
Some Users Want Terrible User Interfaces - tvon
http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2010/03/25/some_users_want_terrible_user_interfaces/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IgnoreTheCode+%28ignore+the+code%29
======
ctkrohn
As a former trader, I can say that Bloomberg's UI is, while not perfect, in
general quite good. You can do almost everything straight from the keyboard;
once you get used to it, it's quite fast. In about 30 seconds, I can calculate
the yield on a mortgage-backed security, see what the Treasury market is doing
today, skim a list of top headlines, and show a graph of the stock market
since today's open. Try doing that with Yahoo Finance!

In that sense, it's very much in the spirit of any other command line
environment. But apart from any UI issues, people continue to use it because
of network effects. It's got a great messaging system that everyone uses, and
it's got a common set of tools shared across the entire financial system.

Old habits die hard, too. Even though I'm no longer trading, I still have an
old Bloomberg keyboard on my desk.

~~~
marcinw
Exactly. Just another blog post by someone who doesn't understand why. Not
everything can be web 2.0'd, bubbly and made into an iPhone app.

~~~
Groxx
Replace "can" with "should", and I'll happily agree with you.

I'm a vim fan, personally. The keyboard is _ideal_ for high-speed, high-skill
interaction. Most GUI-centric applications fail completely in this area, where
a lot of old applications had a lot of focus on it. Both is probably the best,
but that's hard work and doesn't always fit with the GUI without it being
cluttered for a "clean" interface.

------
Deestan
This looks like yet another case of designers not "getting" the needs of
anyone who wants to _use_ the software for any length of time.

I took a gander at the comparison on [http://www.portfolio.com/interactive-
features/2007/06/termin...](http://www.portfolio.com/interactive-
features/2007/06/terminals) , and the whole article just annoys me. If they
could focus less on "oh dear, this isn't going to win any design award" and
more on making the software more efficient to use, I am confident they would
not have faced the wholesale rejection that they complain about.

The current design is _easy on the eyes_. A black background with bright text
is easier on the eyes than a glaring white flashlight with some thin black
text on it. (I wonder if the misconception that dark background is bad stems
from print, where it is a legitimate complaint?) Fun test: try using each of
black-on-white and white-on-black at 3AM with bloodshot eyes and see which one
gives you a pounding headache and which one allows you to focus on your work.

The current design is _compact_ , and uses nice color-contrast techniques to
group regions, while the "improved design" wastes a ton of pixels for spacing
between the regions instead. Less eye-travel, less scrolling, less next-page-
ing makes for more efficient (and therefore more relaxed) use.

------
lukev
Emacs or vi won't win any design awards, yet it is the editor of choice for a
lot of hackers, and not just because of machismo.

This is because (A) there is more to design and usability than _visual_
design, and (B) some systems design should be optimized for the expert user,
not the general user.

------
og1
I don't know if I can agree with the stick shift argument. There are benefits
over an automatic transmission, and you can choose the same model of car with
either transmission types. I'd equate the differences to having a settings
page with defaults and then advanced user options. I like a better design than
not, but I think the traders use bloomberg terminal largely for the data that
it displays. I don't think that is is going to change much between the current
and potentially redesigned versions.

~~~
rbranson
Agreed. As far as I'm concerned, a manual transmission and an automatic
transmission are completely different animals altogether. In my mind, his
whole argument fell thru once the statement was made. It's like comparing a
text-based shell with a GUI interface. There are trade-offs to be considered
and neither of them are "better" than the other, they just have different
strengths and weaknesses.

------
rmorrison
_Pride in their ability and job security are two reasons why people may prefer
such user interfaces. Some complex user interfaces may also give people the
perception of having more control._

These statements are incorrect. Command line interfaces (black background, in
my case green text instead of the article's yellow) often _give_ more control
and are more usable than "simple" GUI ones. Especially for complex systems, it
becomes unwieldy when a GUI interface tries to provide graphical settings for
_every_ supported feature. There are a bajillion tabs and windows, and while
the UI designer though of several brilliant one word descriptions for each
settings section/tab, of course they're not completely accurate for the
setting which you're looking, and you end up flipping through way to many
tabs/windows.

------
timthorn
How is a black background with orange text a "blatant UI flaw"?

