
The Utopian UI Architect - kawera
https://medium.com/re-form/the-utopian-ui-architect-34dead42a28#.emrat4pnv
======
dkural
I think Bret Victor is a living genius. So much of what is designed today
implicitly accepts the layers of nonsense imposed on us as "the way to do
things", convinced that nothing better is possible. It is somehow hard to see
when you are the person who prefers a horse cart to a car, accusing Model T of
being impractical, if it was so great why is everyone using carriages etc.
claiming it's a "well debugged and understood system". He is attempting a
rethink of the entire field starting from first principles, asking at every
decision point if we needlessly separate modalities. He is one of the few
people that gets me excited about computing and its future.

~~~
pgodzin
I have never followed him before and the article does little mention his
actual accomplishments. Do you think he is a living genius because of his
talks/ideas or has he actually implemented anything revolutionary to back up
those ideas?

~~~
dkural
My opinion is based on his writings and talks, available on his personal
homepage worrydream.com ~ he has prototyped a number of his ideas as
interactive webpages, responsive development environments, demos as part of
his talks etc. The genius scale is not usually known to be an objective and
absolute system of measurement :) Part of the magic is (I believe) that he was
outside of any narrow corporate project, or the confines of the paper
publishing & grant system; and was able to explore and develop some of the
ideas with the free thinking and depth required on his own time - in this day
unfortunately true freedom today lies outside of both industry and academia.

I also reject in more essential terms the line of thinking around "actually
implemented anything revolutionary as opposed to talks/ideas". Don't
underestimate the power of well-argued ideas. See re: horse carriages above.
You need to start somewhere, and that somewhere is ideas, sketches, equations,
talks. If it doesn't make sense to you, fine. If it makes sense to some
people, they'll go and use, reuse, some of the ideas in a hundred different
projects and implementations. The turing machine was a mathematical device
invented to solve a rather abstract mathematical / logical problem. It took
some time to get to the iPhone from there. You need free space for the next
Turing Machine to come from. Those types of ideas are very rare.

Side note - It is curious to me that some of the most interesting projects
start out as "side projects" of PhD students, since they have the free time
(the true quantity of which rarely admitted), usually not directly related to
narrow research focus of whatever P.I. they work below minimum wage for asked
them to work on.

~~~
vxNsr
I might be missing something but a website that intentionally breaks scrolling
and wrecks havoc with the standard page display doesn't really speak too
highly of UX genius.

I'm not saying he's not a genius, I'm just frustrated that he's making such
elementary mistakes on his own website for the sake of graphic design
"beauty". It's almost ironic because he has articles up there that kinda rant
about just this type of thing...

Everything about the website screams scroll down, (Chrome Win10) but the
scroll wheel doesn't work and there is no middle click option(!), On MSEdge
the scroll does work but veeeeeery veeeeeeery sloooooooowly (and still no
middle click).

~~~
calvins
What you're missing is that Bret Victor isn't the author of that web page.

If you want to some of his inspired UX, view
[https://vimeo.com/67076984](https://vimeo.com/67076984)

~~~
vxNsr
Ah thanks, I knew someone with the amount of work (just from that page)
wouldn't make such an obvious blunder.

~~~
buovjaga
If you mean [http://worrydream.com/](http://worrydream.com/) it is made by
Bret Victor himself.

------
Animats
One of the most useful concepts in user interfaces is not visual. It comes
from the original Macintosh User Interface Guidelines. "You should never have
to tell the computer something it already knows."

