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Comment on Ask HN: Should I attend college?parent

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I've worked with folks doing gestural (eg. Kinect-style) and voice interfaces. Some of the principles are different, but a lot remain the same. The basic ideas behind deciding what's the absolute most important information for a user to know, getting in their mindset, progressively revealing more as they navigate through the app, and being instantly responsive actually become more important with gestural/voice interfaces, because your communication channel with the device is lower bandwidth. (At least now - gestural interfaces have the potential to be much higher bandwidth, but current camera tech isn't up to it yet.) A lot of the math behind gestural interfaces is also very similar to the math behind 3D computer graphics.

I also think that computer interfaces will retain some visual component at least for the foreseeable future, because humans are predominantly visual creatures. There are some situations where this isn't appropriate - eg. while driving a car - but when you have the user's full attention, it's usually fastest to present information visually.

I think that a lot of the changes might be in the form of refinements or new UI models. Mobile has opened up a whole bunch of new UI metaphors - scrolling is much more important, with things like pull-to-refresh and sticky toolbars, and it's now customary to stick all links and navigation options behind a NavigationDrawer - but they didn't fundamentally change what being a FE-SWE is about. It's more like these are new UI widgets that can be used to build a better experience on smaller screens. Things like cameras and accelerometers do change some of the paradigms behind frontend engineering (I bet OCR and physics will become much more important in the near future), but so far they're being used as subroutines you call out to.

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