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Inspired by work on gesture-based marking menus (Callahan et al 1988), in 2001 we designed, implemented and evaluated a gesture-based mechanism for issuing the Back and Forward commands. Similar features were simultaneously released in the Opera 4 commercial web browser, and slightly later by the Mozilla Optimoz project 5. To our knowledge, neither of these commercial implementations has been formally evaluated.

Another book you sould consider, though it is more geared toward personal computer interfaces, is Bruce Tognazinni's Tog on Interface also from Addison-Wesley (ISBN: 0201608421). Tog is now part of the Nielsen-Norman Group, which can be hired for HCI work, if you have the moolah.

His description of such a system is here. and includes a link to a company that now makes such a thing.

The reason why a linux terminal often seems more efficient (and usable) than a linux gui is that the people designing linux GUI's do not know how to make efficient and usable GUI's. If you don't develop a gui that tries to minimize number of mouse clicks, adhere to Fitts' Law, be non-modal, things like that, then you'll tend to have very inefficient and unusable GUI's that make you wish to be rescued by some archaic, cryptic, monochromatic piece of keyboard driven junk from 1970.

Many open source people tend to think that the kind of stuff that I linked to above is pretty much BS, and this is where the problem with linux usability really lies.

That's less of a problem with Jaguar, but it's still true to some extent, mainly because response time to mouse clicks is much longer on OSX than it was in OS9. In OS9, the time between the mouse button going down and some noticeable change happening on the screen was just a few milliseconds. In OSX, it seems more like several tens of milliseconds. It's a very noticeable difference. To see this, click your mouse fairly quickly, taking note of the "ka-chunk" that occurs where "ka" is down and "chunk" is up. Now click and hold on a menu in OSX. Notice that the menu drops down at roughly the same time that "chunk" would happen if you had released the mouse button. There's an obvious "beat" between the time the mouse goes down and the time the menu drops down. Now boot into OS9 (not Classic) and do the same test. The time lag between the mouse going down and the menu dropping is so short it's virtually undetectable.

On the other hand, preemptive multitasking kind of makes up for it; in OS9 I was used to the entire machine locking up when the mouse was down or certain dialog boxes (like printing) were in progress. But in OSX, almost nothing ever locks up the entire machine. Operations that would monopolize the processor in OS9 (like Acrobat when it's searching for a string in a long document) have no such effect in OSX--you're always free to switch to another application to continue to get work done. Those CPU-hogging operations are now very obvious and annoying when I occasionally boot into OS9.

Most operations that don't involve the user interface seem faster in OSX than in OS9. To me, the file system seems faster, network operations seem faster, and CPU-intensive operations seem faster. Whether this is a true speedup or merely the result of preemptive timeslicing I don't know.

The Finder is still the biggest problem in Jaguar. The OS9 Finder was a well-honed jewel of user interface mastery, having been originally designed by user interface experts and successively refined over a decade and a half. The OS9 Finder was a subtle beast: novices had no trouble with it and never noticed its deeper layers, while power users found that it was supremely useful at doing industrial-strength operations without getting in your way. In the OS9 Finder I rarely touched the mouse, so facile was the system at being controlled by the keyboard.

In OSX the situation is different. The Finder in OSX is pretty and it's reasonably functional for novices. But it clearly was not designed by user interface experts and it's not capable of handling what power users need. "Of course," you say, "that's what the Terminal is for." But in OS9, there was no Terminal, and the Finder there was designed well enough that you almost never wished you had one. In OSX, perhaps because there is a Terminal, the Finder's designers have not taken any great pains to make the thing usable to power users. For example, Labels were very useful to power users and they're gone now. The Open and Save dialog boxes cannot be navigated with the keyboard any more, like they could in OS9. (This problem was slightly addressed in Jaguar, in that you can now use arrow keys in this dialog, but you still cannot navigate the dialog alphabetically like you could in OS9). Window opening and refreshing in the OSX Finder is much slower than it was in OS9, and the OSX Finder is dirt slow when you use it to perform an operation on hundreds of files at once. Wanna see the rainbow cursor? Open your browser cache folder when it's got over 1000 files, select all, then hit cmd-Delete to throw them in the trash. The OS9 Finder was somewhat slow when it dealt with thousands of files too, but the situation seems worse in OSX. You'd think it would be better.

All in all, I think I'm just about as productive in Jaguar as I was in OS9. But I'd be more so if the Finder didn't suck so much.

I think this would be a good idea and might help more than in just checking for cheaters.

