Learning from Terminals to Design the Future of User Interfaces
Ever since software design became a thing there&#x27;s been a tug-of-war between visual design and interaction design. And it doesn&#x27;t help that those skills are usually not held by the same person on a design team (even if many visual designers think of themselves as interaction designers).<p>I agree with the general thrust of this piece, and think we&#x27;re in a bit of a dark age of interface design right now. Too much attention is paid to visual design and not enough to interaction design.<p>But while speed of response in a UI is certainly a factor in usability, it&#x27;s not as significant as things like mode, navigation, habituation, vocabulary or consistency. So to that extent I think the article isn&#x27;t really addressing the main problem, which is that time spent on visual design should be better spent on designing for usability.<p>I&#x27;m also not sure what to make of the idea of calling for the terminal to be revised and considered the way forward in user interfaces. Apart from speed, what problem would that solve?<p>And I&#x27;m intrigued when it says interfaces should be &quot;composable by default so that good interfaces aren’t just something produced by the best developer&#x2F;designers in the world, but could be reasonably expected from even junior people in the industry&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m afraid I don&#x27;t understand what that means.