I have the highest regard for these terse, but information-dense displays that enable humans to quickly grasp all information they need to do their jobs, and nothing more. This is also something avionics provide - a modern cockpit displays are a work of art in layering needed information for what is happening at the time, both the dense PFD and the much specific that communicate aircraft status.
Yeah, I think this is something a lot folks miss when doing UI/UX these days. There’s an immense focus on new users, not on folks who rely on it day in and day out for actual work. I’ve seen loads of old, incredibly “ugly” UIs that absolutely mog newer friendlier attempts at the same. They’re absolutely intimidating to new users, but once folks learn it they’re indispensable and obviously intentional.
I really wish there was a resurgence of information dense UIs and tools, optimizing for people who use them daily and not “use it once.” It really reminds me of the hate folks have for things like Eclipse or IntelliJ which are daunting at first but once you get over the shock and learn them really are amazing tools.
You’re reminding me of this thread I found a long time ago where someone was talking about the old amber-screen library computers that felt FAST. The gif here shows what it would look like to read Twitter in that manner… <a href="https://x.com/apaprocki/status/1230241842928791552" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/apaprocki/status/1230241842928791552
The difference is that Costco pays their employees well enough to keep them around (notice that Costco prints the start year on each employee badge- average retail length of service is 1 year, Costco keeps people around for decades) and so they can learn to use this older software and master it. Most retail operations optimize their inventory management for new people, because they don't expect someone to stick around long enough to master it.
My wife worked at a small regional chain of pharmacies that had an ancient MS-DOS based EHR system. And she mastered that system to the point where people would call her when she was home with me and ask her how to do something, and she would walk them through "okay, hit tab three times then shift-F12 then enter the frabble and then alt-F3 to go to the next screen and enter the drabble." It was difficult to learn it, but if you mastered it you could do everything you needed to do from just muscle memory while you were on the phone arguing with the doctor's office that their prescription was not correct and needed to be changed.
Then the small chain got bought by a national player and their brand new GUI system was brought in. It was a lot easier to learn- discoverability was a lot higher with menus and drop-downs and all of that. But if you stuck around to master it, you could never be as fast as you could with the older system. And that emphasis on quickly integrating new employees- but lower payoff for experience in employees- was clear in every choice that national chain made. They wanted their employees to be completely interchangeable, which meant that they didn't care if you had six months of experience or four years of experience or three decades of experience.
Same story at my bank. Tellers used to speed run through a TUI, hitting tab and other key combos to accomplish things. Now it's a long wait with them mousing around.
The best thing about all character-based applications I've ever used is the keyboard buffer. Even if you're using a TUI on a system that has a slow backend, it almost always blocked the thread and didn't consume from the buffer during waits, so if you knew the sequence of keys was "Total, F1, 1, Enter, Enter, Tab, 2125551234, F10, 1, Enter" you could just enter all those keystrokes as fast as you could and the system would eventually catch up with you, meanwhile you were bagging a purchase or counting out the cash, whatever.
The GUI also has lag - especially in the era of web-technologies-bloat, more lag than ever - but whether touchscreen or mouse there can't be a buffer, so each lag requires you to stare waiting for the next UI to be drawn.
Unfortunately web-inspired TUI toolkits start to lose that property. Hit a key too fast, before the next screen runs code to attach its event listener? Sorry your key is lost.
Clickable web GUIs that don't lose your interactions are even worse. The email client I have to use at work buffers your "mark as read" click when it's loading new letters and applies it to the one that's under your cursor when it finishes loading them.
This is a good point: you can build character-oriented interfaces "for dummies" — IBM i née OS/400 which Costco uses is actually good at this, with a standard interaction design centered around menus and form interfaces that map directly to CLI commands — and information-dense GUIs, but you can't very well build point-and-click interface with keyboard-style buffering.
Agreed. Also, you can try to satisfy both new and expert users. It take more thought and design, but that principle is in both Nielsen's Heuristics and Shneiderman's Golden Rules.
> Most retail operations optimize their inventory management for new people, because they don't expect someone to stick around long enough to master it.
Somehow I think I failed to think very deeply about this very important link! The twin happenings of the elimination of any retail career that pays a living wage, and the availability of GUIs and especially touch-screen GUIs happened simultaneously over a couple of decades, and the touch-screen dummy interface naturally won out. Not just because training that used to take two days for the 'green-screen' system I learned in 2001 now takes 15 minutes of instruction (and even that training is rather redundant for anyone over 95 IQ) -- also because the massive differential in productivity of an expert vs. new cashier/teller/pharmacy tech/etc. only even manifests if people are on the job long enough to become expert. And they're really not anymore.
