#ui (10 quotes)
It will, to be clear, be a transition: UI isn’t just about how to use a computer, it also, as Benedict Evans noted on a recent Interview, embeds critical aspects of how a business works. Open-ended text prompts in particular are a terrible replacement for a well-considered UI button that both prompts the right action and ensures the right thing happens. That’s why it’s the agent space that will be the one to watch: what workflows will transition from UI to AI, and thus from a thick client architecture to a thin one? Current workflows are TBD; future workflows seem inevitable.
— , Thin Is In With today’s bloated software, making a UI more dense in time is more impactful than just squeezing more stuff onto each screen. That’s why Bloomberg’s Terminal is still such a dominant tool in the financial analysis space; it loads data almost instantaneously. A skilled Terminal user can navigate between dozens of charts and graphs in milliseconds. There are plenty of ways to cram tons of financial data into a table, but loading it with no latency is Terminal’s real superpower.
— , UI Density Since his first waking, he’d found twenty-second-century technology easy to work. User interfaces seemed to have settled down to common standards some time before he’d been frozen. Even the language had stabilised, more or less, if not the accents; English was spoken across several worlds now and had to stay comprehensible to everybody, and there was a huge mass of recorded culture, all of which tended to keep the language static. The vehicles and vocabularies of the year 2166 were easy. It was the people he couldn’t figure out.
— , Proxima The system offered a simulation of access, rather than the real thing. Tyler said this with a note of disappointment, even betrayal, but it sounded to me like standard user interface. Despite their excitement, they were in exactly the same position I was: they didn’t understand the core systems at all.
— , In Ascension The best tools enable collaboration that was previously unthinkable.
— , Why Figma Wins We often forget that the purpose of the tools we use at work isn’t to increase our individual productivity, but the entire team’s productivity. Companies themselves often forget this.
— , Why Figma Wins Interface evolves toward transparency. The one you have to devote the least conscious effort to, survives, prospers.
— , Distrust That Particular Flavor Instead of exploring the benefits of flexible web design, we rely on a little white lie: “minimum screen resolution.” These three words contain a powerful magic, under the cover of which we churn out fixed-width layout after fixed-width layout, perhaps revisiting a design every few years to “bump up” the width once it’s judged safe enough to do so. “Minimum screen resolution” lets us design for a contrived subset of users who see our design as god and Photoshop intended. These users always browse with a maximized 1024×768 window, and are never running, say, an OLPC laptop, or looking at the web with a monitor that’s more than four years old.
— , Fluid Grids I don’t want to “explore the interface”. I want to get in, do my shit and get out again. If you think forcing users to explore the interface is such a good idea, try ripping the labels off all the cans of food in your cupboard. A couple of meals of cat-food, chilli and peaches should demonstrate exactly how “fun” this is.
— , If you're a web designer working alongside print designers with little to no web design/dev knowledge, how is your experience? The importance of comprehending context – circumstances and conditions that surround a place, thing, or event – within the mobile environment cannot be overstated. Your content is of little value to users if it ignores the context in which it is viewed, manipulated, and processed.
— , Mobile Web Design