It reminds me of the glory days when “hypertext” was a term uttered with a straight face to great stroking of beards—HyperCard, exercises in nonlinear narrative, VRML-based “navigation,” Apple eWorld [0] and the like.
> Would you like to bring a touch of adventurous spirit to your contents?
I personally would not, but I’m really glad people more adventurous than I are still exploring the periphery of UI design!
Or that Apple space based file system back in the 80's.
Try this a bit, it would be nice to be able to go directly to the grand-child, instead having to bring up the parent before going the child. Other wise can be a much better file naviation system then what we have. Especially on touch screen I would image.
Exactly, clicking should be the default so the drag handler doesn't prevent users from highlighting text - I literally cannot read anymore without frantically double-clicking/dragging on the words in the text
I think it would be pretty nice to be able to use the keyboard to navigate the UI (left/right arrow keys to "orbit the content", up/down to "zoom").
Using a pointer, I'd prefer to just be able to click on the oval to zoom into, maybe double-click to zoom back out a level, use the back button to go to the place I came from.
Makes me think of arguman[1] and kialo[2]. I discovered arguman maybe 10 years ago and have been thinking about it ever since. It's non-functional now but the source code is available. Maybe it's just my wishful thinking, but if we could map out every detail of an argument, maybe we could make progress faster, as a species. If this were incentivized well (like for instance polymarket), maybe with crypto rewards or something, this *could* take off.
I think if we could improve our ability to easily & precisely communicate arguments, that would be huge for humanity's ability to deal with problems. I'm building a tool[1] that I'm hoping can help with this, maybe be a successor (in some ways) to something like Kialo.
It's critically missing suggestions/approvals[2], and perhaps a simpler interface[3], but I think that, for arguments about problems/solutions, the idea of grounding arguments within a cause/effect diagram is really powerful both for getting on the same page and for making concrete progress towards improving a situation (rather than arguing for argument's sake).
I'd be happy to get your thoughts on it if you have any (I'll be making a HN post about it sometime soon^TM).
> I think if we could improve our ability to easily & precisely communicate arguments, that would be huge for humanity's ability to deal with problems.
I've been thinking the same thing, and also started working on it in the past. Whenever I voiced this (like here) others came to me saying they also thought of it as at LEAST a part of "the solution". You seem to actually have something going here!
I'll take a look at your three links, a first look at [1] gives me goosebumps, you have no idea how happy I am that I'm not the only one that still has this top-of-mind, especially nowadays, no matter what side you lean towards.
I can't really find the words to convey my elation here, so you'll have to do with a simple "wow, thank you!".
This reminds me of the time a few years ago when mind mapping sites and apps exploded into popularity among the... "technorati" and sort of slightly seep into the wider online awareness but then seemingly, just as quickly, disappear into the background noise of the internet (I'm terminally online to a degree, especially when it comes to tech news—and have a pretty decent general awareness of pop culture trends—and can't recall having seen the topic referenced since the trend faded. But perhaps I'm just not in the right circles?)
None of these mind map, zoom first interfaces actually help with creating a global understanding.
People take an occasionally helpful "view" for navigating items and then mistakenly believe it should be turned into an active interface for creation and editing.
Graph/Mindmap views should only ever be a view and maybe a linking layer for nested text lists, actively operating in these interfaces is worse for global understanding and systems thinking.
I suspect this is because mind maps don't actually map to how our brain stores information.
Visual programming and even tools like KNIME work for stepwise workflow creation but they are not a good UI for new thinking, it's too much UI for novel idea generation and brainstorming, these interfaces are also useful for quickly understanding a DB structure.
That's why they never take off and remain a niche tool for the small number of people who have brain structures that find them useful or are willing to bend themselves to an arbitrary interface.
In the author's defense - this is probably a prototype, hacked together without trying to optimize performance. You should not judge the idea by its realization's performance at this point in time.
It is true that I plan a custom renderer with scripting support, to replace the HTML version. From the tests I performed by now, it can be smoother and faster than the current version. But it is yet to be seen how well would a substitution to HTML catch up with the current state of art CSS+HTML+JS.
Liked this more than expected. Here's my possible use case.
