I'm adding this to my repertoire of HIGs to study for a new desktop environment project I'm working on. I'm trying to synthesize the best parts of every computer interaction method, primarily focusing on desktops but looking at mobile designs as well.
There are 2 principle reasons for this project:
1. UNIX desktops objectively suck compared to their Mac and Windows cousins, either being too complex to learn and bombarding the user with options (KDE, XFCE) or being so dumbed down and rigid to be actually usable (GNOME, to a lesser extend CDE)
2. I'm a massive fan of the GNU project and the way it designs software and none of the current desktops integrate well with it (EG: texinfo manuals, emacs-y keybinds, A wealth of customization if you want it but otherwise easy to pick up and use)
relium 52 minutes ago [-]
The best book I've ever read on the topic was the classic Mac OS Human Interface Guidelines. I still recommend them even though some of the specifics are out-of-date.
It's on my list as well. I really appreciate the MacOS handles progressive disclosure, something most environments either get wrong or misunderstand (caugh caugh GNOME caugh caugh)
If you haven't already, check out Microsoft's "The Windows® 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering" report summarizing some of the Windows 95 designers' user research:
I wouldn't use modern Windows as a good reference in user interface and user experience. If anything, is an experiment in user hostility.
mghackerlady 58 minutes ago [-]
Certainly not a reference, rather I'm looking at what each platform does good and trying to combine them in a way that empowers the user rather than fearing them
cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago [-]
I'll be keeping an eye out for your DE. For a long time now, the Linux desktop space as a whole has been rather uninspired in my opinion. A few interesting ideas have surfaced within it but failed to become popular for one reason or another, making for a rather stale environment.
That's not to say that it needs to be in constant flux or to be full of radical ideas. If anything, it'd be nice to see more DEs settle into a design and feature set and chase stability, efficiency, and performance over shinies. Rather, I think it would be better if more Linux DEs were built around coherent, opinionated design philosophies that cleanly set them all apart from each other. Even if that design philosphy is just "N platform's desktop, refined to its ultimate form", it's better than the "aimless bag of features" direction that's most common.
RGamma 47 minutes ago [-]
IMHO if you can afford some setup time just skipping the DE entirely is still the best option. My i3wm setup plus some scripts and services was super lean and efficient. Still buried it for reasons I can't remember, switched distro too, but when I find the time I'm eager to create a tiling WM, wayland native UI on NixOS again.
cosmic_cheese 49 seconds ago [-]
It's a decent option for those who lean technical and like minimal WMs, but none are really my cup of tea. I've played with several and probably the one I enjoyed most was OpenBox which is the least like a minimal WM and most like a traditional floating DE, but it still wasn't what I was looking for.
jimmaswell 1 hours ago [-]
How is KDE like that? If you don't go out of your way to change options, you aren't "bombarded" with anything, it just works.
cosmic_cheese 57 minutes ago [-]
Can only speak for myself but the problem is that with KDE there's always stuff I need to go in and change because I don't like the defaults, and then I fall into a rabbit hole of endless tweaking from which it's difficult to escape because no matter how much time I spend I can never get it to be just right.
lunar_rover 40 minutes ago [-]
It's quality issue from my experience. Nobody ever bothered with polishing the defaults and the "option bombardment" is really bad incoherent design instead of having too many things.
I remember spending hours customising the KDE 5 task bar clock, trying to correct the padding. Eventually I gave up customising it and switched to GNOME.
KDE app customisation is also a mess compared to something like foobar2000.
mghackerlady 52 minutes ago [-]
The wealth of things in the KDE settings are things people will likely never change or are things that can be tweaked but don't necessarily need to be. For example, let's look at GNOMEs settings app. It has menus and options for all the things that the average user needs (network settings, mouse and display options, etc.) but leaves out, for example, things that people need to change for specific workflows (like the option to have focus follow the mouse). A settings app should let the user set things needed for the functions of a computer to work properly while separating deeper level customization for those who want it.
I think emacs does a very good job at this. You can configure most of the settings people need to be productive in a text editor from the menu bar while leaving the extremely rich customization of emacs to the options menu and elisp config files
hypercube33 31 minutes ago [-]
If you're looking at Windows peak was like Win2000
jim180 2 hours ago [-]
would you mind sharing your library of HIGs?
mghackerlady 59 minutes ago [-]
I can give a list of ones I'm studying
CUA (87 and 91 versions)
Awaita
Breeze
Material (primarily 3, but also 2 and 1)
Apples HIG
Microsofts HIG
and Motifs HIG
Some of these aren't technically HIGs and are rather "design-systems" but they all contain the commonality of trying to set up a consistent model for user-interaction in their environment
resters 2 hours ago [-]
great idea! would love to star a repo or otherwise follow the project.
mghackerlady 1 hours ago [-]
Still in the planning phases. I've had many ideas and am excited to share them
silveira 1 hours ago [-]
I still remember using Palm OS for the first time and having my little mind blown away because there was no save buttons (at least in the version and apps I was using). You edited a document and that's it, it was saved. Like writing on paper.
