“But software design is just vibes!”
No, it’s absolutely not. It’s an extremely well researched topic with an abundance of studies, literature and scientific articles over the last 75 years.
Here’s some books to get you started. They’re over 30 years old.
I’d add a recommendation for Raskin’s The Humane Interface. The recommendations are not all good but the introduction to how to think about interface design is fantastic.
@david_chisnall @thomasfuchs Just wondering, which suggestions do you dislike? I think he's right on the money about the uselessness of icons, personally.
I need to reread it, but I recall him being very text centric. A lot of the leap stuff that he talks about would be quite painful in an editor that supported both images and text (which wasn’t a concern for the CAT) and would not map at all into non-destructive video editors (the UI I was thinking the most about the first time I read it).
Raskin’s First Law should be top of mind for anyone writing any program with users though.
@david_chisnall @thomasfuchs Yeah that's totally fair. I tend to highly favor text based UIs (but despise command lines, actually) but there are certainly plenty of things which are irreducibly non-textual
Raskin’s arguments were also the reason that we built an undo system on top of a versioned document model in CoreObject. Our idea was that every editing operation would be persisted, immediately (and could also be sent across a network for collaborative editing). Undo was non-destructive and took you to an earlier state and introduced a new branch in the history, which you could visually navigate and pull edits from another branch and marge them if you wanted to.
This meant that you didn’t lose undo history when you rebooted and you had no UI abstraction for ‘save’. Instead, you would have had a checkpoint operation, where you have a name to a specific document state so that you could easily return to it (and meant templates were just old checkpoints: want two documents starting from the same template? Just instantiate that checkpoint and start editing). You’d also have an export operation for serialising a snapshot of the document in some format for external consumption. Export would not include the history unless explicitly instructed to, so you wouldn’t accidentally leak the history.
@thomasfuchs Are they still relevant?
@bart unless humans changed (hint: they didn’t), yes 100%
