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Native apps used to have a performance edge, but that pretty much only remains for hard realtime stuff

Or for physically smaller, battery-powered devices where 8 GB of RAM is too physically large, too power-hungry, or too expensive, particularly tablet and compact laptop computers. If your device has 2 GB of RAM, then spending 365 MB per app on something like Skype or Discord (both built with Electron) will cause your device to lose performance to swap pressure fairly quickly, especially if it's running on the same device as a web browser whose user is using multiple tabs for page parking. Even 4 GB will cause more things to end up evicted from disk cache.

because it gives us perspectives that we can't hold ourselves,

Big buttons and big normal text because their eyesight isn't that good. Time-critical tasks would need to be slower. Reminders of "what to do on this page". No neologisms or trying to be "hip". Boom, perspective of the elderly accounted for. It's like we have the ability to read and learn things and can have a set of design standards for the elderly. Just imagine a whole class of people who had the job of... I dunno... designing things or something. Instead of every website dev team needing to hire one of every group of... however you want to split it, the designers could simply read up on their target audience. If it's important. Most the the time the boss will tell you to get it out the door fast as possible and not care about edge-cases.

Of course, the presumption that seniors don't know how to use computers is less true than it was before. Simple because the old die and there is a newer younger wave of seniors coming in. Because we'd hate to be ageist wouldn't we?

But hey, I'm not arguing against diversity. I'm saying that the gains from diversity are less than you're selling as people can read about and accommodate different perspectives. Automation has taken that job. It's a book. Maybe a large pamphlet. But diversity is still a good thing. Party composition is a thing. If you've got 4 wizards, on the chance that you run into some beholders, having a fighter in the party is going to pay for itself. There's utility there. What ISN'T a good thing is penalizing people based on their skin-color. That's racist. And accepting lower-quality applicants instead of having the higher-quality applicant read a book on "How to cater to your target audience" is a net LOSS.

Designers, marketers, and bosses loved it because you had WYSIWYG control over everything.

Yes, they did. Let us not forget.

And end-users didn't really care

End-users did care because Flash was most notoriously known for obnoxious ads.

Wow. The screenshot tool is now an experience.
So cool.... or not.

You know, that when Don Normal and his group at Apple back in the '80s coined then term User Experience, they defined it as:

Encompasses all aspects of the end-user's interaction with the company, its services, and its products.

It goes beyond the user interface of a piece of software to include also how the product is packaged, sold, bought, installs; how the user manual is written (remember user manuals? ;-P ), how to get support and support is done, and then how dispose of install media and how to uninstall the software.

Please stop this nonsensical misuse of the term!

My next rant is going to be about: "Solution". Until then: Cheers!

Dont lump all of us millenials together.

Apologies! Age doesn't imply wisdom.

I give 1 star reviews to Android apps that use Material Design 9 times outta 10.

Hell yeah, it's not just old folks that agree these UI designs are objectively worse. But hey, if you say CSD is worse than Hitler, you have a beer on me (collectable only in person).

No, it's not delicate, it's slowed down by poor UI design. You lose substantial productivity when you use "flat design," it's that simple, e.g. https://www.nngroup.com/articl...

"let's recreate the interface with flat design, remove all the colours, hide all the options, remove all customisation, spread the buttons all over the place, and after we've finished let's redesign the whole thing again next year."

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but your UX Designer is actually just a low-rate Graphic Designer.

Fire him/her and get an actual UX Specialist, such as one certified by the Nielsen Norman Group.

That said... All people I've met who picked up a Windows Phone, figured them out quickly.

That's not at all what Microsoft's own UX designer found:

https://www.reddit.com/r/windo...

But you know what was a thousand times worse? Going on site, handing someone a Windows Phone, and watching them universally struggle with it.

--snip--

The stark look of Windows Phone seemed to turn off more people than fell in love with it. I know here in this forum we're all fans but in the mainstream marketing was only one problem. Apps was another. But the biggest one was lack of relevance. People didn't understand why they should care. A lot of people said it looked like a nice phone, but it wasn't for them.

Furthermore, we have empirical data to suggest that metro's design concepts really don't work that well:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
https://www.nngroup.com/articl...

And the Microsoft UX designer I mentioned above also had this to say:

This isn't a popular opinion on this particular forum, but the interaction patterns in Android and iOS are better designed (at least compared to 7). You can disagree, you can say I'm a fanboy, whatever, I don't mind.

But get into the labs and watch people use all three platforms. There's data here that not everyone is privy to, but that doesn't make it less true. There are some real weaknesses in the old Metro patterns.

So yeah, you can say, without a shadow of doubt, that Windows Phone has a crap UI.

This week also marks the 20th anniversary of Jakob Neilsen's article, How Users Read on the Web. (published Oct. 1, 1997)

Maybe the Slashdot editors should have a look at this article, given the tome that was included in today's post.

Maybe it's because I'm a fast reader, or I can skim for certain words.

This is a common habit for on-screen consumption of information. Few "read" a website, most scan/skim for headings, and read the first 5-6 words of the paragraph to determine if the information they are looking for might be in that area.

Videos break how users regularly interact with finding information online/onscreen, and it slows down their ability to complete their task (find the information they want), which is why this practice is found annoying.

Reference: How Users Read on the Web (Spoiler: They don't)

First of all, see "Stop Password Masking" at https://www.nngroup.com/articl.... The author, Jakob Nielsen, is supposedly an expert on human-computer interfaces.

