As a UI/UX agency that focusses on B2B SaaS, I’ve always found Fantasy UIs fascinating. It’s the complete opposite of the simple & clean interfaces clients ask us to design.
I’ve spent some time thinking about why these Fantasy UIs are so fascinating despite the fact they seem not very user friendly.
My conclusion was that fantasy Interfaces are very much like the early web. Lots of moving parts (dancing banana gifs) and you had to figure out the navigation on each website you visited. Today, everything looks and feels the same and we lost the creative spirit of interface building.
Figuring out the interface might not be best practice. But at the same time, I remember sharing websites with friends purely based on how fun the navigation and overall controls were.
We lost the Art of interface building and turned it into a complete science. There are arguments for both sides.
My wish is that... Hopefully.. one day, someone will contact us with a project that allows us to build the first fantasy UI for a real-world SaaS product.
> We lost the Art of interface building and turned it into a complete science. There are arguments for both sides.
It was turned into a literal science by Xerox, IBM, and Microsoft (through the 90s) that involved actual study of the human body, perception, haptics, material science, light, psychology, human biases and preconceptions, holistic purpose, advances in micro mechanical engineering, usability studies, panel testing, and actual research (for just one example out of thousands, read the story behind the creation of the trackpoint [0]). Then different types of people wearing different hats became involved in the decision making process and the target consumer base shifted in a certain direction and “science” didn’t cut it any more.
Modern UI/UX is absolutely not driven by any science apart from sales conversion rates.
I'm not convinced we even turned it into science. I think we turned it into a pseudo-science of confirmation biases, poor contextual understanding and even distain for our own users while actively devaluing the role that design plays in interaction.
No, most todays UI is not really great. On websites you often can't navigate just with the keyboard and shortcuts does not work at all. An a really terrible new UI thing are these on / off sliders. So often is not clear where the slider is, because it's not clear if the slider or the background is colored. Also a lot of new software comes with shortcuts, but you would need 3 hands to push all buttons for it.
Also for me, all the Google style, round, flat, to much color, I just can't see it anymore. I hate the look so much.
Why is keyboard use the pinnacle of UI? Pretty much every device has some kind of mouse-like device attached to it, and trackpads with good scrolling (e.g. Apple ones) are a wonderfully intuitive way to control movement.
I get that HN likes using the keyboard for stuff like terminals, I do too. But web pages aren’t terminal applications.
I was with a fortune 10 company as a tech executive, we had an effort to move all of the call center technology over to web based technologies in a modernization effort. The call center lost over 15 million dollars in revenue in the first week when we moved from the old UNIX terminal app to the web UI, after an extensive study it was deemed the issue was loss of speed due to lack of keyboard shortcuts and navigation. For power-users keyboard shortcuts allow them to navigate and use the app up to 3 to 4 times faster than a mouse based interface. If you ever watch a 3D artist work in Max, Maya or Blender this becomes evident quickly. It is not that keyboard use is the pinnacle, it is that in high use cases it saves time and money.
The situation you’re describing is one where trained professionals use one and only one UI.
Web sites aren’t like that. They’re used by a vast number of people of differing technical ability, and different sites do incredibly different things.
I’m not saying a keyboard UI is never right. I’m saying that it isn’t universally right.
I do this for a living and I am constantly amazed at the amount of money we are paid to make things worse. Of course we add in things like chat, email, and other channels but the day to day experience of the users usually gets a lot worse.
The systems we put in are easier to use and have more controls around who can do what. It makes the users more interchangeable and cuts training time. The cost of that is the top speed that users can get stuff done is drastically reduced.
Every so often my mouse or track pad bonks out. Less and less as time goes on, but happens.
In those cases, I might want or need to use the web for some reason before I get a new one (to locate or purchase a new one if nothing else). I definitely have appreciated sites that take keyboard navigation into consideration at those times.
The keyboard is a common UI mechanism. Why not try to design the site to increase access via diversity of mechanisms instead of dismissing them due to low use rates?
I agree with some of the other posters that something has gone awry with UI testing and design. A lot of it is good, but there's these huge holes that pop up all the time. Usually it feels like something that's a trend that's being applied inappropriately... Other times obvious considerations seem completely ignored.
In general I think there's problems with UI trying to be too clever and novel, or too "fresh" without focusing critically on functionally. I'm all for clever, novel, and fresh, as long as it's actually driven by function and not using the UI to implicitly assert some kind of status of taste or ability.
Because not everyone can use a mouse or similar UI interaction device, but not only is a keyboard generally usable, there are a ton of accessibility devices that can mimic a keyboard's signals. Not nearly as simple to emulate a mouse or similar pointing device.
Saying "I can't navigate a website just using my keyboard" is sort of like saying "I can't drive my car just using the steering." Well, of course you can't. You're not supposed to be able to, unless you have some sort of assistance hardware/software loaded that articulates/emulates the missing control(s).
I'm a little confused how a person can play a 3D video game with just a keyboard, but a website is beyond control? I don't think a car is a good comparison as it is in 3D space unlike a website.
