Guiding users away from cd and ls

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Style Pass

2024-04-26 01:30:29

TL;DR: We’ve devised a strategy to shepherd users away from archaic commands. I hope this case study shapes our thinking on UX for new terminals.

Excited to have the free time to summarize progress I’ve made on Twitch this year. The biggest focus was teaching new users that Terminal Click has a visual browser. My friends suggested I eliminate the cd and ls commands entirely because our alternative is superior. However, as I kept reflecting on Jes Chuhta’s fireside chat [1] (along with some private banter) this suggestion to merely chuck out the old system didn’t sit right with me.

After running some experiments, the solution that delighted users the most was to lull them into believing something like cd exists and then immediately violate expectations:

User feedback tells me it just seems to click (hehe) now! Notice how we’re incorporating new behavior into the old command followed by recommending the faster workflow. Running ls works similarly. Another thing I would like to implement is dissolving the command into a puff of smoke: if someone knows a quick shader trick for this please shoot me a message (I use sokol-gfx for the graphics.)