| ▲ | mghackerlady 2 hours ago |
| I'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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| ▲ | relium 39 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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 I still recommend them even though some of the specifics are out-of-date.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 |
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| ▲ | mghackerlady 34 minutes ago | parent [-] | | It's on my list as well. I really appreciate the MacOS handles progressive disclosure, something most environments either get wrong or misunderstand (caugh caugh GNOME caugh caugh) | | |
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| ▲ | klaussilveira an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I wouldn't use modern Windows as a good reference in user interface and user experience. If anything, is an experiment in user hostility. |
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| ▲ | mghackerlady 44 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Certainly not a reference, rather I'm looking at what each platform does good and trying to combine them in a way that empowers the user rather than fearing them |
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| ▲ | cosmic_cheese an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | RGamma 33 minutes ago | parent [-] | | IMHO if you can afford some setup time just skipping the DE entirely is still the best option. My i3wm setup plus some scripts and services was super lean and efficient. Still buried it for reasons I can't remember, switched distro too, but when I find the time I'm eager to create a tiling WM, wayland native UI on NixOS again. |
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| ▲ | cpeterso 27 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611 |
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| ▲ | hypercube33 18 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| If you're looking at Windows peak was like Win2000 |
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| ▲ | jimmaswell an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | lunar_rover 26 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | It's quality issue from my experience. Nobody ever bothered with polishing the defaults and the "option bombardment" is really bad incoherent design instead of having too many things. I remember spending hours customising the KDE 5 task bar clock, trying to correct the padding. Eventually I gave up customising it and switched to GNOME. KDE app customisation is also a mess compared to something like foobar2000. | |
| ▲ | mghackerlady 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The wealth of things in the KDE settings are things people will likely never change or are things that can be tweaked but don't necessarily need to be. For example, let's look at GNOMEs settings app. It has menus and options for all the things that the average user needs (network settings, mouse and display options, etc.) but leaves out, for example, things that people need to change for specific workflows (like the option to have focus follow the mouse). A settings app should let the user set things needed for the functions of a computer to work properly while separating deeper level customization for those who want it. I think emacs does a very good job at this. You can configure most of the settings people need to be productive in a text editor from the menu bar while leaving the extremely rich customization of emacs to the options menu and elisp config files | |
| ▲ | cosmic_cheese 43 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Can only speak for myself but the problem is that with KDE there's always stuff I need to go in and change because I don't like the defaults, and then I fall into a rabbit hole of endless tweaking from which it's difficult to escape because no matter how much time I spend I can never get it to be just right. |
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| ▲ | jim180 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| would you mind sharing your library of HIGs? |
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| ▲ | mghackerlady an hour ago | parent [-] | | I can give a list of ones I'm studying
CUA (87 and 91 versions)
Awaita
Breeze
Material (primarily 3, but also 2 and 1)
Apples HIG
Microsofts HIG
and Motifs HIG
Some of these aren't technically HIGs and are rather "design-systems" but they all contain the commonality of trying to set up a consistent model for user-interaction in their environment |
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| ▲ | resters an hour ago | parent | prev [-] |
| great idea! would love to star a repo or otherwise follow the project. |
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