Because there’s a very small defined set of actions a person can take in such games: backwards, forwards, left, right, etc.
By comparison pages have dozens of links, form fields, menus, etc. It’s not that they can’t be navigated with the keyboard alone, it’s that it’s rarely the most efficient way of doing it. Clicking a link will always be quicker than pressing tab X number of times to select it.
Tab is not how most keyboard only users navigate web pages. There are an entire set of built-in keyboard navigation utilities for those that cannot use a pointing device.
If I have never learned this entire set, I bet you that my mum won't learn it. Most users not only aren't power users - they have zero interest in becoming power users.
Just when is a thread about VT terminals also an HN front now, have you ever seen how fast people could navigate on those terminals 20, 30 years ago. No website can do the same thing today, no mater how much CPU power you have.
What proof do you have that you're "not supposed to be able to" navigate a website with only your keyboard? What authoritative statement dictates that the web should require usage of a mouse? If you take a second to look at that statement, you should be able to see how it is quite ableist (possibly unintentionally).
Not everyone can use a mouse or similar UI interaction device, but not only is a keyboard generally usable, there are a ton of accessibility devices that can mimic a keyboard's signals. Not nearly as simple to emulate a mouse or similar pointing device.
You also have to realize that it's a feedback cycle, the more interfaces that converge the more users just get used to them, over and over, so decisions get made that tighten then loop. And then you get something like Unity and gnome 3 :D
>>I’ve spent some time thinking about why these Fantasy UIs are so fascinating despite the fact they seem not very user friendly.
Fantasy UIs are often flashed up as eye candy to communicate high complexity for power users that an outside observer (i.e. movie viewer) can only dream of properly mastering yet still able to grasp the "key message".
Yes, this must be it. Real-world UI design aims to be as easily understandable and usable as possible, even if it falls short. In movies, they want to convey that the hackers/astronauts/super heros have deep expertise. It would be frustrating if you saw them using a familiar Windows Start Menu because you'd feel like you yourself could just step in and do their job.
They could (and for hacker movies, sometimes do) just use a command line, but then it's hard to convey what they're doing to an audience. For a similar reason, important text in a fantasy UI is impractically large, so it's visible when the UI itself is only a fraction of the movie screen.
I hate to be a downer, but these fantasy UIs are also completely unusable. They have no actual users, so they can go all-in on flashy complexity without having to solve the problem of "how do I let an expert get work done most efficiently." I have never seen a fantasy UI with spreadsheets, but the fact of the matter is that Excel is much closer to a power-user interface than anything you see in movies.
Not a downer at all; that's the real truth. The visual eye candy is needed because Excel just doesn't excite anybody but power users, and even then only if the spreadsheet model pertains to their expert domain. I have exactly the same feeling when I see terminal output flashing up on the big screens.
That isn't really going against their claim, IMO. Complex and inscrutable is part of the point - only the vaguest notes of "oh, that's their goal" are necessary. It reinforces that you don't fully understand what they're doing.
>We lost the Art of interface building and turned it into a complete science.
In the realm of VST/AU plugins (virtual music instruments and effects), the art of interface building is alive and kicking, and the different interfaces add (a) to the excitement, (b) to be able to differentiate quickly among dozens (or 100s) of different plugins you use, (c) helps test/create novel interaction ideas...
I was thinking VSTs as well. It's kind of funny, I truly dislike the UI of most VSTs I use. Cluttered, hard to understand, many hidden features and menus, and often rampant unhelpful skeuomorphism.
But also there are a few which are remarkable: the 3 synths from Madrona labs, the prosaic and convenient UI from Valhalla's plugins, up to the complex patchbay interface of something like VCV Rack, for instance.
VSTs balance a number of interesting perspectives in their UI. They are facing a very challenging domain (audio synthesis, analysis, manipulation in creative and often real-time interaction), have a complex user base (ranging from pros who really would prefer to be using their actual rack effects, to audiophiles who are pretending they've got a garage of classic synths, to modern electronic musicians who are digital natives), and have essentially zero strong UI non-skeumorphic conventions (knobs, sliders, presets, A/B switches, modules).
That's the best part of it. They work like hardware, which if you get serious, you often end up buying and using as well, which means studio musicians immediately know what they do, computer musicians get to learn how hardware units works, and the designs are nice and life-like.
The bad about skeuomorphism is not looking like a hardware unit, but being restricted to interacting like it's a hardware unit.
Which is not the case in most skeuomorphic VSTs - you have all kinds of computer-only interactions to make your life easier (double-click to reset knobs, preset search, A/B comparison, draw curves, etc).
Skeuomorphism there is just the cherry on top, not a rotten core, like the skeuomorphic DVD player programs of yore.
It would be kinda cool if the basic slideable/toggleable options of a plugin could be defined somehow so that the program/OS of your choice can render them as a nice boring inspector palette or something. Then you can choose between that and the vendor-defined skeuomorphic design. Perhaps it already exists?
Yeah, it does. Not sure if it's available on all DAWs, but the capability to enumerate and control the various options corresponding to various widgets exists in the protocols.