You wonder what more eyeballs would have done with this fiasco analyzed by Bruce Tognazzini.

I think this would be a good idea and might help more than in just checking for cheaters.

You wonder what more eyeballs would have done with this fiasco analyzed by Bruce Tognazzini.

Why the heck do I have to move the mouse to one of the most obscure position, the lower left corner, just to start a program, which is easily the most used desktop operation of all?

Because the corners/edges of the screen are the easiest pixels to click on, with the exception of the pixel currently under the mouse. See Fitt's Law.

It's easier to click on the desktop if the mouse is already over the desktop. However, a lot of people work with apps using the full screen, so it's easier to use a start button.

Of course, this requires that your Start button actually extend to the corner of the screen. MS fumbled the ball on this originally, IIRC, by giving it a border (as they did with taskbar buttons), but they later fixed this (the border is still there visually, but now you can click on it). However, if you make the taskbar double height (as I normally do) then the Windows Start button inexplicably gets aligned with the top of the taskbar rather than the bottom, so slamming the the mouse to the bottom left and clicking has no effect.

I expect this positioning was considered to be more aesthetically pleasing. Sometimes Microsoft are very good at, as Sir Humphrey once said, "Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory".

Tim

"What I like about the toolbars in Win98/ME is that you can add your own toolbars along all the edges of the screen. Can you do this in WindowMaker, my preferred WM?"

If you also run gnome's panel application, yes. (I prefer to just have one toolbar. I use WindowMaker as well at the moment. The only thing I want to change in it is that I want the icons to be at the same place at the dock. It looks weird that they're at two different places.)

By the way, when last I used windows, it's edge toolbars violated Fitt's Law, have they improved?

(I use "unclutter" to get rid of the mouse cursor if it annoys me.)

Menus are an important special case as they are typically the only user interface elements not managed by the window manager.

An application would define a property, WM_MENU, on any window that needs a menu. The property would be a list of menu items, each similar to the structs used in just about every windowing system, and allowing recursive definitions of other menus by pointing to other window properties. Applications wouldn't have to respond to the menu events, only to the final selection. The advantages would be many.

• Applications could be smaller, since they won't have to manage the menus.
• Applications, especially those running remotely from the display server, would seem more responsive to the user because the menu would be handled locally.
• Best of all, window managers could offer more choice in menu bars.

I haven't seen this URL posted yet (I thought it came from Slashdot a while ago, but I guess I was mistaken :) Be sure you can answer all of these questions before you even start to think about GUI design. I agree with pretty much everything the guy says. One other thing, be sure to keep to conventions wherever possible. For example, people are used to having the Exit command at the bottom of the File menu, so (unless you're doing something completely different, as you may be) don't stick it anywhere else. Little things like that make programs more intuitive. And one other thing: make it as unlike Blender as possible :)

Sorry, correct link is: http://www.asktog.com/papers/videoPrototypePaper.h tml

1) That wraparound screen actually looks pretty cool and potentially useful. I find myself glancing back and forth slightly across my large screen, so something like this could help with limited screen real estate. Not everyone's comfortable with X-style multiple desktops. My one worry is that this monitor would be MS-only

It is cool. It's also a blatant ripoff of the work Bruce Tognazzini did at Sun: In his "Starfire" movie (in which we are shown exactly why Bruce should not attempt a career as director) one of the core ideas is the Starfire desktop, a 6-foot wide vertical arc that also sweeps down onto the physical "desktop". While the film is flat, the thinking that went into the world it portrays is excellent, and has stood the test of time quite well.

Not only is the idea presented there, but there are some clever demonstrations of possible features of such tchnology, for instance: The desktop portion of the display incorporates phototransistors as the 4th element of each pixel. The entire screen is touch sensitive, allowing one to "scan" a document by simply placing it face down on the display and rubbing it with your knuckles. The image then visibly flips to "un-mirror" itself and is OCRed into usable form. Cool. Another neat idea is that of merging touchscreen gestures with the giant Starfire display - for instance, a duplicate of a graphics object in Ashlar Vellum for Starfire is created by touching it with thumb and finger joined, then spreading them apart, creating a selected copy of the object.

The MS center sounds interesting, but it looks to be a simple rip-off of the ideas that Sun first expressed in the Starfire film. (That said, I think Sun wasn't quite ready to deal with a vision so bold, either. One of the interesting things about the film is the implied e-business connectedness that underlies the system. In some ways, it is very much like what we have today with Google and large scale information repository sites.)

This vision still needs to happen. Here's hoping it will...

