This is so critical, and I'm so happy to see it on HN.
When I was a PhD student, I TA'd an HCI class my advisor taught, where he gave a project a week. The very first project was to design a text interface - the subsequent weeks then ramped up to designing applications for 1024x768 mouse driven computers, then touch screens, then 80" screens viewed from 50 feet away, etc. I think any good UI design class should proceed in this manner.
Now that I've left academia, when I need to assess an interactive designer's skills, the first thing I do is ask them to design a text interface because all of the core principles exposed in the posted piece are foundations of any good interactive design - regardless of whether it's in a terminal, in a GUI, or for a gesture driven application (conversely, UI designers who dismiss textual interfaces as irrelevant to UI design are probably mediocre designers).
Most of the fundamentals of interaction design are present in good textual interfaces, and there's no fluff to hide behind if you are a mediocre interaction designer. I commonly see UIs with lush graphics, beautiful animations, the perfect quirky copy - and yet it all falls flat because one of the rules listed in the posted book aren't respected, but when you try to tell the designers that they just point at all these things as signs of how great their interface is.
The truth is that all this crap doesn't matter if your interaction model is shitty. Just like a great artist should be able to make beautiful pieces using just a piece of charcoal regardless of their Photoshop skills, a great interaction designer should know how to design effective text interfaces - and if they can't, no amount of CSS skills or blog posts on "skeuomorphic vs flat" they've read will matter.
Just curios, but... how do you frame the task of designing a text interface when evaluating an UI designer? ...and what's their usual reaction to the request?
When I was a PhD student, I TA'd an HCI class my advisor taught, where he gave a project a week. The very first project was to design a text interface - the subsequent weeks then ramped up to designing applications for 1024x768 mouse driven computers, then touch screens, then 80" screens viewed from 50 feet away, etc. I think any good UI design class should proceed in this manner.
Now that I've left academia, when I need to assess an interactive designer's skills, the first thing I do is ask them to design a text interface because all of the core principles exposed in the posted piece are foundations of any good interactive design - regardless of whether it's in a terminal, in a GUI, or for a gesture driven application (conversely, UI designers who dismiss textual interfaces as irrelevant to UI design are probably mediocre designers).
Most of the fundamentals of interaction design are present in good textual interfaces, and there's no fluff to hide behind if you are a mediocre interaction designer. I commonly see UIs with lush graphics, beautiful animations, the perfect quirky copy - and yet it all falls flat because one of the rules listed in the posted book aren't respected, but when you try to tell the designers that they just point at all these things as signs of how great their interface is.
The truth is that all this crap doesn't matter if your interaction model is shitty. Just like a great artist should be able to make beautiful pieces using just a piece of charcoal regardless of their Photoshop skills, a great interaction designer should know how to design effective text interfaces - and if they can't, no amount of CSS skills or blog posts on "skeuomorphic vs flat" they've read will matter.