Logic and Ableton Live do offer this view as alternative.
That's great. I'm never a fan of the skeuomorphic controls. Making a dial right and down by dragging my cursor up makes no sense to me, much prefer a slider.
I'm a music producer and the FabFilter Pro-Q3 equalizer plugin has THE most refined, intuitive, and quick user interface I've ever experienced. They've taken the most frequently-used audio tool and found a way to really let you fly with it.
Upon opening, it displays an empty field with a live frequency readout of the sound on the channel. You can click anywhere in the frequency range and it generates an EQ/filter node underneath your mouse. It's as easy as thinking about the aspect of the sound that you want to alter, and immediately having your tone-shaping underneath your fingers. You reach out and grab it.
It's most-used features (gain, frequency, Q) are all changed by dragging the node or a modifier key (Cmd). These can all be done simultaneously in what feels like a unified gesture. The default filter type is context-dependent, based on where I grab on the spectrum. So if I grab a new node in the sub-bass frequencies it will automatically provide me a high-pass filter to start filtering all unwanted low-end. Ditto for the top-end, shelving filters, etc.
The fine-controls all appear in a secondary window just beneath your mouse that follows the filter node with you as you drag it, so you won't find yourself moving back and forth across the entire screen to tweak controls. When you click on another node the fine-controls appear nearby and the controls for the first node disappear, keeping the GUI empty and very easy to read.
These features may seem simple and obvious now that I've explained them, but an EQ is easily the most-used tool in my toolbox, and FabFilter's design choices have made the process quicker, easier, and far more intuitive than any other interface out there. It really puts a lot of pleasure back into the process that would be reduced fighting with inferior interfaces.
For comparison, most software EQs are either skeumorphic to resemble classic hardware EQs like this:
> My wish is that... Hopefully.. one day, someone will contact us with a project that allows us to build the first fantasy UI for a real-world SaaS product.
I suggest you make a concept of fantasy UI for a real-world SaaS product, and make it so good that somebody would want it. Put it on your website, post it to HN. Then your wish will be fulfilled in no time.
On the other hand, it could be a much more difficult task than you imagine.
This. 99% of B2B Dashboards solve trivial problems. If I need to filter by a boolean, the cleanest possible solution is something like an input field. If you need to create a "Clean" modern interface of the Shuttle Control Cockpit, it's likely that your dashboard will need to morph into something that resembles more a Fantasy UI.
> If I need to filter by a boolean, the cleanest possible solution is something like an input field.
I think here by "the cleanest possible solution" you mean "the simplest to make without any need to understand the actual underlying business". With that approach, 99% of B2B dashboards will be boring, trivial problems re-done again and again, but also crappy UIs with which actual users struggle.
> My conclusion was that fantasy Interfaces are very much like the early web. Lots of moving parts
These designs all have quite a bit of 'hair'. There are some basic functional elements and then, like a salad, it is garnished with all those numeric registers and shifting rulers, and linear elements.
Since you are a designer, I'm sure you've had those moments with a wip composition that has all the visual metadata still visible and possibly found it more 'visually exciting' than the final cleaned-up product. Same thing happens with architectural design drawings. The 'compact/minimal intensity' of a conceptual sketch is, imo, partly due to the fact that relationships between elements are more explicit in the early stages and the composition feels more 'dynamic'. Same design in final form will simply not evoke the same emotional response and is rather 'static'. (my take on this.)
I also remember the times you are reminiscing about. I would go look up lists of top innovative websites in a given month and just be blown away with the moving pieces and interaction.
But...from a consulting and a developer perspective, the marginal utility for increasingly artistic and engaging UI seems to be fairly low from a cost/ROI perspective. If you could figure out a truly compelling reason to spend 100 more budget hours to build that cool doodad and make it work across 100 devices and 10 browsers, great! But truth be told, it is already hard to build interfaces with moving elements that work across the 57 iPhone screens, 60 Windows screens, 10 browsers, well you get my point...
There are still many mind blowing projects out there with cool interfaces though...we did not lose the art of interface building. It just isn't where you are looking for it.
>marginal utility for increasingly artistic and engaging UI seems to be fairly low from a cost/ROI perspective.
This is exactly the problem. The artistic part of design is gone and turned into another utilitarian measurable. The same thing has been happening in architecture, designs getting simpler and more usability focused but they held on to some kind of artistry better than web designers. When we design a building people are happy to spend a little extra to make it beautiful but not so with websites.
But to me it feels like we have much more creative possibility today than we did when we had flash...JavaScript and CSS have evolved to enable extreme creativity, but if that is to be exercised, it mostly has to be in side projects or on one's own time.
One thing that strikes me is that these interfaces are incredibly specialized for the task at hand, and only that. You can't build for every task, you'd need a super-intelligent system that knows how to figure out what the task is and generate the appropriate UI for it.