The single menubar at the top of the screen is faster to access because of an ergonomic principle known as Fitts' Law, which states that the time to access a target is a function of the target's distance and size. A at the top menubar is infinitely large because there is no possible way to overshoot it vertically (i.e. you can slam the mouse up to the top of the screen really fast and don't have to correct for any vertical error because you're running into the top of the screen). On the Windows/GNOME/KDE interfaces it's possible to vertically overshoot the menubar, which makes that layout far less usable than the layout on a mac. For a more in-depth explanation of this phenomena, check out this article by UI guru Bruce Tognazinni.

i'd like to point out that the content is what reall matters, not how it is written. yes it's true that many of the posters here have an english that lacks some serious grammar lessons, but YOU can't change them, especially not with your somehow harsh approach. (you might consider reading this: How to Write a Report Without Getting Lynched) besides that there are quite a few reader whose primary language (their mother tounge?) is not english and learn much of their english not in school but rather on the internet, namely the irc networks and news portals like slashdot, and from movies. those people are not to be blamed for their bad english and 4 tere stoopid slang Xpressns ..blame the people who talked to them that way on the internet, blame the movies industry and most of all, blame their english teachers who don't know anything about slang and therefore can't prevent the ones they are teaching from using them when not in their lessons (my english teacher never talked about slang with us, if he would have talked about it, we might have found out, some expressions we learned from the movies and from the internet were just plain wrong) anyways, who cares about language on the internet anymore? couldn't you care less?

Now I wonder if I could remotely flush my toliet?"

You can if you live in japan...

See "Ask Tog". The principle is that the closer a menu item is to the mouse pointer, the easier it is to hit. So you get
-
-^-
-

rather than
-
-
-
-
^
for a menu.

see http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFit ts.html>

As much as I hate to say it, the studies by Nielsen et al are actually worth something here. A context menu arranged in a circle will be easier to navigate, because you memorise direction as well as distance (look at the answer to q7 on the page).

Also, pie menus will be advantageous because, unlike keyboard shortcuts, they will be displayed whenever called upon. Further, arrangements such as piemenu-Left to go back, piemenu-Right to go forward, are intuitive.

Overall, this is a development in UI design that I'd like to see used more. I first saw it used in the extra software supplied with a Genius wheel mouse.

The mac menubar does have faster access times, because of Fitts' Law. Check out this article by UI design guru bruce tognazzini. Basically, interface elements located on screen edges have faster access times with a mouse because you can't overshoot.

Why do so many interfaces have the Windows-style menus? GNOME has them because that's what KDE did. KDE did them because that's what microsoft did. Microsoft did them because of their usual incompetance at designing UI's (M$ office adaptive menu's, multi-row tabs, need I say more) and because in they didn't want to get sued by Apple. Fat lot of good that did them, as Apple filed a lawsuit over the UI anyways.

For those who are interested in usability, check out stuff from Jakob Nielsen and Bruce Tognazzini

The reason why the mouse requires so much effort on Windows is that Microsoft (and by extension, most windows programmers) make UI's that take a lot of power away from the mouse.

The example most relevant to your post is the pull-down "File" menu. When they copied apple (or tried to), microsoft changed the location of the pull-down menu bar from the top of the screen (like on a mac) to the window of each respective application. With Apple's way, you can't possibly vertically overshoot the menu bar; with Microsoft's way, not only is it possible to overshoot the menubar horizontally, but you have to watch out for overshooting the menubar vertically as well. Putting it simply, a menu at the top of a screen has faster mouse access times than a menu on a window. I know it sounds counterintuitive, but it is a result of something called Fitts' Law, which states that the time to access a target is a function of the target's distance and it's size. For more information on Fitts' Law, check out this article on usability guru Bruce Tognizzini's website.

On that AskTog link...(honestly I forgot to read it before, but I think it proves my point about "overall usability is not measured by a stopwatch" in spades) I'd say he starts with a wrong principle, and then makes about 8/10 wrong conclusions from that:
Fitts's Law: The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.
This completely ignores several other important factors involving the mental process of locating the correct button you're looking for. Reducing scanning and searching goes a longer way to improving speed than these two factors...

Point by point:
1. I don't disagree but he missed "C. because sometimes I can read faster than I can think about icons". Hell, I always use Save or Load from the File menu rather than the standard buttonbar, because I can't be bothered to think about what the damn icon means. I'm sure this isn't the case for everyone.

2. I don't disagree but he missed "C. make sure the tools are logically grouped by function"

3. A one pixel target? What is he smoking anyway? In any case, despite the mechanics of arm movement, a *logical* placement is more important than thinking in terms of the whole damn screen!

