Attention all designers: That skeuomorphic, non-flat design that you might think is unstylish but in reality is so very usable… this book explains why.
In the UI of the 2000’s, the UI is visible, the chrome is visible and it has meaning and utility. Buttons are easily found and pushed because they visibly look like they are extending from the display. That’s an affordance. The window corner used to have a “rough” texture just like exterior stairs have texture strips to keep your feet from slipping. They indicated that the friction from your mouse-pointer on the screen will move the window corner.
These designs allowed user decisions about UI function to exist in the subconscious where they weren’t a distraction from the actual problem at hand.
The bar these days seems to be “is it possible for the user to eventually accomplish their task?) as opposed to “how can we demand even less of the users’ brain for the task to be accomplished?”
I am anticipating this will not be a popular response, but I can’t help but think wrt/ UI design, we’ve collectively thrown out the baby with the bath water for vanity and it’s going to take some criticism to get it back.
Reading this book and studying the UI designs it inspired (ex: early to late 2000’s Mac UI) is IMO the best education a young UI-designer can get.
Edit: I don’t want to lay too much at the feet of designers because it’s probably Product Managers that also need to read this book and care about it.
True, but simple color contrast can work wonders. It’s not just a symptom of flat design — it’s a symptom of flat and pretty much all the same color design.
It might be a touch ugly, but as an example, if the main interface were black and the URL bar were white, you could nix all the texture/shadow/borders/margins you want and still be fine.
This is why I use the high contrast mode in MacOS. It ads nice solid black borders to all inputs. Originally I tried it out while fixing a bug, but now I can’t go back lest everything looks so monotonous and washed out.
For those of you skeptical that software can address this problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_power_plant
Adding storage to the grid is one solution, but adding software that can better influence the demand various customers put on the grid is also surprisingly effective.
>software that can better influence the demand various customers put on the grid is also surprisingly effective.
Every time the smart grid comes up, I imagine the power company turning off my air conditioning because the ability to turn off my air conditioning made them feel safe to under-provision.
Anecdotally, we are paid $10/mo for the utility to have the option to disable our A/C for up to a couple hours a day. They do not pay us for the time they actually disable A/C, but I don’t it hasn’t actually happened yet, so we are “winning” that bet. I think that customers would bid this option lower than $10, given the option, but agree others wouldn’t touch it. I hope that the price mitigated the real risk of supply planning skew mentioned by the GP.
I would only do it if either I actually controlled the software that did the turning off or there were a third-party that could be trusted to monitor and provided an escrow account with a huge financial penalty payable to me if the utility ever broke the rules.
I have absolutely no reason to trust them unless their incentives align with mine, and, here, they do not.
Even in that case, I would only agree to the 75F limit, because, for the other ones, it would take way too much time (and possibly too much energy, as well) to get back down. Air conditioning isn't instantaneous, and one can't just turn it on when one needs it, if there's more than a trivial temperature (or humidity[1]) drop.
[1] For some areas of the country, that's another, bigger problem with allowing an outsider to turn off the AC: go too long without and the humidity goes up too high. Now you have to buy a thermostat with a humidistat, just in case, even if you didn't need one before.
That's sure one way to do it. Another one is to have strict on- device limitations for how much control the power company does have. E.g. maximum delay of one minute for the air conditioning, one hour for the ice maker. A little flexibility goes a long way in load management.
Your residential AC is a long, long way down the smart grid priority chain.
The steel foundry down the road is a lot easier to convince - their profits are directly tied to the cost of energy, and it is relatively easy for them to scale energy use up or down.
Many utilities are interested in enrolling their customers in programs that would allow software to control the energy demands their customers put on the grid.
For instance, if you are a high-energy consuming factory, you may have a fixed amount of energy that you need to use each day, but have some flexibility as to exactly what time of day it is used.
There are companies right now writing software that takes into consideration all the constraints around the electrical usage of the various customers of a utility, and then vary the customer’s electrical usage in real time as the energy demand/production fluctuates on the grid.
Think of it this way. You can either put a battery on the grid to supply energy when the grid needs it OR, you can ask customers to stop using as much energy at that moment. Either way, the supply meets demand.
Although the problem you described can be solved with software, is it really "high growth"?
Put another way, can this grid flexibility problem be solved purely with a (currently popular in tech, especially among startups, as the GP alluded) cloud-based SaaS offering?
Or will it require some significant non-software portions to the solutions, such as co-locating hardware and/or high-reliability low-latency networking?
I realized my (own) sibling comment sounded like a bunch of rhetorical questions, since they were asked from the standpoint of my skepticism/suspicion based on what I read.
However, they actually are questions, and I'd appreciate knowing the answers (or best approximations) from an insider.
The wikipedia doesn't provide much insight into the technical underpinnings to draw any conclusions.
Perhaps there's something of an answer to the OC's general question, just in this inscrutability: the details are so foreign/unique but so important that software/computer people would have no intuition on how or where their skills would fit.
You seem to have missed the word 'exclusively'. Obviously software is an (important) part of a solution but it will need a lot of hardware and hardware knowledge in order to be able to be solved well. Your typical high-growth hacker wantrepreneur wouldn't touch a project like that with a 10' pole.
https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/03/software-ics-binary-comp...