Alternatively, make the UI malleable enough that the user can conform it to their usecase. A lot of applications used to try and allow that sort of thing, but the trend for the past 15 years or so has sadly been exactly the opposite. Case in point: bespoke "dark mode" has replaced the near-complete control over colors and fonts we had in the 90s. Instead of customizable toolbars and re-arrangeable MDIs with sub windows everything is a fucking electron app with giant shiny buttons for mobile users regardless of the platform it runs on or even if mobile use is suited to the tool.
Yes, but if system is inteligent enough to know what is the task and why it needs to be performed, why do we even need an ui. Let the system do what is needed :)
Such systems always live in a Star Trek kind of universe, where they simply await orders from humans, yet know vastly more than them. It's probably about our sense of goal: machines help achieving a goal, but not set it. While I personally also like to have control, I'm sure there will always be a Musk or Kurzweil around to advocate machine autonomy, and they will implement it no matter what. That's why such interfaces are unrealistic.
For a long time that was my approach to LoB backoffice applications: make the backend clever enough that there is no need for non-trivial user interfaces (in the sense of being non-trivial to implement). That in part works well but on the other hand there are situations when the user knows more, uses the thing every day and thus making something something that looks like sci-fi UI (or like something straight out of mid-90's OS HIG, with the difference being mostly about color choice) makes sense.
This is why most b2b tools have boring interfaces: they don't know what the task is, so they generalize and build yet-another interface on-top of SQL. See splunk, looker, G Analytics, Stripe, Shopify, etc.
Is it possible to somehow let the end user design a ui/ux that works for them?
>We lost the Art of interface building and turned it into a complete science
If only... Most modern companies seem to ignore any kind of science and thoughtful consideration of their UIs. The only considerations seem to be: (1) looks good on screenshots, and (2) is modern (for some arbitrary definition of modern). The only "scientific" tool they emply A/B testing, blindly and massively.
Look at some reports about beta testing for Windows 95 and you'll see how far we've fallen.
There are still people doing fun interface experiments out there. Try some of the wacky ones in the gallery on the https://threejs.org/ homepage. There's some really impressive stuff.
Nearest I can think of to an interface that fulfills both criteria is Kai’s Power Tools for Photoshop. They were both strange, beautiful and fairly usable.
I think it’s mostly that they are on a dark background honestly.
Imagine what a non programmer thinks when they see a programmers dark text editor. Thats the same feeling most people get when they see data viz on a dark BG since it’s so uncommon.
Absolutely, it makes me think of this game where you have to diffuse a bomb (keep talking and nobody dies) I'm sure many here are familiar with. One diffuses the bomb based on directions from another who is reading a diffusing manual. Imagine that game on Fantasy UI, I'm sure everyone would die haha!
Do you have experience creating "fantasy" UIs? Basic UX/UI skills won't transfer over, you'd need additional skillsets and an eye for it.
Complex-tight layouts will feel cluttered to people who have more difficulty with differentiation, visually processing contrast - or aren't motivated/driven/interested to understand what they're looking at. If you can expect the audience who needs to learn the interface will be motivated to learn it, then it can work.
I've had similar desire to see higher quality, more complex "fantasy" UIs and I could see parts of projects benefitting from such an interface - however I'm a long way off from having the funding and experimental budget to move in that direction. Maybe I'll be blessed enough that it can happen in 5 years.
> My wish is that... Hopefully.. one day, someone will contact us with a project that allows us to build the first fantasy UI for a real-world SaaS product.
Your best bet is to build internal tools. Interfaces aimed at consumers have to be appealing to the broadest market possible, which severely restricts how creative you can be and how much you can expect your users to learn. By contrast, internal tools have an expert, captive audience. As an added bonus you have direct access to your users, which makes it a lot easier to get feedback and iterate.
Check FVWM themes/styles. Those were revolutionary and inspiring. And, well, usable, as they were used by real life users and not just for showoff. Ahem, Edex UI and similar crap.
I have mixed feelings about fantasy UIs. At times they're stunningly beautiful, but more often than not, they're ridiculously impractical and/or just plain unusable regardless of the hardware. For example, here's a mini thread I made analyzing Stargate SG-1 UIs: https://mastodon.social/@grishka/104824174217647439
At first, we didn’t have the same distinctions between roles that many places making software and UIs have today. A UI would be put together by programmers. Those UIs were often powerful, flexible, even logical in their own way, but only if you knew how to use them. For normal people who didn’t think like the programmers or have the same deep knowledge of the system, this generation of UIs often resulted in slow, error-prone, frustrating interaction.
Eventually we responded to that problem by bringing in more expertise in related areas: usability and accessibility, graphic design and typography, and so on. People started thinking more explicitly about information architecture and the flows a user would follow as they navigated an interface and overall a more task-focussed and user-friendly style of UI. Both the look and feel and the practical operation of systems became much better. IMHO, this was the closest we’ve experienced to a “golden age” of UIs so far.
The big problem with that was that doing those things well did require all those other skills, which weren’t native to software developers and didn’t necessarily translate in an obviously quantifiable way to the financial bottom line. With the arrival of CSS3 on the web and flat design as a trend in desktop and mobile OSes, suddenly programmers could make UIs again. Import some glorified stylesheet that gave you a colour scheme and some basic layout and typography, throw in a few rounded corners or font weights for street cred, and you never need to hire anyone with real design skills again, right?
