Vincent Gable’s Blog

October 23, 2009

GUI is Dead, Long Live UI

Filed under: Design,Programming,Usability | , , , ,
― Vincent Gable on October 23, 2009

The term GUI, Graphical User Interface, pronounced “Gooey” is laughably anachronistic. All interfaces meant for people on modern computers are graphical. The right abbreviation to use today is simply UI, for User Interface, pronounced “You I”.

Believe me, I understand that a command line interface is still useful today. I use them. I’m a programmer. I get the whole UNIX thing. Even without a pipe, a command-line is the highest-bandwidth input mechanism we have today.

But all command lines live inside a graphical OS. That’s how computers work in the 21st century.
Picture 6.png

Whenever I see “GUI” written I can’t help but wonder if the author is dangerously out of touch. Do they still think graphical interfaces are a novelty that needs to be called out?

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