Comment by OhMeadhbh

This whole thread reminds me of when I saw my first Windows-based ticket dispensing machine at a movie theater. Early in the year there was a screening of the Star Wars trilogy at the Cinema at the North Park Mall in Dallas. Every geek for miles beat a path to the theater. When I got there the line was moving along reasonably quickly and was maybe 20 people deep. No problem. You get to the front of the line, hand over a $10 for two $5 tickets and the cashier pressed the "dispense ticket" button twice. Two tickets came out immediately and you were on your way.

Later that same year Jurassic Park premiered at the same location. Again, every geek for miles around beat a path to the theater. But this time when I arrived, the line was hundreds of people deep and it took about 45 minutes to get to the head of the line (good thing we got there early.) When I got up to the cashier I found they had a new Windows-3.1 based ticket dispensing system. You said how many tickets you wanted and the cashier moved the mouse over a text field, took their hands off the mouse to type "1" or "2" or whatever. If you bought a child's ticket or a senior ticket, that went in a different form field. Then the cashier put their hands back on the mouse, scrolled down and hit the "calculate" button. It told them how much cash to take. They took their hands off the keyboard to collect the cash and then pressed the "dispense tickets" button. Thankfully, the system seemed to actually dispense tickets without crashing. (Windows 3.x had a very bad reliability reputation.)

What had taken 10-15 seconds with the "old school" interface now took about a minute.

Never let anyone tell you "the new system" is better just because it is new.

[[ Also, about this time I remembered Jef Raskin going on about keyboard interfaces, but this was long before the publication of The Humane Interface. And I know we're using the initialism "TUI" in this thread to mean "Text UI", but some people use it to mean "Tactile UI." No one ever got fired for recommending a React Single Page App optimized to quickly swap pages on the current model iPhone. Whether or not that's the best interface for the application is irrelevant. ]]