Around the same time, the use of telemetry in software and tools for testing multiple variants of websites in real time were gaining popularity. Now the programmers didn’t even have to make a subjective decision about what colour to use for their action button, because The Mighty Data would dictate such things.
Somewhere around there, much of the industry lost its soul, and much of the software we produce just became bland, homogenous, heavily instrumented mediocrity. It didn’t look interesting and, to add insult to injury, caused a regression in ease of use as well thanks to some glaring usability problems with the popular visual style of the day. And while it’s certainly true that the increased use of hard data rather than subjective personal preference has its advantages, it will only ever tell you some numbers that compare designs you already have. It can never tell you that all of your designs really suck and you should start over with a different concept, only which one sucks 17% less than the others.
The most unfortunate thing, to me, is that with the technologies we now have routinely available, we could do so much better, even in a lot of everyday business software. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is the worth of a system that lets you interactively explore your whole data set, freely swapping between a range of different textual and graphical views that are relevant to whatever problem you’re interested in solving, combining or filtering your data to focus on areas or relationships of interest, highlighting patterns or outliers that might be important, all while the user experiments with different changes to see what the results are, before sharing all of that in real time with colleagues around the world who have been doing the same thing so everyone can decide which ideas are worth acting on next? And sure, go ahead and add some distinctive and pretty graphics to make it enjoyable to use at the same time. If the rest of the system is well-designed, this shouldn’t hurt, and we used to understand that building a brand image and engaging people using our stuff had value of their own.
Of course, no A/B test is ever going to tell you how to do anything like that in any particular application, and your average programming specialist isn’t going to offer the best ideas either. If we want to build UIs that are powerful, easy to use and perhaps even fun, we need those creative types of thinking and those other design skills too.
I don't work in UI design and really only have a layman's perspective. To add to what you and else here said, my view is that most of these fantasy interfaces are build for specialised/professional tasks.
My impression of most of the user interfaces we encounter on the other hand is that they are build for the lowest common denominator and much of what the previous poster called "the science" is about how quickly the "on boarding" works, so how quickly someone can do a certain task when they are not familiar with the interface.
What seems to be never tested is, when people are very profficent, how long does it take them to do tasks. I understand why that is the case, it's much easier to do a quick study with some new users to test out a UI, but to design several UIs and then let people become very profficent with them first (possibly taking months) to then do a study comparing the interfaces is much more involved. So instead we extrapolate from the novice user studies to advanced users.
Completely agree. I would be interested in a modern, advanced user GUI trend - like most of the modern UIs optimize for discoverability and for a sufficiently complex use case (like photoshop, video/music editing software) where learning the UI is a must, most programs would need a feature-packed, hotkey/gesture-rich one.
>I’ve spent some time thinking about why these Fantasy UIs are so fascinating despite the fact they seem not very user friendly.
It took a ux expert "some time thinking" to realize these fantasy UIs are not not UX friendly.
I think that answers your question. These UIs are not meant be usable. Who cares about the UX of them? Visual appeal to the mass consumer demographic is all that matters.
I am not a designer. I understand them the way I understand original user interfaces that were not computer generated. Think of the giant chrome steering wheel of a large ship. Or the ornate decorations of some fancy locomotive. The idea is to mirror the craftsmanship that went into the function of the device in its controls. To help the operator feel more comfortable and familiar with the machine. To recall certain details of the device in its controls (unique square grill on a car might dictate square gauges). Utilitarian controls are better in some respects, less distracting. But they aren’t as fancy.
Now translate that to us trying to show a future design or a more advanced but ancient design than what we have today. You could go minimalistic and it’s just a bunch of blank buttons and the operator just knows what they do. What a piano might look like to someone who isn’t familiar with pianos. That can have a certain type of appeal, but if your intention is to show the device as both advanced AND important, then it’s a big challenge to make the UI stand out. You could also make the UI baroque with unnecessary embellishments to show that it is so fancy and advanced that it hasn’t reached the point of mass production where economic forces would have dictated that it be simplified. Why have a holographic display that just renders a swirly button when you can have a simple push button? Well, because we are going all out creating this singular object. It’s a way to emphasize the device.
I think The Martian had some very cool UIs because they managed to walk the middle road: they seemed like they were actually designed for function but were also clearly more advanced than what we use today. But by that metric they were also much closer to what we have today.
