[HN Gopher] Semantic Zoom
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Semantic Zoom
Author : bpierre
Score : 150 points
Date : 2023-09-02 12:50 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (alexanderobenauer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (alexanderobenauer.com)
| nottheengineer wrote:
| While it's nice to imagine what this could be used for, it just
| looks like frontend dev hell with so many moving parts.
| [deleted]
| baliex wrote:
| This reminds me of Jef Raskin's humane interface:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Humane_Interface
|
| Edit: more specifically, Archy:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_(software) which has its
| roots in the "Zoomable user interfaces in scaleable vector
| graphics" paper (which I can't find a working link for right now)
| jonahx wrote:
| First thing I thought of too.
|
| For those who don't know, Raskin proposes an alternative the
| reigning windows and folders paradigm, in which your entire OS
| is a single sheet, a kind of landscape in which you can zoom
| out to a map view or zoom down into specific words and images,
| a kind of google maps for your digital space.
|
| It's always stuck with me and I would love to try it. Figma
| comes to mind as a popular product that's put the idea into
| practice, but that's a specific use case rather than "your
| whole digital world".
| lgas wrote:
| I think Miro would be a few steps closer to "your whole
| digital world", but of course it's still not that close.
| montroser wrote:
| This is hard to get right, but awesomely powerful when it works.
| The only collaborative whiteboard I've seen do this well is
| Plectica[0]. It has its other quirks but nails this part nicely.
|
| [0]: https://beta.plectica.com
| skrebbel wrote:
| I have a touchscreen laptop. I love it, but UIs like these would
| make me love it even more. Having information detail literally at
| your fingertips sounds amazing.
|
| This seems like such a sensible idea to me, it makes me wonder
| why it isn't commonplace yet. I hope it will be!
| datastoat wrote:
| Windows 8 (Metro) used semantic zoom. It's been a while, but I
| do remember that one of the apps that used it very nicely was
| Photos. A search for "windows metro semantic zoom" comes up
| with lots of articles about semantic-zoom-aware GridView
| controls etc.
|
| Why isn't it commonplace? I think that touchscreen laptops are
| still too much a minority, and keyboard + mouse + monitor are
| too entrenched, for anyone to seriously attempt it again for a
| while. (A shame -- I'm one of the few who really liked the
| Windows 8 Metro interface.) I think that phones are too small
| for it to really work well. I don't know why it's not more
| popular on tablets.
| Tachyooon wrote:
| Something that would help speed up development of new
| interfaces would be applications having more extensibility in
| general. It happens so often that I come across a piece of
| software where I want to change just _one_ thing, but there 's
| no easy way to do it with plugins or extensions. The
| alternative is to create the software mostly from scratch
| myself, which is way too much effort that's just not worth it.
| Imagine what would happen if you could see all those small
| changes stack up, we could have so much more interesting
| functionality.
| kajaktum wrote:
| This looks good but will come out horrible in practice:
|
| 1. This requires so much thought to implement and I don't think
| the average UX team can implement it. A half ass implementation
| of this will probably be worse than a simple page with
| hyperlinks.
|
| 2. This requires so much thought that each implementation will
| naturally diverge and so the user have to deal with hundreds of
| different unique and horrible UX.
|
| From the example, when the app zooms into the "pace" page, how do
| I go back to the summary?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| g0xA52A2A wrote:
| The general athesetic reminds me of the design concept "Mercury
| OS".
|
| https://uxdesign.cc/introducing-mercury-os-f4de45a04289
| Veuxdo wrote:
| I'm trying to do something very similar (if not exactly the same)
| to semantic zoom with architecture diagrams [0]. It's of course
| _much_ simpler when the components are view-only and have a fixed
| UI. An entire design system for any kind of desktop /tablet app
| would be amazing.
|
| [0]
| https://twitter.com/ilographs/status/1651011570330206209?t=a...
| jeffreygoesto wrote:
| I get lost in these diagrams quickly, because they change
| constantly. I'd prefer architecture diagrams that solve multi
| scale display like maps do. Then, directions stay valid when
| zooming. I like to dive into different details coming from a
| common overview and getting back to that overview is much
| easier on maps than in such a view that constantly changes
| relative sizes and directions.
| [deleted]
| lijok wrote:
| I was going to comment here that semantic zoom would be amazing
| for C4 diagrams.
|
| Really excited about the work you're doing
| Veuxdo wrote:
| Thanks! Yeah, you can certainly use Ilograph for C4. To see
| one layer at a time (the common way C4 is shown), set the
| detail slider, in top-right of the app [0], all the way to
| the left (low detail).
