Comment by privong
7 hours ago
An interesting theme here in the comments (that I am sympathetic to) is "TUIs have steep learning curves but are fast/efficient for people with proficiency". I wonder if a small part of the modern preference for GUIs is related to a lack of employee retention. If companies aren't necessarily interested in working hard to keep employees then training new hires needs to be faster/easier and that could work against TUI and keyboard-based tools.
Of course, if that's a factor I'm guessing it's a small one in comparison to expectations about what "modern" software should look like.
What I heard from one large chain is they couldn't train warehouse employees on the green screen (3270) inventory app, its too different for them. They just wouldn't do it or would quit.
I don't think it's an either/or situation.
An application I worked on was a GUI but (at the user's request) we loaded that thing up with hotkeys like no other.
Watching experienced employees operate a gui I worked on was a fascinating experience. They were so fucking fast!
I think the problem is that GUI authors often put hotkeys in as an afterthought.
The other thing is that GUIs can be very slow to load, limiting the potential speed/efficiency. One of the most frustrating experiences is pressing a series of key commands (or just single keys) that SHOULD have performed a very specific series of actions, but the software lagged behind at some point(s) in the flow and something ended up getting messed up because my series of key presses resulted in a totally unintended action.
It's also quite common that the customer is now the one that drives the interface.
It's the customer's time wasted by the UI, but also the customer typically can't be expected to perform enough orders to actually learn a complicated interface.
TUIs persist in industries where there is specialized knowledge needed to even complete the order. For example, an optometrist's office.
I was thinking about employee-facing tools, but I agree that TUIs present an even bigger challenge for casual users / customers.
This is a definite reality and headache. The learning curve was steep and I literally had somebody walk out after training them for less than two hours.