Another factor to all this is that UI is dictated by its medium. What kind of hardware can we use for UIs? Well so far we have physicals dials, buttons, toggles, and switches. We also have touch screens. In more of the real of sci fi we have motion capture and voice interfaces, both starting to slowly be adopted as the cost comes down. And in the pure speculative we have things like holographic interactions, nanobotic renderings, and a broad category of telepathy (that last one is really good for stories about the hero simply learning to believe in themselves because long training is for suckers). But how many types of materials and devices and materials have we not yet discovered? Ones that could be used to create a UI in a completely novel way. Maybe it’s a blood contrast that gets injected into your bloodstream and makes it easier to track your motion precisely. Maybe it’s magnets or RFID chips embedded in your fingers that allow you to interact with a theramin type device more intuitively. Maybe it’s direct to retina projection that an outside observer can’t even see. Maybe it’s a smart UI that is programmable ahead of time and it’s activation is simply timed. Maybe it’s something that reads its inputs by facial recognition and emotion detection. Maybe some material that once our hands are coated in it can make them feel whatever physical controls are supposed to be there without having to pay foe them to physically manufactured.
The point is that as long as fantasy UIs are going to be constrained to only a few mediums, the only way to set them apart is to make them either super fancy, super grungy, or super minimalistic/magical. Making them utilitarian and usable makes them look contemporary.
The fantasy UI of Neon Genesis Evangelion[1,2] left a deep impression on me when I watched the original series for the first time. And, in my opinion, it has aged very well.
The single biggest common denominator between so many fantasy UIs, is transparent (HUD-style) interfaces. I was just watching the latest episode of The Expanse, last night, and saw them all using these transparent PDA/phones.
Ever try using a transparent UI? It's absolutely maddening.
Looks cool on the screen, but is pretty much unusable IRL.
It's in the carousel on that page, but here's an interview with Timothy Peel, who did those for The Expanse and also Mr. Robot. They talk about it a bit:
I think they'd rather bring you into the world by showing the UI and interactions while also showing the actors. With a opaque device, we know they're using it, but we don't get to see any detail about it. And a camera angle behind the actor that shows the UI can be awkward. So I think it's really just a compromise to be able to show the UIs, interaction, and the actors from the front at the same time.
I wouldn't ever use one for privacy, and I think the only realistic way transparent devices would be useful is if they tint the glass so it's maybe 50% opaque.
The Expanse is also one of the few shows where phones (and tech in general) feels like characters actually use it daily. Cracked screens, casual gestures, they even just throw phones on tables and what not.
I came here to say that too! Exactly what I was thinking while watching The Expanse (which is a great series), and so many other shows that pander to the cliché of pointlessly transparent phones. Goodbye privacy! Why would you ever want your phone display to be harder for YOU to see, and easier for EVERYONE ELSE to see?
It's a cliché not because it's a vision of the future, but because it's a good filmmaking technique that lets the audience easily see what's going on when you have characters interacting with tiny pocket screens. Without transparent screens, you'd need to do something like what the recent Sherlock series did and have giant text bubbles pop up on the screen or something, which would not fit with the aesthetic of a show like The Expanse.
Like how you can just "flick" your screen onto another computer in the same room. Which is a beautiful dream, but...how would that even work?! Everyone just has access to every other device?
Or how you can be in a room full of people, but for some reason the holographic display only works for you. And good thing all you want to do is pan and zoom, because that's about as much expressivity you get. It would be hilarious to have a scene where they struggle to get it to work, a future equivalent of "Can everyone see my screen?"
I think it would be rather simple to implement. Device A recognizes gesture to share info. Device A sends a local ping asking if there are other nearby devices that are willing to accept data. Device B is willing to accept data, so it answers with a location. Device A determines Device B is in a location where the user swiped to. Device A asks Device B, will you accept flight plan data? Device B says sure. Device A sends the flight plan data. Device B determines that it is already friends with Device A, so it shows the data, otherwise maybe it would have prompted its user first.
>Specialized elements of hardware and software, connected by wires, radio waves and infrared, will be so ubiquitous that no one will notice their presence.
>The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.
>In the post-PC era, we are getting closer to the vision of ubiquitous computing, a termed coined by Mark Weiser in 1988 (a chief scientist at Xerox PARC in the U.S.). Simply put, computing would be on any device, in any location, and in any format.
>We're getting there. During my son's homework this week we created a Word document on an iPad, inserted a photo taken on a Windows phone, saved the doc to the cloud via Dropbox, printed the doc from a laptop over wifi to a printer.
>Weiser helpfully proposed three basic forms for ubiquitous system devices;
>Ubiquitous computing (or "ubicomp") is a concept in software engineering and computer science where computing is made to appear anytime and everywhere. In contrast to desktop computing, ubiquitous computing can occur using any device, in any location, and in any format. A user interacts with the computer, which can exist in many different forms, including laptop computers, tablets and terminals in everyday objects such as a refrigerator or a pair of glasses. The underlying technologies to support ubiquitous computing include Internet, advanced middleware, operating system, mobile code, sensors, microprocessors, new I/O and user interfaces, computer networks, mobile protocols, location and positioning, and new materials.
why so critical on such a superficial observation?
>Goodbye privacy
Why would the designers for the show spend anytime about that concept, the state of privacy protection in a future fictitious show is not core to the storyline, ratings, and chance of the show being renewed.
I remember in early(ish) Linux, the terminal programs had a setting to be at least partly transparent, so your desktop background (and other windows? I forget) could show through.
