Where will UX Design be in 5 years?

Re:Where will UX Design be in 5 years? by pavlov on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @06:48PM (#14037979)

Sun NeWS should have been that GUI standard, thirty years ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS

There was a simplicity and purity in its approach to front-end interactivity and rendering that completely eludes the HTML+CSS+JS stack we're now stuck with. As the Wikipedia article states...

"NeWS was architecturally similar to what is now called AJAX, except that NeWS coherently: used PostScript code instead of JavaScript for programming; used PostScript graphics instead of DHTML and CSS for rendering; used PostScript data instead of XML and JSON for data representation."

PostScript is basically a graphics-oriented Forth, so it's kind of a weird language to write directly... But it would have been great as a target for all sorts of interesting compilers and GUI tools.

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Re:Where will UX Design be in 5 years? by TuringTest on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @06:20AM (#14041011)

If you have compilers and GUI tools, how does it matter than the underlying layer is HTML+CSS+JSON? The designer shouldn't see it anyway.

Now that we have a web-aware platform (which NeWS was not), nothing stops us to create good UI tools on top - yet it is happening very slowly.

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Re:Where will UX Design be in 5 years? by pjmlp on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @09:48AM (#14042036)

You mean by piling up <div>, <span>, CSS and JavaScript?

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Re:Where will UX Design be in 5 years? by TuringTest on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @11:25AM (#14042791)

Yes, why not? That's no different than piling objects in a GUI widget library to build a tree structure for the layout of a window; except that it has a human-readable string representation.

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Re:Where will UX Design be in 5 years? by pjmlp on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @12:13PM (#14043152)

Sure there is, on a GUI toolkit I can always control at some level how those pixels are drawn, while on a browser I need to hope it does the right thing.

Also there is big performance impact, where piling up divs with CCS requires the right incantations, some browser version specific, for hardware acceleration to kick in.

And in any case, it is impossible to fully replicate the UX of the host platform.

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Re:Where will UX Design be in 5 years? by TuringTest on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @12:32PM (#14043329)

> I can always control at some level how those pixels are drawn

How well does that work when your GUI must be shown in arbitrary devices, with arbitrary screen sizes and arbitrary resolutions? And how well does it reflow when the user changes the viewport size?

In any case, the original post to which I replied was comparing HTML5 to the NeWS platform, which provided a unified UI stack itself, so you wouldn't be able to match the native behavior following that approach either.

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Re:Where will UX Design be in 5 years? by pjmlp on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @01:43PM (#14043947)

That is what layout managers and logical pixels are for.

You are missing the fact that NeWS offered this kind of control.

"The NeWS Book" - https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_sunNeWSThe_11666863

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Re:Where will UX Design be in 5 years? by lj3 on Thursday April 06, 2017 @10:25AM (#14050767)

Didn't NeWS have its own issues? It lost to X11 for a reason...

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/usenix2000/invitedtalks/...

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Re:Where will UX Design be in 5 years? by samkellett on Wednesday April 05, 2017 @07:44AM (#14041346)

you either die a hero or...

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