A GUI can be as effective as a TUI if it's designed to be 100% usable from a keyboard - the problem is very few applications take the time to do that design.
Maybe in some cases. But largely, no, it really is not comparable. These TUI interfaces literally had 0 latency for any action. You could paste in text (from clipboard), with \t characters, and it would advance the input focus and could fill out an entire form with once paste action. There's a ton of real world cases where the browser is just too heavy to keep up with fast paced data entry.
I've never once seen an experienced user equal or gain efficiency when switching. It's always a loss even after months of acclimation.
It's totally possible to get this done with a web based SPA. Just get rid of all the fancy design, images, gradients, animations, and so on, and just focus on usability.
The management needs to pick the right concept though, not the one with pretty and playful screenshots, but the one that focuses on the right KPIs (the 20 most common user flows need to take less than x seconds for an average user).
My experience has always been that TUIs and Terminal emulators these days have massive snags with how they handle control codes and inputs. Pasting into a terminal is a crapshoot of “what on earth is it going to spew back at me”.
It’s perfectly possible to handle large amounts of data by copy and paste on a web browser, you just have to actually support it.
That is not unique to TUIs, but also possible in GUIs where the developers care, and in some games (try the GUI ("tiles") version of Brogue). You can definitely make a GUI that updates in an instant and be fully keyboard-driven, even if that may have been more common last century.
The other thing that a TUI generally does that a GUI doesn't is that it lets you type ahead, you can drive it without looking at the screen.
Most GUI's make you wait for the form to appear before you can type into it. That totally destroys the flow of operators.
There are GUI's that are properly designed to be keyboard driven and to allow type-ahead. Those can be truly best-of-both-worlds. Too bad they're so rare.
No, that's only the Steve Jobs view. You might be grappling with Discoverability.
When IT was trying to sell everyone on WIMP GUI, the standard was WordPerfect. There, you had to memorize the functions of the F1-F12 keys, as well as their shifted (or Control) behavior. The only sure thing was that F1 was HELP.
We were looking for something better--but having no keyboard was the opposite extreme.
Not specifically for those but I have to assume the pattern would work: you could intercept the keystrokes in a parent window or an overlay, then forward them to the correct child window once it's rendered.
conductr|3 months ago
I've never once seen an experienced user equal or gain efficiency when switching. It's always a loss even after months of acclimation.
andix|3 months ago
The management needs to pick the right concept though, not the one with pretty and playful screenshots, but the one that focuses on the right KPIs (the 20 most common user flows need to take less than x seconds for an average user).
maccard|3 months ago
It’s perfectly possible to handle large amounts of data by copy and paste on a web browser, you just have to actually support it.
1313ed01|3 months ago
bryanlarsen|3 months ago
Most GUI's make you wait for the form to appear before you can type into it. That totally destroys the flow of operators.
There are GUI's that are properly designed to be keyboard driven and to allow type-ahead. Those can be truly best-of-both-worlds. Too bad they're so rare.
dartharva|3 months ago
FarmerPotato|3 months ago
When IT was trying to sell everyone on WIMP GUI, the standard was WordPerfect. There, you had to memorize the functions of the F1-F12 keys, as well as their shifted (or Control) behavior. The only sure thing was that F1 was HELP.
We were looking for something better--but having no keyboard was the opposite extreme.
throw_a_grenade|3 months ago
GrinningFool|3 months ago