Wound up constraining what desktops you could choose, and how you had to set up your terminal colors. And since I prefer dark text on a light background, it didn't work for me from the beginning.
I imagine those programs still have those settings, but I don't see that behavior in screen-shots of programs any more.
This can be a surprisingly useful tool at times - I've definitely used it to advantage when doing creative coding so that the graphic or animation is displayed behind my terminal and I can see and edit the code at the same time as viewing the effect without switching windows.
Of course, a second monitor can do this too and without the downsides, but sometimes you're away from your desk and it's a nice workflow.
Strange that nobody on this thread shared the amazing eDEX-UI project: https://github.com/GitSquared/edex-ui. A full open-source sci-fi terminal emulator inspired by Tron Legacy.
Hah yeah I remember downloading that and reading the disclaimer that you shouldn't do any real work on this seeing as how it has a virtual keyboard showing your password keypresses, scifi UIs are cool but not practical at all.
To me, what makes these fantasy UIs compelling is that they are usually extremely context-aware and content-aware. We haven’t quite worked out how to make real world computers work that way yet.
We’re still very much tied to paradigms that are ultimately easier for the computer (apps, windows, menus, files) as opposed to things that are natural to humans. If I have one hope for ML, it’s that hopefully it will bring some context-awareness to computing so that the content becomes the user interface.
Surprisingly hollow. There is almost no information on the screens to indicate what any swipe or touch might do. Explains a lot about their decisions in Windows 8/10. Their ideal is magic bullshit.
My fantasy UI would be a sort of large flat desktop plane, with ~infinite zoom. FVWM and other do have the one large desktop space that you scroll around, instead of discrete virtual desktops, but I want to see the ultimate version of that.
A vast virtual plane that you could scroll and zoom around, drag your files/content around, make groups with marked delineations like a map. Obviously there would be some kind of grouping and minimap if you zoomed out enough. Documents should be represented such that you would simply zoom into them to access their content, you wouldn't open files or start applications, everything would be represented visually and the editing tools you need would be presented as you zoom close enough. A document would be represented as pages you could flip through or spread out for a larger overview. Videos could be simply viewed or spread out into frames/segments with editing tools.
Content would not be a "text file" or an "image file", it would just be a delineated piece of content, which you could add whatever type of content to, by calling up the relevant tools.
There would be no discrete applications as such, just content and flexibility, I want it to be seamless and integrated. In some ways similar to UIs seen in Minority Report and other sci-fi movies, but without the Hollywood flash and gimmickry.
I'm aware that there are a lot of complications and practical limitations, but it's an idea I've toyed with for a while, and I'm not sure I've seen people really attempt something like it for practical use, only bits and pieces.
An interesting theme in UI this year has been what types of tools for remote collaboration have become popular as more people have been working from home. Several of the ones I’ve seen are indeed based on a sort of infinite canvas/desktop/whiteboard concept.
Apparently those businesses are doing OK providing that kind of SaaS, even though the things you can actually do on their boards might be much simpler than what full-power desktop software or more specialised SaaS can offer. And this does make sense: once you can put basic text and basic drawing in some sort of freeform layout and share that display with others remotely, you already have a useful collaboration tool.
Providing built-in support for more sophisticated visuals like tables or specific types of diagram might make things more efficient, as could making good use of shortcut icons, gestures, hotkeys and so on. However, these are incremental improvements. They might bring big improvements in productivity in some cases, but they’re still helping to solve the same fundamental problem in the same fundamental way.
So it seems that at least some developers are already experimenting with the concept you’re suggesting, if only in a relatively simple form so far.
I don't have much to add except that I wonder why something similar hasn't been done already? I mean, it's an UI that works fine in RTS games, so why wouldn't it work for application windows?
It would be pretty maddening to keep losing the application you're working on because of the infinite scroll.
In RTS games you have keyboard shortcuts to return to your unit groups, bases etc to mitigate that, but there you're supposed to jump between points of interest while for general use you tend to keep the same point of interest for a long time...
That covers a lot of the basic concepts, albeit in a somewhat different format than I imagined. For one, it sticks to a grid rather than being freeform. There are certainly benefits to that. Thanks :-)
Others are pointing out that Fantasy UIs have too much complexity to serve as your average productivity tool interface, and that an artistic design hurts usability. Yet there is a subset of usable interfaces which look a lot like the examples on this website: Game UIs. I find it fascinating how artistic vision and interaction design can combine.
I've always wondered who does those browsers / email clients / phone UIs you see in films and on TV that are kind of familiar but also not "real" software. I'm talking about everyday films - not futuristic fantasy. Often when someone writes an email in a film the UI is some kind of Frankenstein interface that isn't recognisable as say Gmail or Outlook. Am I just imagining this? Is there a company that specializes in writing fake UIs for films and TV?
I’m currently working on an FUI for a short film with those sorts of principles in mind - a more “realistic” interpretation of what you might call “every day software” (in this case it’s for a call center of sorts).
There’s a sci-fi element but very much grounded in current day technologies so it’s the furthest thing away from the typical Marvel FUI.
