I found this to be a particularly excellent and insightful seminar. Scott does a great job of getting you to see UX from a different perspective, and was able to keep me engaged throughout the whole seminar.
Bonus link to Dynamicland, which is mentioned in the talk.
Video description:
This talk focuses on that evil little term “UX/UI,” which is responsible for so much confusion and tension in open-source projects. Not only does it unnecessarily pit programmers against designers, but it also limits our vision of what we could be doing.
In this talk, Scott Jenson gives examples of how focusing on UX – instead of UI – frees us to think bigger. This is especially true for the desktop, where the user experience has so much potential to grow well beyond its current interaction models. The desktop UX is certainly not dead, and this talk suggests some future directions we could >take.
About Scott Scott Jenson has been a leader in UX design and strategic planning for over 35 years. He was the first member of Apple’s Human Interface group in the late '80s, and has since held key roles at several major tech companies. He served as Director of Product Design for Symbian in London, managed Mobile UX design at Google, and was Creative Director at frog design in San Francisco. He returned to Google to do UX research for Android and is now a UX strategist in the open-source community for Mastodon and Home Assistant.
This talk focuses on that evil little term “UX/UI,”
Well, I know, right? People who say “UX/UI” are ignorant and having no idea what they are taking about. “UX” is a designer’s job, while “UI” commonly means “front end programming”. It’s the same where your aunt asks you to fix her printer because you are a programmer.
Very good talk, I personally waste time daydreaming about how radically different the desktop could’ve been, if the xerox whatchamacallit was designed differently
I watched this a couple of days ago. I really enjoyed his talk. Sometimes I feel like I’m talking crazy pills with what people put up with in UI. All his points made total sense to me.
What parts caught your interest?
I have only read the auto-generated transcript as I prefer text to sound/video so I imagine a lot got lost there.The part about translating text editing from desktop ui to mobile ui was interesting, while I mostly use the solution he mentioned being bad (tap where you want to edit) I realized the drag and drop the indicator function is something I use the times when I do miss and that’s really useful.
As someone that is very text focused the dynamic.land landing site was a hellscape for me. All those graphics hiding the relevant information and having to zoom into tiny squares to read the actual text. Using the actual books as links in the everything section instead of a proper text list where I can read the book titles without straining my eyes made me give up and come back here to comment instead.
The Dynamicland website reminds me of the worst of the 00’s, it really turned me off to the whole project
Its funny because I have every so often commented on not liking ai in some ways but would like to see it done with linux or some other libre os. The main difference I have with this guy is he talks in terms of ui/ux but to me its sorta more. He compares to command line and that to me is the comparison point. I think a properly implemented ai os would be as different as adding graphics to what was command line only. I mean for awhile the installers were still command line and eventually graphics became part of it and I could see an os having one. As he says it needs to be an ethical one but to me as well it should be a small one that is specialized in knowing its own technology. By default it should be able to communicate with the user and know as much as possible about itself so it can be used specifically for itself. To me any additional capabilities should be like addons in the browsers. Specific additional models that are subserviant to the master and it uses to have greater capability.