4. I personally like the taskbar as a glance-able reminder of what tasks I got going. I think his point "A" is obsolete now that Windows taskbars have that QuickLaunch section. And has always mised the useful clock that was there...the taskbar isn't really "one object" And as for stuffing it in the corners...well, I don't know about "accidental triggers" (not that I think people are randomly mousing around anyway) but if the taskbar is constrained to take an edge so it has enough room to be useful, then the entire edge should LOGICALLY activate it, rather than some "magic hot corners"

5. I'm biased because I grew up on Win3.1 and not Mac OSwhatever, but I think having menubars on windows, with its mapping of what the hell the program wants to do close to the task at hand, is more sensible than a bar that's always changing around. But I think people are gonna want whatever they grew up with.

6. Actually, I agree with him here. I find Windows menus to be excessively futzy.

7. Oh Sweet Jimminy Crickets. My logitech mouse has an option to bring up a circular menu...how are you supposed to read that thing, twist your head in a circle?

8. While I guess I've found some "mouse acceleration" algorithms to be unobtrusive and useful, I don't think context sensitive mouse movement is a good thing.

9. I'll grant him this, not knowing much about it.

10. Overall, I agree with some of his conclusions. Bigger buttons are probably a good idea. But to think that it all comes down to some kind of "mousing olympics", that it's all sprints and hurdles instead of a mental process, is plain dumb.

If the user is typing something really important in an IE text field, and then all of a sudden the text field loses focus and they hit the backspace button (thinking they're doing a backspace in a text field) guess what happens? They go back to a previous page and in many cases the text field they have been typing in get's completely blanked out when this happens. We UI designers would typically call this an "unexpected action". The user expected hitting backspace by itself would do a backspace in the text, and instead it brought them to a previous page. And wiped out all the valuable work they had done in the process.

Other examples of microsoft incompetance include window-in-window MDI, multi-row tabs, and their latest shennanigan, the adaptive menus that constantly change position on a user (which screws up the users motor muscle memory for where the menu selections are). All these "features" have been harshly criticized by many in the HCI community.

For further reading, check out the Interface Hall of Shame, of which Microsoft is the most frequent inductee.
To see Microsoft usability get slammed by one of the most prominent members of the UI design community, check out AskTog.com

Microsoft is so successful in the UI biz despite their poor usability for precisely the same reason they are so successful in the server biz despite their poor security: they've got a monopoly, a proprietary file format, and the ears, hearts and minds of every pointy-haired boss and every clueless IT manager in America.

Herein lies an important tenet of usability testing, which is Jakob Nielsen's "First Rule of Usability:"

Don't Listen to Users

You may think the Windows interface is OK, but your saying so is no substitute for observing you in action. Chances are--and no offense intended--you probably don't get along as well as you think you do.

And you have to have something to compare it to. When compared with the Macintosh, the Windows GUI is much slower. Just, Ask Tog. Finally, as MaxVlast points out,

• the user shouldn't care or think about whether a program is running or not, he should simply use the right tool for the right job

We've done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

• Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
  
• The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
  

Where's your fifty million dollars worth of research, cmkrnl?

I've always found this article a thoughtful commentary on the role techies have had in shaping the internet.

• Jakob Neilson
• Usable Web
• Web Word
• Bruce Tognazzini
• User Interface Engineering
• Usability First
• Microsoft Usability

Tog has come up with a similar idea.
The Bluetooth solution mentioned elsewhere can be found here.

The first place I saw the idea was AskTog, May, 2000. But he has an update saying the technology has been developed by a company called bluelinx.

For those of you who don't yet know of Tog, he was the Human Interface Evangslist at Apple.
The book, as the Amazon review states, does not describe a methodology or a set of guidelines but a state of mind. The mindset that Tog describes is one that I personally think the open source movement could benefit from.

All I know is that once I had finished the book I couldn't help but look at all software differently.