Do your web site forms do form fill properly?

~~~
jonah
There's an RFC for that.

[http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3106](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3106)

------
frik
Good that he works now for SAP. The software needs a new UI.

The SAP ERP software UI dates back to the 80s, and is still basically all text
based, even the tables are still made out of ASCII chars.

Screenshot of an text based table (SAP ERP):
[https://mysapbasis.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/screenshot1.j...](https://mysapbasis.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/screenshot1.jpg)
... the table borders are drawn over the all text (= a lot of space and tab
chars) based table.

Textfields cannot be longer than 40 chars, multiline textfields don't exist
(basically one textfield per line) and it looks like a dinosaur UI in 2015 -
optimized for 14" CRT monitors. Their HTML4 Netweaver UI and Java
"experiments" failed.

The ABAP script language dates back to the 80s too and looks like COBOL.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABAP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABAP)

~~~
edwinnathaniel
I was under the impression he works indirectly for SAP via this company that
SAP funded (search for similar situation with Vi Hart and/or Alan Kay).

Can't argue the old SAP ERP looks outdated (but ... somehow it works :)).

Recently SAP released a new product called Cloud for Analytics, here's some of
the screenshot:

[http://www.sapcloudanalytics.com/images/carousel-
plan.png](http://www.sapcloudanalytics.com/images/carousel-plan.png)

[http://www.sapcloudanalytics.com/images/carousel-
discover.pn...](http://www.sapcloudanalytics.com/images/carousel-discover.png)

[http://www.sapcloudanalytics.com/images/carousel-
visualize.p...](http://www.sapcloudanalytics.com/images/carousel-
visualize.png)

[http://www.sapcloudanalytics.com/images/carousel-
predict.png](http://www.sapcloudanalytics.com/images/carousel-predict.png)

There are still plenty rooms to improve ...

PS: I'm part of the Cloud for Analytics team.

~~~
vxNsr
(disclaimer: I'm a 23 yr old IT dude) See it's interesting, I would rather use
the old UI over what you show here, it could be I'm not really seeing
everything, but it looks like all you did was update the graphics and add more
white space without adding any real UX improvements, I shudder thinking about
trying to explain this "improvement" to whichever dept (finance? marketing?
analytics?) this software is meant for. The one thing all my colleagues hate
is not being able to see all the data (well really, not being able to see as
much data as possible) give 'em cramped boxes over huge whitewashed screens
any day of the week.

~~~
jcagalawan
I worked on the table for a different SAP product (Lumira) and I think ours
works pretty well. It's for business analysts and lets you stack hierarchies
in a bunch of different ways. For a large overview of data, it's better to use
a different visualization anyways which was a click away in Lumira.

[http://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-127432-7...](http://scn.sap.com/servlet/JiveServlet/showImage/38-127432-731382/Slide20.PNG)

------
errantmind
I really enjoy Bret Victor's talks. Here is one where he discusses his driving
principle: Creators need an immediate connection to what they create (e.g.
immediate feedback)

[http://worrydream.com/#!/InventingOnPrinciple](http://worrydream.com/#!/InventingOnPrinciple)

~~~
TheAceOfHearts
Along these lines, this is why I love hot-loading code. For example, there's
react-hot-loader [0] (which was actually superseded already by react-transform
[1]). This enables you to iterate much more quickly while you're building an
interface. Along that same line, the same guy created redux and redux-devtools
[2], which also enables you to iterate quickly on application code.

I've been using hotloading css, react and redux for the past few months and
it's an amazing experience. It enables you to iterate quickly and see changes
immediately. (Admittedly, as a project grows, there's a small delay between
saving and seeing the change. I'm not sure if it's avoidable or not... But
it's still much faster than having to do a full-page reload.)

[0] [https://gaearon.github.io/react-hot-
loader/](https://gaearon.github.io/react-hot-loader/)

[1] [https://github.com/gaearon/react-transform-
boilerplate](https://github.com/gaearon/react-transform-boilerplate)

[2] [https://github.com/gaearon/redux-
devtools](https://github.com/gaearon/redux-devtools)

