New Architect: What's your pet peeve about UI design on the Web?

Tim Bray: First, the lack of progress. Today's Web UI doesn't look much different than it did in 1994. Have we learned nothing? Second, the huge gulf between the visual access your desktop provides to your hard drive and the "query, hit Enter, look-at-lists-of-items" basis of most Web apps.

NA: Is the Web to blame for bad UI design? Or does the problem predate the Net?

TB: I think in general we took a step forward when we migrated from custom GUIs to the Web back in the '90s. The Web keeps things simple, and the notion of pieces of text doubling as control elements is very sound. Having said that, there are excellent pieces of desktop software UI and horrible examples of Web UI.

NA: Give me an example of a good UI.

TB: The interface at www.time.gov is one example of how to do things right. It uses a very small amount of screen real estate to provide a substantial number of choices in a way that is instantly obvious. What's not to like? I'm not going to point a finger at all the ways to do things wrong, that's Jakob Nielsen's job.

NA: What are your current projects or areas of research?

TB: The last three years of my life have been more or less totally dedicated to this problem. We are using the graphics engine in every modern browser to display visual maps—real maps, like cartographers draw—of complex data sets, so that access to shared information can be visual.<>
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