yeah my issue with aiming for “intuitive” interfaces is that intuition is deeply subjective and requires making a lot of assumptions about your users, and I very often feel like UIs touted as “intuitive” are hostile to actually being useful.
it is absolutely possible to design good UI, but people need to stop holding up intuition as the ultimate goal. it matters the first few times someone uses your software, but after that you’re stuck with whatever messy compromises you’ve made to get people in the door. good UI design prioritizes utility, speed, and clarity. the truth is interfacing with any software is almost always a deeply complex problem and you risk steamrolling over that complexity to make it more accessible to people
on the other hand I think pro tools easily has the best UI of any DAW I’ve used so maybe I’m just a crazy person. it is not easy to learn but it is very internally consistent and optimized for extremely fast editing.
FWIW my partner is a professional UX designer and I don’t recall hearing her say the word “intuitive” even once. It hasn’t been in the professional vocabulary of designers during this century, even to bother to argue it shouldn’t be used (this seems to go without saying nowadays).
An example of a UI jargon that she does say constantly is “information hierarchy”. This relates to the principle that the visual look, position and emergence over time of UI elements should correspond to the mental model and process of the user. And it gets tricky because of course different users have different mental models and goals.
Fortunately UIs can be customized to different users based on what the system knows about them, but then again this knowledge could be imperfect. What’s more, there is a reflexive and longitudinal quality to the problem as users develop new mental models of the software over time based on what is presented. This kind of tangle of tradeoffs is why UX design and research becomes a whole profession.
I have come to understand success or failure at adhering to this tricky principle as the main distinguishing factor between good and bad UIs, and probably in some fashion it’s what armchair UI critics are trying to get at with the word “intuitive”.
yeah I mean idk if this is specifically an issue with UI engineers as much as it seems to continue to be a corporate/marketing strategy. it’s still a big selling point and a major complaint from users.
an fpga box i don’t have to assemble that plays megadrive, snes, pce and i guess ps1 off whatever storage i have & connects to either scart or hdmi with no fuss would be sweet
the gb studio and nanoloop integration in the analogue pocket is very cool imo but I don’t need another dedicated device that only plays up to like, what my 1998 PC could emulate when I already have a crtpi and a retroarch iOS w/ a gamevice and a rooted switch
The zero-latency aspect of it seems relevant to speedrunners, although as far as I know the speedrunning community hasn’t shown much enthusiasm for FPGAs yet. I can imagine that might change over time as more and more of the original hardware breaks down though.
Communities that allow emulation on their leaderboards today tend to be the ones where getting access to the original hardware is excessively inconvenient/expensive (I’m thinking of Gameboy Pokemon, where a good experience requires a SNES/Gamecube plus a “Super gameboy” adapter), and given a cheap non-emulation solution they might prefer to go with that instead.
I’m suddenly reminded of the fact that the person who holds ~90% of the records for Mario Kart: Super Circuit (see here) just records his footage by pointing his camera at his GBA SP:
the community was overall really nice in 2017 when I was super into it for a little while there, it did seem worse every time I’ve checked in lately, not sure what’s going on with that, but it’s still one of my favourite examples of “we looked at everything that was good about this early 3D game from the 90s and made a proper modern successor” from this generation
at my request a friend translated a 4gamer interview with the developers of the serial experiments lain psx game (which i’ve expressed my love for on here before) from its 20th anniversary in 2018, if anyone is interested
Siege isn’t an easy game to get into, so it does do a much better job - compared to other FPS games - of weeding out the toxic folks, but there’s always the mute button when someone wants to be a jerk. At some point we should put together a Selectbutton five stack just for casual games and etc.