~~~
dirtyaura
A small side track to the topic: I've been evaluating data querying, caching
(or syncing) options for building modern JS apps. Public GraphQL solutons seem
not to be practical enough for fast prototyping yet, but redux looks a
promising middle-ground. Have you done production apps on it? Any downsides?

~~~
TheAceOfHearts
I'm currently in process of rewriting our work application from AngularJS to
Redux.

The downside with redux is that simpler things can take a bit more code than
you might wish. You have to add an action handler / reducer, action creator,
etc. However, it's generally very easy to extend previously written code, and
it's very easy to reason about the data / logic flow.

Another pitfall with redux is that it doesn't provide any help when you have
to react to changes. A few days ago in reddit I wrote a small example
explaining what I mean [0].

You might be interested in checking out relay-local-schema [1], it looks
promising for experimenting with GraphQL and Relay.

[0]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/3u0167/getting_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/3u0167/getting_started_with_redux_a_free_30part_video/cxbg9s4)

[1] [https://github.com/relay-tools/relay-local-
schema](https://github.com/relay-tools/relay-local-schema)

------
robmccoll
It's great that he questions everything and proposes radical new approaches,
but at some point, you have to actually commit and go build something.
Revolutionary ideas and spirit are not a revolution.

I also have a lot of highly-opinionated grandiose ideas. Perhaps I should put
up a website and start giving talks.

~~~
dirtyaura
I totally disagree. For example, Edward Tufte never built some grandiose
project around his ideas, but influenced thousands of people with his books,
projects and talks. We might evaluate his legacy in 50 years, and it might be
bigger than any single application of his ideas.

Same with Victor, I think it's better that he focuses on the exploring the
idea space and finds even better approaches. If his ideas are any good, there
will be modern Henry Fords that will assemble teams and resources and will
build businesses around his ideas. Henry Fords will potentially reap millions
of dollars of profits.

Bret Victor will have his legacy as a reseacher and explorer of ideas. He will
never get tons of money out of his ideas, but it seems that it is the path he
has deliberately chosen. His name might be mentioned in human computer
interface research 100 years from now, alongside Engelbart, Kay, etc.

------
kepano
Fascinating. Didn't realize how hungry I was for more of the human story
behind Bret.

It certainly makes me wonder how much creative talent is locked up within big
corporations. All you end up seeing is super-refined output, like a single
polished grain of sake rice. Since leaving Apple it's undoubtable that Bret
has made much more far-reaching contributions that can be attributed to to his
process of thinking aloud and publishing his thought process.

------
auggierose
I find Bret Victors talks quite inspiring and would love to collaborate with
him on interfaces for collaborative mathematics. I think he is misguided
though on the "Kill Math" angle. There are two different kinds of maths. 1)
The well-understood one, and for this kind of math there should actually exist
much better interfaces for it than the "freakish manipulation of abstract
symbols". 2) The new one, where you are not sure about your concepts yet etc.
For the new one it is ALSO (maybe even more so?) important to be able to
approach it via (virtual) physical experiments / models, but in the end the
new territory has to be mapped out by symbols. By logic. Only then the full
power of math can be realized. But of course there is no reason why working
with logic should NOT be supported by the computer; actually I would think the
computer is ideally suited to help with that task.

------
keithpeter
worrydream.com has a lot of very interesting material on it that is presented
in a way that will appeal to students in the 16+ age range. Fortunately, the
College network PCs do have Chrome available (not happening in Firefox on
Linux).

I did notice that the OA is illustrated with really nice pictures of a
studio/workspace furnished with books, notice boards and desks alive with
paper illustrations. when I read the tag line...

 _" An ex-Apple interface designer’s 40-year plan to redesign not just the way
we use computers, but the way we think with them"_

... I thought the article might be about Jef Raskin and the _Humane Interface_
for a moment.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jef_Raskin)

[http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheHumaneInterface](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheHumaneInterface)

------
agumonkey
They could have quoted Jaron Lanier, he used to make people impersonate
I-cant-recall-what-insect in VR suits, mapping various limbs and senses
together. To move you had to remap your own senses of mobility to the animal.
A great way to rethink and learn.