In a work setting I am constantly juggling between excel,PowerPoint,word and bunch of online wiki style tools
When I have to craft something that requires information from these tools, like many, I end up creating a PowerPoint presentation.
Gets the job done but never feels ideal given the one way directional nature of it, yes you can hyperlink but gets messy for audience.
This style of navigation could help especially where you are layering the information across multiple themes (each theme say is a node). As audience you might go deep into one node quickly then zoom back out to understand how that node interacts with another.
Kudos for building something new, fresh & exploring, experimenting.
I don't see a scenario where this would be useful. It reminds me of exploded-view drawing but I don't see this being useful for textual content. Do you have an explicit use case? The example page, to me, looks very cluttered, overwhelming and IMO aesthetically unpleasing when reading on a mobile device.
Readit News
> Would you like to bring a touch of adventurous spirit to your contents?
I personally would not, but I’m really glad people more adventurous than I are still exploring the periphery of UI design!
[0] https://www.macworld.com/article/223467/remembering-eworld-a...
Try this a bit, it would be nice to be able to go directly to the grand-child, instead having to bring up the parent before going the child. Other wise can be a much better file naviation system then what we have. Especially on touch screen I would image.
Also I hate that I can't select text on this. Probably because "dragging".
Using a pointer, I'd prefer to just be able to click on the oval to zoom into, maybe double-click to zoom back out a level, use the back button to go to the place I came from.
[1] https://github.com/arguman/arguman.org - the website exists but is non-functional now
[2] https://www.kialo.com - feels like a dumbed-down version of arguman
It's critically missing suggestions/approvals[2], and perhaps a simpler interface[3], but I think that, for arguments about problems/solutions, the idea of grounding arguments within a cause/effect diagram is really powerful both for getting on the same page and for making concrete progress towards improving a situation (rather than arguing for argument's sake).
I'd be happy to get your thoughts on it if you have any (I'll be making a HN post about it sometime soon^TM).
[1] https://ameliorate.app/
[2] https://github.com/amelioro/ameliorate/issues/11
[3] https://github.com/amelioro/ameliorate/discussions/541
I've been thinking the same thing, and also started working on it in the past. Whenever I voiced this (like here) others came to me saying they also thought of it as at LEAST a part of "the solution". You seem to actually have something going here!
I'll take a look at your three links, a first look at [1] gives me goosebumps, you have no idea how happy I am that I'm not the only one that still has this top-of-mind, especially nowadays, no matter what side you lean towards.
I can't really find the words to convey my elation here, so you'll have to do with a simple "wow, thank you!".
None of these mind map, zoom first interfaces actually help with creating a global understanding.
People take an occasionally helpful "view" for navigating items and then mistakenly believe it should be turned into an active interface for creation and editing.
Graph/Mindmap views should only ever be a view and maybe a linking layer for nested text lists, actively operating in these interfaces is worse for global understanding and systems thinking.
I suspect this is because mind maps don't actually map to how our brain stores information.
Visual programming and even tools like KNIME work for stepwise workflow creation but they are not a good UI for new thinking, it's too much UI for novel idea generation and brainstorming, these interfaces are also useful for quickly understanding a DB structure.
That's why they never take off and remain a niche tool for the small number of people who have brain structures that find them useful or are willing to bend themselves to an arbitrary interface.
[0] https://prezi.com/p/p6evz0gdy5dr/ux-design-tips-for-product-...
Decidedly not "OK".
In a work setting I am constantly juggling between excel,PowerPoint,word and bunch of online wiki style tools
When I have to craft something that requires information from these tools, like many, I end up creating a PowerPoint presentation.
Gets the job done but never feels ideal given the one way directional nature of it, yes you can hyperlink but gets messy for audience.
This style of navigation could help especially where you are layering the information across multiple themes (each theme say is a node). As audience you might go deep into one node quickly then zoom back out to understand how that node interacts with another.
I don't see a scenario where this would be useful. It reminds me of exploded-view drawing but I don't see this being useful for textual content. Do you have an explicit use case? The example page, to me, looks very cluttered, overwhelming and IMO aesthetically unpleasing when reading on a mobile device.