Apple UX Pioneer on Reviving Computer Desktop Design

Scott Jenson is sad over the stagnation of computer desktop design, a field with still-untapped potential for making humans way more productive. “Desktop UX has not meaningfully changed in 20 years,” he lamented, sharing his thoughts at the Canonical Ubuntu Summit 2025, in London earlier this year. Jenson was the first member of Apple’s Human Interface group in the late 1980s and went on to do key product design for Symbian and Google. Currently, he is a UX strategist in the open source world for both Mastodon and Home Assistant. “People completely forget how powerful desktop is, because it is boring,” he admits. A UX Pioneer Among his many achievements at Apple, Jenson originally had the idea to put the ellipse in the middle of a too-long filename, rather than at the end, making it way more readable in tiny Macintosh windows. “It’s so fun to see that code that you had an impact on 40 years ago is still running,” Jenson said. “But it’s also, I think, a good sign of how subtle a lot of details are for desktop UX.” He also pointed out how, on Macs, the user can bring a file in from a background window to the main window, or even into another application. “On almost every Linux system, you cannot do this because the window comes forward on mouse-down, not mouse-up,” he explained. “Good desktop UX enables new ways of moving data and handling things,” he said. A Call for Innovation Today’s desktop interface is a copy of a copy of a copy, with the original desktop metaphor coming from the Xerox Star prototype in 1981. Apple’s original Macintosh copied this “window”-based interface, with a number of refinements. And thus begat Windows, which begat GNOME and KDE. This copying of the window-based system makes it easier for both the designer and user. “Why would you want to reinvent the wheel?” Jenson asked. But, at the same time, it has left the interface designer bereft of ideas. “Designers think statistically and programmers think mathematically.” Taking a jab at Apple’s new liquid display for the iPhone, Jenson said, “If your big claim to fame to your operating system is that you’ve got some fancy shiny pixels, you’ve really lost the plot,” he said. Microsoft Windows has had some serious lapses lately as well, in Jenson’s mind, including “thirsty signups,” and the botched rollout of the Recall feature, Jenson said. But the real problem is that there is nothing left to copy. The Foundations of User Design Today, too many people think of user design as moving pixels around. Thanks in part to the success of Figma, a depressingly large amount of “design” work involves icons. But far from prettifying the surface, user interface design goes through four steps (understanding, bridging, flowing and refining) to bring all involved into a shared perspective of what a thing is and how it works, Jenson explained.   The four-step process of user interface design. (Scott Jenson) UX is all about shared perspective. At Mastodon, Jenson participated in the debate over whether a response to a response post should appear above or below the original post in the user’s feed. Twitter put the original post underneath, assuming that it would downplay toxic content. And when Mastodon researched this matter, it came to the same conclusion, but for a completely different reason. It found that most original posts were overwhelmingly positive in nature, and users said they preferred the repost-on-top format, as it would amplify the good news in the original post. From either perspective, Jenson pointed out, the post at the bottom came out on top. Mobile Consumes, Computers Produce “What’s a computer?” When the fresh-faced youth asked that question in the 2017 Apple ad for the iPad, a little part of Jenson’s heart crumpled. That was when Apple definitively finally broke off its love affair with the Mac (“computer”) in favor of the mobile platform. Mobile may have since won the market for consumers, but when it comes to productivity, the computer is still king. The iPhone was made for consuming data, not producing it. Mobile designers equated taps on the phone screen with computer clicks, when in fact the two varied quite a bit in functionality, much to the confusion of early mobile users who tried to type out text as if they were on a computer. A single tap on a phone’s text editor can lead to four possible actions, leading to myriad befuddled users. In contrast, the average desktop has a very clear pattern for the click button when it comes to text. First, you may learn to simply click on a word. Then you learn to click and drag for more words. At the final level of understanding, you double-click once on as many words as you want. There’s still a need for similar interfaces optimized for producing content, not just consuming it. Jenson did not offer much in the way of ideas of large-scale revisions, but did offer a way forward. It’s all about thinking in loops, he said. A user starts an action, and that action is executed. What series of actions can unlock current pain points? He offered a demo where a window manager could keep track not only of files, but also manage text clippings and images, all through the same set of keystrokes. “When you think in loops, you think about the OS in a more nuanced way,” he said. 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