Kinda why I prefer self-checkout. Even though the UI is firmly in "dummy" territory and I have to use a touch screen, I've used the current iteration of the self-checkout software more transactions than most cashiers I meet at Target, since they seem to have been there about 2 weeks on average.
The de-skilling of retail clerk I think predates even the GUI. I think it goes back to the laser/upc/database systems of the 1970's and 1980's.
In 1970 retail clerk is a medium-skill medium prestige job. There were lots of stories of people who started as a retail clerk and end up as CEO, and even people who aren't that ambitious could still carve out a comfortable middle class lifestyle as a retail clerk. But that's because there was a reward for experience. Before the laser/UPC/DB system rolled out, you needed at a glance to be able to know the price of an orange, or the difference between the expensive and the cheap mushroom. Because there would be a paper tag on every cheap mushroom that said "10 cents", but what if someone swapped that paper tag onto the expensive mushrooms that were supposed to cost 30 cents? You needed to know the difference, and have the real prices memorized to be able to be fast enough to keep the customers happy.
This also meant that you couldn't have a large retail store (something at the scale of the modern Walmart or Target), because you couldn't get enough clerks who could remember all the necessary prices and so inevitably you would lose money to tag switching. Department stores solved this by forcing you to buy each good separately in each department- you would pay for your housewares in the housewares section and your clothes in the clothes section, and they had another whole army of clerks in the basement managing store credit to keep it low-friction enough. But that's very high-touch, demanding a lot of workers, and those people still have the rewards of experience so they are all comfortable careers.
But then the laser/upc/database system came out. And suddenly you would get a natural language description of the item (or even a picture in the modern systems) from scanning the UPC. And you could scale the store up as much as you wanted, just needed to buy a bigger hard disk for the database, so the stores tilted more towards capital and less towards labor. And that eviscerated the career path of most retail stores, because store owners no longer believed that keeping retail clerks around benefited them.
This is machines hallowing out a job and alienating workers from their labor for the benefit of capital- exactly what Marx had described a century earlier for factory workers in Das Kapital. But for reasons of class and gender we mostly ignore retail clerks so it doesn't seem to have attracted near as much attention.
I think that's the 'push/pull' problem though. Information dense UI that takes months or years to learn, or something that may be less information dense, but a monkey can learn it in minutes.
For me, it's typically a balance between speed and efficency of data to help you make decisions quickly, but should be able to be used by anyone with technical experience.
So less of both. Less 'pretty UI' and less "omfg here is every piece of information shoved together and you need to be a wizard to understand it"
The same for hardware. Where I used to live, the ticket vending machines had you punch in your 3-digit station code, adult/child, single/return, and boom ticket issued. You had like 6 button pushes and could buy a ticket in seconds.
In this video I made the mistake of using a debit card (still very slow to clear in 2005) which adds the delay <a href="https://youtu.be/pQCktMWR94Q?t=7" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/pQCktMWR94Q?t=7
They replaced them with Windows-based touchscreen vending machines where each screen selection took as long as the whole former selection process took just to load.
rbanffy · · focus · HN ↗
rubyn00bie · · focus · HN ↗
I really wish there was a resurgence of information dense UIs and tools, optimizing for people who use them daily and not “use it once.” It really reminds me of the hate folks have for things like Eclipse or IntelliJ which are daunting at first but once you get over the shock and learn them really are amazing tools.
apaprocki · · focus · HN ↗
raldi · · focus · HN ↗
apaprocki · · focus · HN ↗
mandevil · · focus · HN ↗
The difference is that Costco pays their employees well enough to keep them around (notice that Costco prints the start year on each employee badge- average retail length of service is 1 year, Costco keeps people around for decades) and so they can learn to use this older software and master it. Most retail operations optimize their inventory management for new people, because they don't expect someone to stick around long enough to master it.
My wife worked at a small regional chain of pharmacies that had an ancient MS-DOS based EHR system. And she mastered that system to the point where people would call her when she was home with me and ask her how to do something, and she would walk them through "okay, hit tab three times then shift-F12 then enter the frabble and then alt-F3 to go to the next screen and enter the drabble." It was difficult to learn it, but if you mastered it you could do everything you needed to do from just muscle memory while you were on the phone arguing with the doctor's office that their prescription was not correct and needed to be changed.