My first post:

KDE is a wanna-be (Score:2) by Ukab the Great on Friday May 25, @12:23PM (#198349) [Alter Relationship] (User #87152 Info)

If KDE really wanted to improve their interface, they should make those tiny little toolbar buttons a lot bigger by adding labels. When you increase the size of a target (aka control aka widget), the user can access it faster (something we in the UI industry call Fitts' law). Right now, KDE has billions of tiny buttons that aren't very forthcoming as to what they do (a problem alleviated by a label) and that have crappy access times as a result of their tinyness. Just like all those buttons in M$ office. I guarantee you that few users if any ever use the toolbar buttons in word or excel because they're esoteric and have no speed advantage. Another problem with KDE is lack of progressive disclosure, which is the concept of putting the most simple, basic options at the top-level of an interface, and then giving the user the option of digging down to a more complex level if needed. KDE doesn't do this. They throw 18 billion menu entries, buttons, and other controls straight at the user. When this happens, users will feel completely overwhelmed and won't know where to begin in using program. Just looking at Konqueror makes my head spin. I'm not bashing KDE for adding a good advanced feature like gesturing, but this seems to be just one more instance in a trend that desktop environments have followed as of late: adding cool, trendy, buzzword-compliant technologies but then completely blowing it the most basic and fundamental UI design principles.

Mosfet response

Your a wanna-be (feature's already there) (Score:3) by Duley on Friday May 25, @12:35PM (#198415) [Alter Relationship] (User #455053 Info)

Erm, try right clicking on the toolbar handle and this is what you get: Text Position->Icons Only, Text Only, Text aside icons, Text under icons. There are your labels. Been here ever since KDE2.0 development first started. You can also select icon size and got a selection of small, medium, and large. As for "progressive disclosure", I don't see this problem but if you do almost all of the menus and toolbars are constructed out of XML. Edit them if you think you can do better and post it to the KDE mailing lists (or the application author).

Ilan's counter response to Mosfet A problem with your arguement--sane defaults (Score:2) by Ukab the Great on Friday May 25, @05:55PM (#198350) [Alter Relationship] (User #87152 Info)

"But you can customize it" people say "But if you dig deep enough into the configuration, you can change it" people say Such are the ideas that hold linux from the desktop. Many users starting off will do neither, and shouldn't be expected to try to improve things that should have been improved to begin with. If there's something in an interface that is supposed to be done (e.g. labeling toolbar buttons) and makes an interface more usable, it should be the default.

Mosfet's counter response

What you want, I don't (Score:1) by Duley on Friday May 25, @08:07PM (#198414) [Alter Relationship] (User #455053 Info)

First of all, I'd hardly call right clicking on the toolbar having to "dig deep...into the configuration". It's not like KDE is making you edit text files or anything. You can also select it in the KDE Control Center under the "Style" entry. There are plenty of places to set this - have you really even used KDE? As for what should be default, *you* think labels make toolbars easier to use, I think it wastes screen real estate (I have a lot of windows open at any given time). *I* wouldn't want it to be default, but you do. They both have good points, but it's certainly not something that you could say "this definitely should be one way". So what can we do but make them both available, choose a sensible default, and let users choose. For me, that's medium sized icons with no labels like most UI's. You feel differently. *Shrug*, KDE allows you to do whatever you like. You'll always get flamed no matter what defaults you choose... if we did it your way people would complain "KDE's toolbars are huge!" and I'd be telling them to right click on them and set what they want ;-) As for the menus, they are fine for me. If you don't like them it doesn't require any programming skill to change their order. Do things your way and suggest to people to change them. This is open development, your not stuck with anything you don't like.

In a previous posting [slashdot.org], I sum up what I think are the main reasons why Linux won't make it to the desktop just yet.

There is alot of work on interfaces. I found the stuff at AskTog well worthwhile:
http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFit ts.html

Little points about how you can get to certain parts of the screen faster than others.

Very little of this stuff filters down into the land of intel/amd.

Wrapping up my arguments nicely, the article was scored down as a troll.

What irritates me more is getting my default post ing score of 2 moderated with -1, overrated. I've had this a few times, and its frustrating to think that the person modding this didn't realise that it wasn't upwardly rated in the first place.

Still, I think you just have to wear that sort of moderation, no matter how much it irritates.

My 2c worth,

Michael

I have no idea how much each spent, but, judging by the results, whatever money was spent was much better spent at Apple than MS.

The now classic Fitts's law column on AskTog explains a great number of points that Apple got right and Microsoft (and, for the most part, GNOME and KDE as well) got wrong. Although the column is more than three years old, the majority of the items are still not corrected even in the latest Microsoft Windows. Compare this with the Macintosh which got most of the items right from the beginning, in 1984.

Tog is not quite as irritating and repetitive as Norman, but he's just a cheerleader, not a designer or a creator. He doesn't have much to say that's useful, that you can't get better and deeper by reading somewhere else more comprehensive and less slanted toward his corporate masters.

After he left Apple, Tog sold out to Sun: a company that absolutely doesn't give a shit about UI design, and just wanted to hire a figurehead to pontificate about it.

