trivial, but sadly, it's not. If it were, our cities would not contain so many huge, and hugely expensive, cookie-cutter glass boxes, and people like former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani would not be able to make serious political capital out of whether or not some artist uses elephant dung to represent the Virgin Mary's breast.

So I'll just suggest that people who are inclined to repeat this discussion yet again might consider stepping back and considering the potential negative ramifications of trying to promote and impose yet another authoritarian manifesto upon the world of art/design. ''

And if that doesn't work, then consider this: People know that there is no brushed aluminum upon the pixels of their monitors. Take a cue from the radical "cinema" artists of the 1970s, who made movies consisting of alternating black and white frames because, after all, "film is really about light and dark"--and the epileptics in the audience seized in the aisles. The only thing that is "really" on our screens is glowing phosphor (or glowing liquid crystals). So displaying anything on a computer monitor that "represents" anything at all is "lying".

When it comes to what's "inside" or "on" a screen, deregulation harms no one. There are precious few areas of human endeavor where that is really true. So: Consider that in this world, there truly are some things that just do...not...matter. Let people do what they want with their own displays. Do what you want with your own display.

-- KenDibble

I'm not here to hold sophomoric pseudo-philosophical discussions about the nature of reality, truth and lying.

And in any case, the fact remains that Apple imposed its brushed steel look upon Mac users. User empowerement? Get real! -- RK

You introduced the discussion, which concerns the nature of reality, truth, and lying as it applies to the representation of information. Whether or not it's sophomoric is in the eyes of the beholder.

I'm suggesting that to contend that any representation of convenience, whose purpose is purely to make it easier for people to manipulate whatever it is that is being represented, bears, by virtue of the fact that it does not faithfully depict the underlying reality, any relationship to the concept of "lying", is wildly excessive. I brought up some examples where similar incongruent comparisons had been made in the past, in order to illustrate my point.

TheMapIsNotTheTerritory. Nobody expects it to be. It would be useless if it was. -- KenDibble

The examples you brought up were stupid. And the reason why is because people attend to different aspects of reality. The programmer attends to a completely different aspect of reality than the user. SyntaxVsSemantics points this out; what's semantics to the implementor of a language is just so much worthless syntax to the user. The "underlying reality" you talk about is completely fucking useless because NOBODY attends to it except equipment manufacturers.

The only aspects of reality of any interest to this page are those parts that users attend to. Not any "underlying reality" crap, but precisely that which users attend to. Users attend to a reality which includes movies, documents, operations on those objects, representations of those objects, et cetera. That is the ONLY reality that matters. And it's with sole reference to THAT reality that an user-interface can be said to be lying to the users.

It is meaningful and important that UIs not lie about things which are of interest to the user. It is completely fucking irrelevant whether or not they lie about the "underlying reality". In fact, it is BENEFICIAL if they lie and lie and lie and lie about that. -- RK

You said:

"In the case of brushed steel, it's clearly giving users a false impression of physicality which impression is a most loathsome and reprehensible lie. There is nothing subjective about this."

I thought you were pointing out that there is no "physical" brushed steel in the underlying reality of the computer--or perhaps that the notion of "physicality" is irrelevant to the underlying reality of the stuff that's being displayed, which is information. -- KenDibble

• It's not information, it's objects with definite characteristics. "Information" is 01010111, text is this page.

Hmm. There are physical objects, like pieces of paper and movie projectors. There are "objects" in ObjectOrientedProgramming -- which are definitely not physical objects. I don't actually believe that electronic documents or movie files fit into either of these definitions very well. More importantly, they are useless without an interface to them. And I am contending that the relative mendaciousness of the appearance of these interfaces is not relevant to how useful they may or may not be. What matters is, can users more or less intuitively figure out how to use them? And one factor that affects the answer to this question is, how closely they match the variable needs and expectations of individual users.

rest moved to SlavishlyImitatingPhysicality

I'm not married to the idea of SlavishlyImitatingPhysicality. I'm pointing out that today's GUIs are largely incomprehensible to non-geeks, regardless of what highly reputable design theorists and expensively-paid designers predicted and expected, and I'm adhering to the thesis that making them more abstract will not help the problem. I'm also reiterating the thesis that broad, sweeping, authoritarian design "manifestos" are doomed to rapid extinction and subsequent ridicule. Representation of information, to be maximally effective, must take into account the fact that different people perceive the world differently; therefore, it must be customizeable to meet individual needs and preferences. If some people prefer graphical representations of ... well ... graphs, let them have them. If others can function better with bookshelves and movie theaters, let them have those.

-- KenDibble

This issue isn't up for debate. It's been extensively studied in HCI research and the consensus is that metaphors like bookshelves and movie theaters impede learning. And the position that people will not need to go beyond the simple needs of a bookshelf / movie theaters is no longer tenable. People need to learn and they need what they're learning to make sense.

Let's take a particular example. In WIMP, you've got a "filesystem" and a "application". There are objects in the filesystem which when moved to the application-space transform themselves radically into completely different objects. In a filesystem, there are nondescript files. Move an appropriate one to a movie player and it transforms into a movie. This is ludicrous. Why is it that the movie can't simply exist in the movie player instead of the filesystem? Why is it that movies disappear from the movie player when you close it? This makes no sense. On the other side, why is it that you have to move a file-movie to a movie player to see it? Again it makes no sense. And how does the user determine which files are movies and which aren't? Again it makes no sense. In WIMP, there are arbitrary restrictions and landmines all over the place.

SlavishlyImitatingPhysicality doesn't make the rules make sense. On the contrary, it guarantees that the rules are nonsense. Because users aren't stupid and they know damned well that software doesn't need to follow the rules of physical objects. And when the completely arbitrary rules of physical reality (and they are arbitrary for software) cause the user to be unable to do something or to have to go through contortions to do it, you can be certain that they'll know who to blame for it.

To get back to learning. Of course it's difficult for the user to learn the rules when the rules make no sense. But the rules of physical reality applied to software don't make sense either. And it's easy enough to design rules that DO make sense. IF you're a designer who bothers to read the HCI literature. Which programmers aren't and is why we're stuck with horrifically bad UIs. -- RK

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CategoryUserInterface