People always wonder at my skill in picking up unfamiliar UIs, and its always just that I explore the interface thoroughly and press every likely-looking button
When I was in my early teens I got my hands on a copy of Photoshop 7 from my granddad and spent so much time on tutorial websites and Worth1000, messing around with the tools and making fake digital post-its and stuff like that. I think Photoshop is definitely up there in terms of complex UIs, so having that hands-on experience was crucial in learning how to learn other UIs.
It also helped that a lot of the tutorials by that point were for CS3, which had warp features that 7 didn't have, and I had to experiment to find workarounds for the missing tools.
The only device where that has failed me was a washing maschine with a mixed analog and digital UI.
With the old ones you could just turn the knobs. With the new ones you basically have a full touchscreen App interface. But for that period where things started to get more digital but not completely, it's absolutely awful.
People always wonder at my skill in picking up unfamiliar UIs, and its always just that I explore the interface thoroughly and press every likely-looking button
When I was in my early teens I got my hands on a copy of Photoshop 7 from my granddad and spent so much time on tutorial websites and Worth1000, messing around with the tools and making fake digital post-its and stuff like that. I think Photoshop is definitely up there in terms of complex UIs, so having that hands-on experience was crucial in learning how to learn other UIs.
It also helped that a lot of the tutorials by that point were for CS3, which had warp features that 7 didn't have, and I had to experiment to find workarounds for the missing tools.
The only device where that has failed me was a washing maschine with a mixed analog and digital UI.
With the old ones you could just turn the knobs. With the new ones you basically have a full touchscreen App interface. But for that period where things started to get more digital but not completely, it's absolutely awful.