And pontificate he did: Tog promised that he was going to turn the ship around and redesign Open Look so Unix was easy to use, and look where that went.

Instead, he spent piles of money producing Sun's "gee whiz" Starfire Corporate Wank-Off Video, in response to Apple's "Knowledge Navigator" HCI Porno Video (aka "GUIs Gone Wild"). That's the kind of bullshit that gives HCI a bad name.

On the other hand, Jakob Nielson is a conscientious researcher who has produce interesting and useful results, and written about them clearly so many people can understand.

Nielson also used to work for Sun, but he didn't make such a fool of himself as Tog did with that silly "Fartfire" video.

My college, NJIT, has a program in this. They didn't when I signed up; it was just a couple of CS classes. Now the program includes psych classes and multimedia classes, and is very well fleshed out. I'll be coming back for my masters in 3 years or so (when the burnout fades), and by then there will be an HCI major.

Place to start: Ask Tog. Read the article on Fitts's law, and then read his other rants and articles. Feel free to email me for more resources.

But on the other hand you have cool for trivial or no reason. There's that anti-ergonomic puck-mouse. You have ethernet interfaces that support two-node networks without a hub. (Cool, but is such a narrowly useful feature worth the extra costs?) You have clear plastic cases that look great -- until maybe a week of normal use. You have first-rate monitors non-Mac people would love to buy -- but which don't have standard connectors.

Worst of all is the UI of OS X. Man UI experts -- including some who helped research and define the original Macintosh usability standards, are disturbed by the way OS X seems to emphasize sheer prettiness at the expense of basic usability.

Believe it or not, I'm not totally ignorant of the role of image in modern business and marketing. For my sins, I've been involved in no fewer than three rebranding efforts. Sure image and brand and style are all important. But these are just representations of the product. You have to have a solid product behind the representation, or people will see through your flim-flam. At least that's true for computers -- but computers are a little more complicated than running shoes!

Speaking of ignorance: try putting champagne in a screw-top bottle. Doesn't work.

1) By one of the main designers of the Mac the Mac is long long overdue for more mouse buttons.

Ask Tog

So much for #1

2) Mac is NOT the BMW of computers and price does matter. A G4 with 512meg of mem etc will cost my $3K. The same PC will cost me $1.2K Using the remaining $1.8K I can buy Photoshop, Office, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver and probably a few other things. So we see that buying a G4 is like buying a car with no wheels, no seats, no windows, no gas, no dash.

3) irrelavent

4) 20,000 apps is that the point. The point is does it have the apps I want to run? Can it run 3D Studio Max? Can it run Softimage? How about 95% of all the games out there? No? Well I guess then I really don't care about those 20K apps.

Not to say you shouldn't try, of course. But bear in mind that different purposes, feature sets, and demographics are going to require different things. Consider what you want the site to be and do, and what your target users will expect and know.

There are some good books on Web design in particular, including Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability and Flanders and Willis' Web Pages that Suck. You might also check out more general books on Human Factors and HCI, including Tufte's books on information design and Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things (these examples are just a few). You might also check out Jakob Nielsen's Web site at useit.com, both for the articles and for the links to other material. asktog.com is also sometimes helpful.

Go to http://www.greenspun.com, http://photo.net, and http://www.arsdigita.com. Philip will teach you the way...

In case you don't wander across it, read Philip's book about web design.

Also, some other related reading would be Nielsen Norman Group, Nielson's own site www.useit.com, and their friend tog.

Make it work first, make it pretty last. User interface is key.

(a) you have sound user interface design for free

MacOS X OTOH has had a lot of critism.

(b) you have an instant installed base familiar with the user interface

The number of people familiar with GNOME and/or KDE is probably larger? I admit I don't have any numbers to back this up except for the fact that there are more machines out there running GNU/Linux rather than Macintosh, add to this that MacOS X was released not so long ago and I may just be right.

Either how, the number is probably not going to be worth the bother.

(c) you have many applications which can be ported possibly with a minimum of effort.

But it does make sense. If people can rush off and build .Net clones, why not do someting actually useful?

After getting a copyright, or an intellectual property, a company must defend it tooth and nail from ANY kind of predatory or even harmless knockoffs.

Point taken, but by your line of reasoning, Slashdot should soon receive mail from Apple's lawyers, since the new look of this topic could be qualified as a "harmless" knockoff. They're walking a thin line here, I hope they know what they're doing.