~~~
gaius
The fascinating thing about graphic designers is, if you use Photoshop then
what do you get, a tool palette, in stark black and white, full of cryptic
symbols. In other words, they tacitly acknowledge that for a busy
professional, learning a "difficult" interface is fully worthwhile. Yet they
continue to peddle "design" as if this isn't the case...

~~~
tvon
In the case of Photoshop I think it's more that an established system with a
large userbase can't significantly change its UI without significant negative
feedback (see Office Ribbon).

The pallet interface is also what we're used to. Most people, were they to set
out to build a pixel pusher app, would start with a basic pallet UI. Unless of
course they were specifically aiming to get away from that.

Also, Photoshop is a perfect example of "The more painful the UI is, the more
satisfied these users are".

------
kmak
BBG's GUI is not pretty, but the real reason people use it, and pay a hefty
fee at that, is because it is full of things people need, and that's an
understatement.

------
lmkg
It's not just UIs. I was in the closed beta for a computer game (friend was a
dev), and one of the goals of the developers was to lower the barriers to
entry for new players to get into the genre. Nearly universally, the self-
described 'hardcore' players decried the changes as dumbing down the game and
removing the skill barriers between new and old players. In fact, some of
those changes were UI upgrades, like making the item shop easier to navigate.
While that one was more generally accepted, there was still a vocal minority
that thought that noobs being able to easily purchase the items they had
earned would lower the competitive aspect of the game.

While there's often an initial loud and forceful resistance to change, it dies
down as people get used to the new system, except for a few die-hards. In the
example above, it took about two months for the community to come around and
realize that removing some obvious pain points let the players focus more on
strategy and whatnot. Of course, it helps that the new system is clearly
superior to the old system. Microsoft Office's Ribbon, on the other hand, is
not clearly superior, so people still bitch about it years after it was
introduced. I happen to think it's superior in theory, but the implementation
was botched a bit (menu names and organization not intuitive), so it's not a
clear upgrade.

------
epochwolf
From the screenshot here: <http://uxmag.com/design/the-impossible-bloomberg-
makeover> I don't see any blatant UI flaw. It looks like a number of unix
tools I use on a daily basis.

Is anyone going to suggest replacing "top" with a friendlier UI?

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
> Is anyone going to suggest replacing "top" with a friendlier UI?

`htop` is that better, friendlier UI...

------
rmorrison
_The Bloomberg terminal is the perfect example of a lock-in effect reinforced
by the powerful conservative tendancies of the financial ecosystem and its
permanent need to fake complexity._

I've noticed relentless attacks on wall street portraying them as dumb people
who do simple work but are just ruthless and greedy as hell. Of course they're
greedy risk takers, and sometimes that causes problems. However, financial
models can get fairly complex and require intelligence to navigate and
utilize.

I was listening to NPR post-Haiti earthquake, and they were interviewing this
woman who was basically borrowing money, going to the Dominican Republic to
buy goods, giving them to stores in Port Au Prince, and then collecting the
money two weeks later. She also charged the shopkeepers interest. When the
earthquake hit, all of her goods were destroyed in the shops, so there was no
way she could repay her debts.

Anyway, the radio hosts kept harping on the fact that she had only a middle
school education, and was doing "extremely sophisticated math, the type that
people on wall street get paid millions for". Now, I very much respect what
that woman (and she was working off her debt post earthquake), but I thought
it was incorrect and misleading to bring in wall street.

There are a lot of other examples, these are just two.

------
gn
Shouldn't this entry link to one of the original articles instead of to some
random, er, symbiont? Sorry if I'm missing something here; I'm the new kid.

~~~
ugh
Yes, but no reason to fling insults around. Linking to articles you enjoyed
and commenting on them is not some kind of despicable act. It’s, in fact,
quite normal.

~~~
gn
I didn't mean to be insulting, it's just that I don't see how this particular
instance of blurb-cum-comment page adds a lot of value. I'd have thought it
would have been more helpful and polite to skip the intro and link to the full
article straight away... but then again I'm new here, which is why I asked.

Does HN encourage this kind of redirection so that the blurb linked to may
serve as an executive summary or tl;dr or whatever you want to call it? Does
HN encourage this kind of redirection to elicit submissions from people with
blogs to draw attention to?

~~~
ugh
In general the original source should be linked. Certainly in this case.

No reason, though, to call the author of the submitted article a “symbiont”.
You could do that if the author of the submitted article is also the submitter
(not the case here), but simply submitting the original article would probably
be more appropriate.

~~~
gn
I see. Thanks for answering.

------
cdr
I'm quite annoyed when I get a GUI with no keyboard shortcuts; it just doesn't
occur to some developers that being able to use the keyboard is what allows
advanced users to become very fast at using the software. Full on command line
capability for very advanced users is great, but rare.

I remember a UI I was given to test for controlling a custom video display;
the operator needed to be able to update things very quickly, but there were
zero keyboard shortcuts defined, so everything had to be done by move-click-
type move-click-type. Keyboard shortcuts hadn't even occurred to the developer
as being important, despite the speed requirement.

------
rmc
I don't know anything about Bloomberg, and I'm willing to bet that as a niche
product aimed at high trained people, it might not be too bad.

But I agree in principle with this article. You can see it sometimes in the
Linux/FLOSS world. People decry anything that means the average user can use
it.

"But you should know how to set up networking on the command line!"

People like that, they like jumping through hoops. They think sensible
defaults are a bad thing. They think you should have to read a 1,000 page
manual before doing something simple.

~~~
habitue
It's actually not about jumping through hoops, it's simple math. Doing a
command in a terminal is O(1). Everything is at your fingertips immediately
and can be combined efficiently with everything else. Doing something in a GUI
is O(n), you have to dig through menus and tabs to get at what you want, and
the result is in a form that can't be recombined or filtered or modified at
will.

The trade-off is that the command line takes a lot of getting used to in terms
of memorizing commands etc. If you don't know any Unix commands, the terminal
is almost completely useless unlike a GUI. For beginners, a GUI is a good way
to explore and get a feeling for how to do things because GUIs explain
themselves.

------
WingForward
If human factors efficiency was the only factor driving interface design, we'd
all be using Dvorak keyboards.

