Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever? [video]

I've given dozens of talks, but this one seems to have struck a chord, as it's my most popular video in quite a while. It's got over 14k views in less than a day.

I'm excited so many people are interested in desktop UX!

Thanks for that nice talk, it felt like a breeze of fresh air with basic & simple yet powerful but alas "forgotten" concepts of UX.

Will look into your other talks.

I concur though per my earlier post I do feel "desktop stagnation" is inevitable and we're already there. You were channeling Don Norman https://jnd.org/ in the best of ways.

It was quite interesting.

Fantastic talk, I found myself nodding in agreement a lot. In my research on next-generation desktop interfaces, I was referred to Ink & Switch as well and man, I sure wish they were hiring. I missed out on the Xerox and Bell Labs eras. I'm also reading this book, "Inventing the Future" by John Buck that details early Apple (there's no reason the Jonathan Computer wouldn't sell like hotcakes today, IMHO).

In my downtime I'm working on my future computing concept[1]. The direction I'm going for the UI is context awareness and the desktop being more of an endless canvas. I need to flesh out my ideas into code one of these days.

P.S. Just learned we're on the same Mastodon server, that's dope.

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[1]: https://systemsoft.works

I think you did a great job of bringing fairly nuanced problems into perspective for a lot of people who take their interactions with their phone/computer/tablet for granted. That is a great skill!

I think an fertile area for investigation would also be 'task specific' interactions. In XDE[1], the thing that got Steve Jobs all excited, the interaction models are different if you're writing code, debugging code, or running an application. There are key things that always work the same way (cut/paste for example) but other things that change based on context.

And echoing some of the sentiment I've read here as well, consistency is a bigger win for the end user than form. By that I mean even a crappy UX is okay if it is consistent in how its crappy. Heard a great talk about Nintendo's design of the 'Mario world' games and how the secret sauce was that Mario physics are consistent, so as a game player if you knew how to use the game mechanics to do one thing, you can guess how to use them to do another thing you've not yet done. Similarly with UX, if the mechanics are consistent then they give you a stepping off point for doing a new thing you haven't done but using mechanics you are already familiar with.

[1] Xerox Development Environment -- This was the environment everyone at Xerox Business Systems used when working on the Xerox Star desktop publishing workstation.

where can we find advanced ux labs ? i'm tired of the figma trend

This was a really fantastic talk and kept me riveted for 40 minutes. Where can I find more?

This was a great talk! I'm interested to hear what you believe the desktop UX ('human interface') issues to actually be, today.

Rightly your talk was not about specific issues or specific solutions, but as a desktop user (macOS primarily, Windows secondary but historically, and KDE a distant third), beyond the mishmash of different UIs, i.e. Windows 11 presenting Windows 3.x or just outright dumb decisions such as transparent everything, what is it that you want to solve for people on the desktop space to make them more /productive/ than they currently are? Especially now that our primary vehicle to information creation and sharing is not the desktop, but the web browser alone?

I'm not into UX much, but listening to someone with such experience and knowledge in their craft, giving a well structured and coherent talk, without shouting or trying to sell anything felt... peaceful?

It's only in the end that I realized I just spent 40 minutes watching the video.

Thanks for sharing it with us!

I post nearly everyone on my blog jenson.org