Then the small chain got bought by a national player and their brand new GUI system was brought in. It was a lot easier to learn- discoverability was a lot higher with menus and drop-downs and all of that. But if you stuck around to master it, you could never be as fast as you could with the older system. And that emphasis on quickly integrating new employees- but lower payoff for experience in employees- was clear in every choice that national chain made. They wanted their employees to be completely interchangeable, which meant that they didn't care if you had six months of experience or four years of experience or three decades of experience.
hylaride · · focus · HN ↗
xp84 · · focus · HN ↗
The GUI also has lag - especially in the era of web-technologies-bloat, more lag than ever - but whether touchscreen or mouse there can't be a buffer, so each lag requires you to stare waiting for the next UI to be drawn.
kccqzy · · focus · HN ↗
orthoxerox · · focus · HN ↗
jasomill · · focus · HN ↗
peterleiser · · focus · HN ↗
xp84 · · focus · HN ↗
Somehow I think I failed to think very deeply about this very important link! The twin happenings of the elimination of any retail career that pays a living wage, and the availability of GUIs and especially touch-screen GUIs happened simultaneously over a couple of decades, and the touch-screen dummy interface naturally won out. Not just because training that used to take two days for the 'green-screen' system I learned in 2001 now takes 15 minutes of instruction (and even that training is rather redundant for anyone over 95 IQ) -- also because the massive differential in productivity of an expert vs. new cashier/teller/pharmacy tech/etc. only even manifests if people are on the job long enough to become expert. And they're really not anymore.
Kinda why I prefer self-checkout. Even though the UI is firmly in "dummy" territory and I have to use a touch screen, I've used the current iteration of the self-checkout software more transactions than most cashiers I meet at Target, since they seem to have been there about 2 weeks on average.
mandevil · · focus · HN ↗
In 1970 retail clerk is a medium-skill medium prestige job. There were lots of stories of people who started as a retail clerk and end up as CEO, and even people who aren't that ambitious could still carve out a comfortable middle class lifestyle as a retail clerk. But that's because there was a reward for experience. Before the laser/UPC/DB system rolled out, you needed at a glance to be able to know the price of an orange, or the difference between the expensive and the cheap mushroom. Because there would be a paper tag on every cheap mushroom that said "10 cents", but what if someone swapped that paper tag onto the expensive mushrooms that were supposed to cost 30 cents? You needed to know the difference, and have the real prices memorized to be able to be fast enough to keep the customers happy.
This also meant that you couldn't have a large retail store (something at the scale of the modern Walmart or Target), because you couldn't get enough clerks who could remember all the necessary prices and so inevitably you would lose money to tag switching. Department stores solved this by forcing you to buy each good separately in each department- you would pay for your housewares in the housewares section and your clothes in the clothes section, and they had another whole army of clerks in the basement managing store credit to keep it low-friction enough. But that's very high-touch, demanding a lot of workers, and those people still have the rewards of experience so they are all comfortable careers.
But then the laser/upc/database system came out. And suddenly you would get a natural language description of the item (or even a picture in the modern systems) from scanning the UPC. And you could scale the store up as much as you wanted, just needed to buy a bigger hard disk for the database, so the stores tilted more towards capital and less towards labor. And that eviscerated the career path of most retail stores, because store owners no longer believed that keeping retail clerks around benefited them.
This is machines hallowing out a job and alienating workers from their labor for the benefit of capital- exactly what Marx had described a century earlier for factory workers in Das Kapital. But for reasons of class and gender we mostly ignore retail clerks so it doesn't seem to have attracted near as much attention.
brewtide · · focus · HN ↗
AbsurdCensor · · focus · HN ↗
For me, it's typically a balance between speed and efficency of data to help you make decisions quickly, but should be able to be used by anyone with technical experience.
So less of both. Less 'pretty UI' and less "omfg here is every piece of information shoved together and you need to be a wizard to understand it"
kalleboo · · focus · HN ↗
In this video I made the mistake of using a debit card (still very slow to clear in 2005) which adds the delay <a href="https://youtu.be/pQCktMWR94Q?t=7" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/pQCktMWR94Q?t=7
They replaced them with Windows-based touchscreen vending machines where each screen selection took as long as the whole former selection process took just to load.