Nowadays a lot of applications behave like this but back then it was a very different from everything I had ever used.
crims0n 60 minutes ago [-]
I really miss this era. Everything was straight and to the point by design, no processor cycles or memory were (or even could be) wasted. Less layers of abstraction, the entire stack from physics to application could be understood by a single person.
analog31 2 hours ago [-]
To me the best thing about Palm OS was the rule that you’re never more than two taps or a button press away from where you want to be. (I think that’s how I remember it). The beloved early GUIs were all on machines that didn’t do much, comparatively speaking. The problem with modern GUIs is that there’s just too much to learn and remember if it’s presented as symbols rather than text.
Someone 1 hours ago [-]
FTA:
“Minimize Taps
Most information about that data should be accessible in a minimal number of taps of the stylus — one or two.
Desktop user interfaces are typically designed to display commands as if they were used equally. In reality, some commands are used very frequently while most are used only rarely. Similarly, some settings are more likely to be used than others. On Palm Powered handhelds, more frequently used commands and settings should be easier to find and faster to execute.
• Frequently executed software commands should be accessible by one tap.
• Infrequently used or dangerous commands may require more user action.”
lxgr 2 hours ago [-]
Symbols are already a best-case scenario. Too often, modern UIs require hovering over this button or making that swipe gesture to perform a certain action. The antithesis of affordance.
Apocryphon 1 hours ago [-]
Perhaps it's natural then that when Palm went on to make WebOS they included the cards system for quick accessibility.
SunshineTheCat 3 hours ago [-]
I still miss my palm treo, the stylus, and physical keyboard. 20 plus years later and I still cannot use an apple pencil on my iphone... >:(
It puzzles me why there is no proper stylus for an iPhone considering how big some versions are.
RGamma 2 hours ago [-]
In fact my keyboard is still broken from that "misdetected keyboard button press" bug they introduced some time in iOS26. Gotta see whether that's fixed in 26.3. Embarrassing!
cosmic_cheese 52 minutes ago [-]
Typical smartphone aspect ratios are too awkward to be great for use with a stylus in my opinion, and is exacerbated by bezels having been all but eliminated.
If I were to design a smartphone for stylus use, I think it'd look something like an iPad mini, with its squarish ratio and thicker bezels, shrunken down by ~20%.
snozolli 37 minutes ago [-]
My favorite detail of the Palm story is that the founder carried around a block of wood and pretended it was a PDA in order to work out details of the interface.
There are 2 principle reasons for this project: 1. UNIX desktops objectively suck compared to their Mac and Windows cousins, either being too complex to learn and bombarding the user with options (KDE, XFCE) or being so dumbed down and rigid to be actually usable (GNOME, to a lesser extend CDE) 2. I'm a massive fan of the GNU project and the way it designs software and none of the current desktops integrate well with it (EG: texinfo manuals, emacs-y keybinds, A wealth of customization if you want it but otherwise easy to pick up and use)
https://dev.os9.ca/techpubs/mac/pdf/HIGuidelines.pdf
https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611
That's not to say that it needs to be in constant flux or to be full of radical ideas. If anything, it'd be nice to see more DEs settle into a design and feature set and chase stability, efficiency, and performance over shinies. Rather, I think it would be better if more Linux DEs were built around coherent, opinionated design philosophies that cleanly set them all apart from each other. Even if that design philosphy is just "N platform's desktop, refined to its ultimate form", it's better than the "aimless bag of features" direction that's most common.
I remember spending hours customising the KDE 5 task bar clock, trying to correct the padding. Eventually I gave up customising it and switched to GNOME.
KDE app customisation is also a mess compared to something like foobar2000.
I think emacs does a very good job at this. You can configure most of the settings people need to be productive in a text editor from the menu bar while leaving the extremely rich customization of emacs to the options menu and elisp config files
Nowadays a lot of applications behave like this but back then it was a very different from everything I had ever used.
“Minimize Taps
Most information about that data should be accessible in a minimal number of taps of the stylus — one or two.
Desktop user interfaces are typically designed to display commands as if they were used equally. In reality, some commands are used very frequently while most are used only rarely. Similarly, some settings are more likely to be used than others. On Palm Powered handhelds, more frequently used commands and settings should be easier to find and faster to execute.
• Frequently executed software commands should be accessible by one tap.
• Infrequently used or dangerous commands may require more user action.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)
I remember the Giraffe game to learn it.
https://palmdb.net/app/giraffe
If I were to design a smartphone for stylus use, I think it'd look something like an iPad mini, with its squarish ratio and thicker bezels, shrunken down by ~20%.
https://albertosavoia.medium.com/the-palm-pilot-story-1a3424...