alt Hacker NewsI'm adding this to my repertoire of HIGs to study for a new desktop environment project I'm working on. I'm trying to synthesize the best parts of every computer interaction method, primarily focusing on desktops but looking at mobile designs as well.
There are 2 principle reasons for this project: 1. UNIX desktops objectively suck compared to their Mac and Windows cousins, either being too complex to learn and bombarding the user with options (KDE, XFCE) or being so dumbed down and rigid to be actually usable (GNOME, to a lesser extend CDE) 2. I'm a massive fan of the GNU project and the way it designs software and none of the current desktops integrate well with it (EG: texinfo manuals, emacs-y keybinds, A wealth of customization if you want it but otherwise easy to pick up and use)
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If you haven't already, check out Microsoft's "The Windows® 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering" report summarizing some of the Windows 95 designers' user research:
I'll be keeping an eye out for your DE. For a long time now, the Linux desktop space as a whole has been rather uninspired in my opinion. A few interesting ideas have surfaced within it but failed to become popular for one reason or another, making for a rather stale environment.
That's not to say that it needs to be in constant flux or to be full of radical ideas. If anything, it'd be nice to see more DEs settle into a design and feature set and chase stability, efficiency, and performance over shinies. Rather, I think it would be better if more Linux DEs were built around coherent, opinionated design philosophies that cleanly set them all apart from each other. Even if that design philosphy is just "N platform's desktop, refined to its ultimate form", it's better than the "aimless bag of features" direction that's most common.
I wouldn't use modern Windows as a good reference in user interface and user experience. If anything, is an experiment in user hostility.
Not sure if you have experimented with it yet but COSMIC is a DE made by System76 (creators of Pop!_OS) and manages to get pretty close to what I have been seeking, which is essentially MacOS with tiling. They basically gave up on GNOME and built it in Rust from scratch. Still a few major things like HDR missing but overall it's solid.
You get the tiling without the config that comes with Hyprland, with the added option of toggling between tiled or floating. Settings are minimal but they are slowly adding more when there is enough demand. IDE-style theming is done at system-level so that applications match.
If you want a photocopy of the Go Corp. PenPoint UI guidelines let me know and I'll see if I can dig out a copy from a binder which I got w/ an SDK I purchased years ago --- I really miss PenPoint, and always thought it was one of the better UI environments.
contact info is my user name here at aol.com
If you want some cool unusual UI, check out the HP Logic Analyzers (like the 16500A but there were others). It had a touch interface even though it had a CRT, and it had a knob for scrolling and for some alternative uses too - I think it used an encoder instead of a potentiometer but I may be misremembering. It was a really cool interface, I used it in early 2000s but it was old already by then, but it was really cool. There is a small website that documents its UI but I forgot the url.
How is KDE like that? If you don't go out of your way to change options, you aren't "bombarded" with anything, it just works.
Consider picking up Alan Cooper’s (perhaps somewhat dated) UI books for some useful perspective in thinking about UIs outside the experienced computer user mindset.
If you're looking at Windows peak was like Win2000
> or being so dumbed down and rigid to be actually usable (GNOME, to a lesser extend CDE)
What do you find "dumbed down" and unusable about it?
Press ctrl-alt-T, and a terminal appears. Begin typing.
Press the flag key and a kind of menu thing you can type the name of apps into appears. Type "firefox" or "vscode" as appropriate, begin typing.
It could hardly be made any more straightforward.
great idea! would love to star a repo or otherwise follow the project.
The best book I've ever read on the topic was the classic Mac OS Human Interface Guidelines. I still recommend them even though some of the specifics are out-of-date.
https://dev.os9.ca/techpubs/mac/pdf/HIGuidelines.pdf