As the saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery - but I think there's no way you can make OS X out of WinXP by slapping a skin on it, all the ugliness and UI blunders are right underneath, right down to the infamous "Aqua" blue screen so familiar to Windows users.

One of the main reasons Apple is still in business is the consistency of the user interface, and this - together with the solid foundation of OS X, good hardware and applications - should be their unique selling points.

Apple has been doing some mistakes with the UI lately (see for example this, this, this, or this page), and I'd rather see them working on improving the greatest UI on earth than on suing a non-commercial website about some Aqua-lookalike skin. Investing time and money to make sure nobody in the neighborhood has a house the same color as yours and at the same time neglecting to take care of the foundations which are slowly rotting away is not a good idea.

Raymond

(P.S. I understand everybody who wants to change the default look of Windows XP - every time I see it I'm expecting Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po to cavort over the desktop, and this gives me the creeps :P )

After getting a copyright, or an intellectual property, a company must defend it tooth and nail from ANY kind of predatory or even harmless knockoffs.

Point taken, but by your line of reasoning, Slashdot should soon receive mail from Apple's lawyers, since the new look of this topic could be qualified as a "harmless" knockoff. They're walking a thin line here, I hope they know what they're doing.

As the saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery - but I think there's no way you can make OS X out of WinXP by slapping a skin on it, all the ugliness and UI blunders are right underneath, right down to the infamous "Aqua" blue screen so familiar to Windows users.

One of the main reasons Apple is still in business is the consistency of the user interface, and this - together with the solid foundation of OS X, good hardware and applications - should be their unique selling points.

Apple has been doing some mistakes with the UI lately (see for example this, this, this, or this page), and I'd rather see them working on improving the greatest UI on earth than on suing a non-commercial website about some Aqua-lookalike skin. Investing time and money to make sure nobody in the neighborhood has a house the same color as yours and at the same time neglecting to take care of the foundations which are slowly rotting away is not a good idea.

Raymond

(P.S. I understand everybody who wants to change the default look of Windows XP - every time I see it I'm expecting Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po to cavort over the desktop, and this gives me the creeps :P )

After getting a copyright, or an intellectual property, a company must defend it tooth and nail from ANY kind of predatory or even harmless knockoffs.

Point taken, but by your line of reasoning, Slashdot should soon receive mail from Apple's lawyers, since the new look of this topic could be qualified as a "harmless" knockoff. They're walking a thin line here, I hope they know what they're doing.

As the saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery - but I think there's no way you can make OS X out of WinXP by slapping a skin on it, all the ugliness and UI blunders are right underneath, right down to the infamous "Aqua" blue screen so familiar to Windows users.

One of the main reasons Apple is still in business is the consistency of the user interface, and this - together with the solid foundation of OS X, good hardware and applications - should be their unique selling points.

Apple has been doing some mistakes with the UI lately (see for example this, this, this, or this page), and I'd rather see them working on improving the greatest UI on earth than on suing a non-commercial website about some Aqua-lookalike skin. Investing time and money to make sure nobody in the neighborhood has a house the same color as yours and at the same time neglecting to take care of the foundations which are slowly rotting away is not a good idea.

Raymond

(P.S. I understand everybody who wants to change the default look of Windows XP - every time I see it I'm expecting Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po to cavort over the desktop, and this gives me the creeps :P )

Some people might really like the new iMac from a physical/enclosure design standpoint, but might not like OSX (see plenty of articles as to why), or might just prefer Linux. So, buy the Mac, run Linux on it, and you get basically what you want.

Also, the whole "because it's there" thing.

-brennan

Tog has an excerpt of the Challenger chapter of that book:

http://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html

One thing that has allways irritated me is the inability of most systems to make use of some inherent methods to buid an efficient GUI. I am mostly thinking of Fitt's law here. Do any of you know if there is work being done on this area in KDE now?

Otherwise it's an exellent product, that's getting better. Thanks!

Depends on where your active window is on the screen, doesn't it? Takes longer to move from the window to the menu if you have to go all the way across the screen.

As a matter of fact, it doesn't (unless your screen is really, really, really big). See AskTog, the answer to #5. The top of the screen is much faster (factor of 5 or so) to access than a menu in the middle due to the precision of mouse control required.

1. Microsoft Toolbars offer the user the option of displaying a label below each tool. Name at least one reason why labeled tools can be accessed faster. (Assume, for this, that the user knows the tool and does not need the label just simply to identify the tool.)
   