|
| [0] https://app.ilograph.com/demo.ilograph.Ilograph/Request
| skrebbel wrote:
| Wow this is very nicely done!
| ta988 wrote:
| Nice, the fact that it breaks the back behavior of the
| browser is a bit annoying, especially on a phone.
| zagrebian wrote:
| This is possible on the web with the Visual Viewport API.
| ballenf wrote:
| Anyone remember the photo viewer from 10+ years ago that started
| with a tiled view of every photo and you zoomed in kind of
| organically to what you wanted? At the time it was revolutionary
| to me. Kind of in the Picasa era or earlier. I believe it was
| shareware or freeware and might have been Java-based.
|
| And I'd love help with a search query. Can't figure out the right
| words to avoid links about restoring old photos, or details of
| various MS Photos applications over the years.
| bo0tzz wrote:
| I don't know the one you mention, but I believe
| https://github.com/SmilyOrg/photofield does something similar.
| ballenf wrote:
| That interface is very similar. It's not the app I was
| thinking of, but same functionality.
| afranchuk wrote:
| Are you perhaps referring to eagle mode?
|
| https://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/
| chromakode wrote:
| I remember Jeff Han's multitouch demos (which pre-dated the
| iPhone!) -- is this what you were thinking of?
| https://youtu.be/ac0E6deG4AU
| ballenf wrote:
| Those are very cool, but I'm talking about years pre-dating
| smartphones. I guess Picasa wasn't a good time marker in my
| question since it really wasn't retired that long ago.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| Are you thinking of Cooliris?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou5CB7hH8TM
| jasonhong wrote:
| You might be thinking of PhotoMesa, which was a research
| project (I think later commercialized) out of University of
| Maryland.
|
| Here is the research paper on PhotoMesa:
| http://www.cs.umd.edu/~bederson/images/pubs_pdfs/p19-khella....
|
| And here's a YouTube video of PhotoMesa:
| https://youtu.be/CQYDhnBMoF0?si=SOWUcjSFyv47nfrt&t=59
|
| Also, as a researcher who has studied and implemented Semantic
| Zooming, the original post (probably inadvertently) makes it
| sound like Underkoffler invented the idea. I'd have to double
| check things, but I believe it was Ben Bederson (also the
| creator of PhotoMesa above) and Jim Hollan that invented the
| concept of semantic zooming in their seminal work Pad++, which
| aimed to explore alternatives to basic GUI interfaces. Ben has
| a lot of papers looking at zooming interfaces for photos,
| presentations, calendars, and other visualizations.
|
| Here's the paper on Pad++
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/192426.192435
| pphysch wrote:
| "Semantic zoom" is a strange phrase because neither of those
| words describe what is happening (in this article). Note that the
| demos mostly involve clicking rather than wheel/zoom gestures.
|
| The semantics of regular zoom are clear: scale+translate the
| viewport.
|
| The semantics of "semantic" "zoom" are undefined. It's really
| just a smooth UI transition between different views. Those views
| could be anything, and the transition could be anything. So it's
| not really clear where "zoom" comes into this, aren't we just
| talking broadly about nice interactive UI transitions?
|
| Sure, perhaps there is latent design space in using the mouse
| wheel / zoom gesture to navigate flat GUIs, but what is the
| accessibility story there?
| carapace wrote:
| I think you need a _grammar_ of gestures. Without that you can 't
| really replace CLI or GUI (or the new talking interfaces.)
|
| Sign language is a language.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| This always looks amazing in the showcase video where the user
| does the expected gestures. But when you use it in real life, you
| want to kill yourself.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| globular-toast wrote:
| Anyone remember eagle mode:
| https://sourceforge.net/projects/eaglemode/ I remember playing
| with this in Windows XP days (perhaps even earlier). I think a
| lot of people assumed the window paradigm would eventually
| evolve, but it hasn't really.
| intrasight wrote:
| I think semantic zoom will play an important role with AR/VR. The
| physical world has a lot of opportunities to zoom with overlayed
| semantic info.
| a1o wrote:
| I prefer predictable zoom. Because this will make it's way in
| desktop apps and having a bigger monitor will not give me more
| screenspace.
| clnq wrote:
| That was my first take as well, but after reading some of the
| previous articles by the author, it's not really about the size
| of elements on the screen. It's more about being able to "zoom"
| into information in a system, which is a part of the user
| selecting their own view of data in complex systems.
|
| No good UX should mess with literal zooming of web elements.
| I'm looking at responsive design and zoom-disabling apps in
| particular.
|
| But when an app presents me with an interface to a ton of data,
| like Spotify giving me access to practically all the music I
| could ever care about, I would like to customize that interface
| as much as possible. Let's say, sometimes I might want to find
| the most popular music in a region, another time I might want
| to find sort regions by how much a particular song is popular.