One of the hardest challenges is making the UI “read” in film - that is getting the point of the action across while trying to remain truthful to some sort of sense of functionality. Oh, and also making it look interesting and/or feel original :)
Here’s an unused direction for that “call center” UI based on NeXT/Win95- I’ve actually since shifted to something quite different (more of a backend web app feel from the mid 2000s I’d say) for the final look but still thought it’d be fun to share this initial glimpse:
These are not fantasy UIs, they are science fiction UIs. There is a massive lack of good swords and wizards fantasy movies and shows. The networks, just to fill out a list, are clumping fantasy in with science fiction and super hero movies. If we are going to say anything involving an unrealistic personal fantasy is fantasy, then why stop there? That’s almost all movies and film. For that matter super hero stuff ends up in science fiction too - Heinlein is not going to be rolling in his grave but it’s still not the same thing either
Like I said, almost all art is fantasy then, and almost all science fiction isn’t scientific enough to qualify. And all stories have drama too, so we might as well clump almost everything into a “dramatic fantasy” bucket in that case. The genre names aren’t perfect but repurposing them to be more English-accurate isn’t helping people find what they’re looking for
Her is my all-time favorite movie UI. It's more familiar and less futuristic than the others but felt like where we're headed. There's also just enough emphasis on skeuomorphism to make it feel warmer and more inviting than the flat designs prevalent in 2013.
Usually any UI in a movie is bad and drops me back to reality out of the magic of the movie.
There are meaningless percentages with silly labels, animated histograms, so much useless movement, scrolling nonsense, and sometimes even a world map, blinking stuff -- all crammed into one screen. And best of all, the useless extra data is often rendered extra useless with a font size that is too tiny to read without a magnifying glass.
There are movies with nice, (semi) plausible fantasy UIs too! For example, The Midnight Sky (damage assessment, map views etc.), Chappie (firmware upgrade, policebot PoV, etc.), Interstellar (flight controls, robot "debug" displays etc.).
Star Trek LCARS screens have been generally well thought of, but not always. There are weird numbers and "display nonsense" here and there. But, I can believe a starship could be steered with such a touch UI with clearly distinguishable big buttons and clear separation of functions.
I worked at a startup that hired a designer that worked on Tron Legacy to design the main product interface and we built it. It's a very complex UI with lots of graphs and information and it was damn sexy and the information was actually useful.
Nice. Some look sort of acid/trippy but others look very slick and eh, super-usable.
I'd love to play with an actual implementation. Something Dear ImGui-sh would be great...
Anyone know what kind of technologies are used to build these fantasy UIs?
There are probably two categories:
- UIs that are live on the set, and the talent interacts with them
- UIs that are added in post, so essentially animated clips that align with the on screen action.
Adobe After Effects come to mind for the 2D UI. {{3D app of choice for the 3d visuals}} Not sure what else are used for these output. Would be crazy if some of them get built with common web technology.
I dig a lot of these interfaces, but I'm a huge fan of simplistic CLI interfaces in sci-fi. Like fallout. I find it infinitely charming -- I love the idea of someone running Unix in the year 2983 or something
Metro is terrible as a desktop and tablet UI, but was fantastic for mobile interfaces. Microsoft's mistake was thinking UIs would converge across form factors.
I still believe the overall vision is/was good. They just would have had to make a few more compromises, like some additional optimizations for desktop where users could profit more from mouse and keybaord.
But another factor was that the change was just to deep of a cut, and the world was just not ready for it. People were overwhelmed when they were expected to suddenly use magic corners and gestures instead of clicking a button. If it would have been a slower change, it might have worked out better.
Seems like Microsoft thought if people could stomach the transition from XP to Vista/7, then the transition to 8 would be taken with the same amount of initial resistance followed by acceptance.
There's only so many times you can tell your customers that their hardware isn't up to snuff for your software, whether in terms of computational capability or interaction modality, in the same decade!
Does the maker of the video also write blog posts or anything? I'm very into this topic and I skimmed through the video, but I'm not sure I want to be essentially yelled at for an hour and a half.
Upon seeing the title I was hyped up but unfortunatelly it's just another yelling dude complaining about surface level stuff being not the way he likes.
I find reading faster and more useful (I can skim for key words, I can look for headings, I can inspect images for as long as I want) and less mentally taxing than listening to a normally-pitched reading by Alvin and the Chipmunks. :D
I’ve spent some time thinking about why these Fantasy UIs are so fascinating despite the fact they seem not very user friendly.
My conclusion was that fantasy Interfaces are very much like the early web. Lots of moving parts (dancing banana gifs) and you had to figure out the navigation on each website you visited. Today, everything looks and feels the same and we lost the creative spirit of interface building.
Figuring out the interface might not be best practice. But at the same time, I remember sharing websites with friends purely based on how fun the navigation and overall controls were.
We lost the Art of interface building and turned it into a complete science. There are arguments for both sides.
My wish is that... Hopefully.. one day, someone will contact us with a project that allows us to build the first fantasy UI for a real-world SaaS product.