   
2. You have a palette of tools in a graphics application that consists of a matrix of 16x16-pixel icons laid out as a 2x8 array that lies along the left-hand edge of the screen. Without moving the array from the left-hand side of the screen or changing the size of the icons, what steps can you take to decrease the time necessary to access the average tool?
   
   
3. A right-handed user is known to be within 10 pixels of the exact center of a large, 1600 X 1200 screen. You will place a single-pixel target on the screen that the user must point to exactly. List the five pixel locations on the screen that the user can access fastest. For extra credit, list them in order from fastest to slowest access.
   
   
4. Microsoft offers a Taskbar which can be oriented along the top, side or bottom of the screen, enabling users to get to hidden windows and applications. This Taskbar may either be hidden or constantly displayed. Describe at least two reasons why the method of triggering an auto-hidden Microsoft Taskbar is grossly inefficient.
   
   
5. Explain why a Macintosh pull-down menu can be accessed at least five times faster than a typical Windows pull-down menu. For extra credit, suggest at least two reasons why Microsoft made such an apparently stupid decision.
   
   
6. What is the bottleneck in hierarchical menus and what technique used on the Macintosh, but not on Windows, makes that bottleneck less of a problem? Can you think of other techniques that could be applied?
   
   
7. Name at least one advantage circular popup menus have over standard, linear popup menus.
   
   
8. What can you do to linear popup menus to better balance access time for all items?
   
   
9. The industrial designers let loose on the iMac not only screwed up the mouse by making it round, they screwed up the keyboard by cutting the command keys in half so the total depth of the keyboard was reduced by half a key. Why was this incredibly stupid?
   
   
10. What do the primary solutions to all these questions have in common?

Mainly, don't be boring. There is no shortage of windowing systems that do what everyone else is doing, with a few mostly useless features and some buzzword compliance added to distinguish themselves from the pack. The easiest thing in the world to do is make a second-rate clone of an existing system, and that won't do anyone any good.

If you want to see interesting and innovative interfaces, look at games. They are free to experiment and be unfamiliar, people even enjoy the exotic feeling of escape from the humdrum world of standard interfaces. Of course, there is more bad than good, but it's always that way where people are trying new things.

Okay, one reference: Ask Tog. Lots of good thoughts on interface design. One of his gripes stands out for me in particular: the importance of the corners of the screen in a mouse-based interface. You can always hit the corners without looking, and with a little practice, you can also hit things near the corners by "bouncing" off the corner. Radial menus out of the corners are probably the easiest thing in the world to hit reliably and quickly. Don't neglect the corners!

Of course, this goes right out if you switch to a pen. In a lot of ways, current interfaces are much better suited to pens than to mice.

It's not just coincidence that having the menu appear below the pointer is a lot faster, or that buttons along the edge are faster to access because you can't overshoot. This phenomena is an example of Fitts' Law (check out usability guru Bruce Tognazinni's article here ). One of the ways that GNUstep truly thrashes KDE usability-wise is that the GNUstep environment has really large buttons often with text right under the icon. By the nature of their size, these buttons can be accessed with a mouse far faster than the really tiny toolbar buttons you often see in other desktop environments. The labels for the buttons also give a clear indication as to what action the button performs; there is no need for the user to try and decipher what a particular icon stands for.

KDE, on the other hand, blindly copies microsoft's system of extremely tiny, unlabelled toolbar buttons that have extremely slow mouse access times and extremely small and cryptic icons whose true nature can only be discovered by either clicking on the toolbar button and possibly performing a destructive task or painstakingly holding the mouse over the toolbar button for several unbearable seconds to get the tooltip. "But Microsoft spends zillions of dollars on usability research" some say. And they spend tens of zillions on security research with results just as good. Microsoft is by far the most frequent inductee into the user interface hall of shame , and such windows UI shennanigans as multi-level tabs, window in window MDI, and Window XP/2000's dynamic menus have been frequently and harshly criticized in the UI design community. "But Windows users coming to Linux will be familiar with lots of really tiny, confusing, toolbar buttons with slow access times" they say. Windows users are certainly familiar with the Blue Screen of Death--maybe we should put stuff in the linux kernel to make it crash so they'll feel right at home. Yes, I know that there are options in KDE to have icons and text appear together. But this is not done by default. And probably 90% of users end up using the default which is installed with their application/OS. If you don't believe me, just ask Netscape. In the cold, hard reality of end-user desktop UI design, not doing something by default is really the same thing as not doing it.

I challenge the KDE Usability project to, by default, give KDE have large, labelled toolbar buttons that are fast to access and easy to understand. They of course don't have to take this challenge; some people would prefer linux not to get on the desktop.