| Maybe I might want to figure out the average length of all Jazz
| pieces, or the average volume.
|
| The author talks about being able to achieve that through UX
| instead of SQL queries in general, and in this post -- about
| the specific idea of asking the UX to give more context about
| an element.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| It's no better. I want to compare a thing in item A to a
| thing in item B so I zoom in on item B and the thing I wanted
| to compare in item A disappears.
|
| Spotify is actually a pretty good example of this, they've
| been steadily removing context for a while. It's gotten to
| where it's impossible to see more than 5 items at a time in a
| lot of their views.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > Spotify is actually a pretty good example of this,
| they've been steadily removing context for a while. It's
| gotten to where it's impossible to see more than 5 items at
| a time in a lot of their views.
|
| Spotify is a weird one: I'd gladly pay 2x (maybe 5x?)
| Spotify's price simply as a database of music files
| licensed for my own personal consumption, provided I get to
| use my own Spotify client software because I don't want
| their Chromium-based UI[1] (for context, I'm still using
| Winamp). But Spotify aren't listening: they donn't want my
| money unless they get to control the UX, but I want to
| control my own UX, and even though I'm prepared to pay a
| premium to compensate them for their loss of access to my
| desktop they aren't interested.
|
| Kinda reminds me of when Twitter Blue first launched: it
| still contained ads, and didn't come with any kind of
| Twitter API access to allow third-party clients. It's the
| worst of both worlds. It's definitely a part of platform-
| enshittification, but the frustrating part is that it's
| just unnecessarily harming the business via reputational-
| harm and poor power-user UX, and worst of all: leaving
| money on the table.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14088483
| [deleted]
| lampiaio wrote:
| Looks great for use as a movie UI. For me, in real life that
| would be an unpredictable nightmare.
| UltimateEdge wrote:
| The examples on this blog are really quite neat. Can I download
| the software being shown, or are these just recordings of the
| author's private experiments?
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Watching the videos before reading the text, was a series of
| baffling surprises
| yodon wrote:
| Reading the text didn't help much
|
| > The heresy implicit within is the premise that the user, not
| the system, gets to define what is most important at any given
| moment
|
| Calling that a heresy is about the most arrogantly flawed
| statement you can make in the field of user experience design,
| which is saying a lot.
| IshKebab wrote:
| There's a note at the bottom about the use of the word
| heresy.
|
| But it's still stupid. The system is still deciding.
| montagg wrote:
| It's worse than that. It forces the user to decide what's
| most important from an interface design perspective at each
| moment while also doing the task. The fluidity is cool, and
| it helps maintain an understanding of hierarchy and
| context, but at some point the "system" needs to decide
| what's important, or you're just outsourcing design to your
| user.
|
| I agree with the overall idea that users should have a lot
| of control over what they see and how, but just presenting
| this idea as the only good one (as implied by contrarian or
| heresy or whatever) is not the way to go. This could work
| for specialized creative workflows, and there may be a
| version of this that you could use for a window system, but
| I think as shown it would need to be targeted at very
| engaged and specialized users who can put in the work.
|
| Is there a version of this idea that could work for general
| computing for a typical user? Maybe! But it would make a
| lot of decisions for the user at the end of the day; it
| would just need to _feel_ like it didn't.
| yodon wrote:
| I've been using beautiful.ai to make slides. I like it,
| but it takes control over font size, and does so poorly -
| it frequently chooses a font size that is just too big
| for the space, in which case it blots out the text with
| an error message telling me I have too much text. If I
| ADD another character or word, it pushes the font size
| selector to the next smaller font size and now my longer
| text is ok where my shorter text was previously too long.
| There is no direct control over the font size, just this
| badly implemented system-controlled size picker.
| [deleted]
| clnq wrote:
| There's a footnote, attached in the wrong place, that
| explains the use of word "Heresy". It's used in a similar
| sense as "revolt", in the context of contrarianism.
|
| In that sense, it is "heresy" -- not the current norm -- to
| put the user in charge of constructing the view of
| information in a system. It might be true.
|
| Anyways, it took me a bit to understand what the author was
| saying, and the articles would be a lot easier to read if
| they used plain English. The articles are quite contextual
| and people with a different frame of view might interpret
| them differently, which is not good communication.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| I've often thought it was time to pick up Ben Bederson's work on
| Pad++ again, now that we have such great UI and hardware for
| zooming in interfaces. Here's a late-90s video of it in action:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlIRYTuSv0Q
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(page generated 2023-09-02 23:00 UTC)