The PGP encryption application likely has the best implementation. When entering a pass-phrase (more complex than a mere password), there is a checkbox to expose what is entered. When starting the application, the default is always to have the checkbox cleared, which means hide the pass-phrase.

It's not PayPal itself, but the login page for Phil's Hobby Shop can work without JavaScript. The only part that changes with script off is that you have to submit with a blank password in order to enable "Show password as I type".

So let me see. Was it:

• * correct horse battery staple
• * correct horse staple battery
• * correct donkey battery staple
• * wrong horse battery staple
• * maybe dolphin pen balloon
• * cable muppet carriage piggy
• * ...

All the people pushing hard passwords and catchphrases should probably read this again. They're the top 5%-8% of the population. WE are the top 5%-8% of the population in this regard and we can't even get it right. What chance does your average tradie have - they may be experts and legends in their fields but in ICT they're ... well, normal. Have you watched most people type a password or email?

I can't wait for Windows Hello or something similar on phones (Samsung have something I think, windows phones did/do?) to get better and better so that people can have stupidly complex passwords in a safe and use their faces to unlock on a daily basis (it's one thing to sign you into a game console, it probably should be another level entirely to unlock the nucular (sic) launch codes).

... secure phones.

We're all asking, "what's the next big thing in smart phones (and tablets)?"

It seems that just about everything's been done:

- Nice, big screens
- Advanced cameras
- Speedier processing
- Multitasking
- Sensor accuracy

What's missing is security.

I foresee "dark" phones and tablets that are ad-free -- for a price, of course.

Apple continues to #resist pressure to sell insecure products because that's not what the consumers want; especially in the high-end business and government markets.

Internet advertising is saturating bandwidth, similar to what email spam did in the past, and is largely ineffective

No, they are not engineers. They are the worst kind of fashionista. It's "trendy". It's "modern". It's good because it's different. There are examples of all the meaningless justifications their proponents offer.

Real engineers are like those in the Nielson-Norman Group. They perform actual measurements of real users interfacing with real software. One telling result I read lately on their site: even though Millenials prefer these "clean" user interfaces a la Material Design, even they have hindered workflows in trying to guess how to get anything done.

Responsive design is hard to do well. Clean interfaces are a crutch perhaps, but I don't think that moving to responsive design is the actual driver to minimalist design. The two are fairly orthogonal.

Designers really need to pay more attention to researchers who make it their business to measure the effectiveness of user-interface designs.

18-to-25-year olds rated flat UIs as slightly more attractive than older adults did. That increased aesthetic appeal may not be worth the usability costs of flat design.

Young Adults Appreciate Flat Design More than Their Parents Do

The Nielson Norman Group consistently points out usability problems in the flat designs, even to the millenials who prefer it. I can hardly wait for the passing of this fad.

Notably, I have already "learned something new" as I have been using Windows 10 for quite some time already, so on that note you may feel free to shove your condescending manner where the sun doesn't shine. The onus is on you to prove that your beloved new shiny interface is better than the one it replaced because you made the original claim of superiority. You have refused to back that claim with specific points, so we can safely assume you don't have any points to raise in favor of your position. However, my position is easily defended, so I will gladly do so now...not for you, but for other readers that are actually interested in a discussion on this subject.

Windows 7's Start menu consists of two columns. The left column contains frequently used and user-pinned programs, with optional sub-menus to open recent documents and perform common tasks associated with that program. Windows 10 has replaced this with pinned tiles and a "frequently used" section at the top of the full program list. The sub-menus for common tasks and recent documents are completely gone. Recent documents are now accessed via File Explorer and the view of these files cannot be grouped by associated program at all.

Pinned tiles take up a large amount of screen space and are the most distant items from the Start button, increasing the amount of movement needed to reach the desired application. This is worse on low-resolution screens since less pinned tiles can be shown and the user may have to scroll in addition to moving the mouse over more distance. While the tile target size is somewhat larger than a pinned Start program in "large icons" display mode, the extra distance and two-dimensional layout cancels out the benefits of the larger target due to requiring a longer (and therefore less accurate) motion to reach.

Pinned and frequently used programs on Windows 7's Start menu can be changed from to "use small icons," increasing the density of what can be pinned there without reducing target size horizontally. Pinned tiles reduced to the equivalent size are reduced in both dimensions and lose their text labels completely, reducing target size to 1/4 (requiring more focus from the user to accurately hit) and forcing reliance on the icon alone to quickly select the desired application. Icons are hard to get right and only enhance usability under specific conditions and "A user’s understanding of an icon is based on previous experience. Due to the absence of a standard usage for most icons, text labels are necessary to communicate the meaning and reduce ambiguity." Hovering over the tile will reveal the label via a tooltip, but this is not sufficient as each tile would have to be hovered over by the user to read all of them whereas displaying text labels for everything enables the user to scan quickly for the name they're interested in.

Windows 7's Start menu has a customizable right-hand column which comes with these (mostly sensible) defaults: User's home folder, Documents, Pictures, Music, Games, Computer, Control Panel, Devices and Printers, Default Programs. The lack of the Downloads shortcut by default is problematic, but the ability to add it exists in an intuitive location. The utility of some options is highly debatable but since they're fully customizable the user can choose new defaults that are more sensible to them. Regardless of what programs (the left column) a user might want to use, all but the most novice users will inevitably need to reach their home folders, the Control Panel, and internal, optical, and external storage media under Computer (aka This PC on Win8+) on a regular basis. Windows 10's Start menu does not provide any of these as first-level shortcuts. Windows 10 provides by def

How about this; give the user an easy-to-use function that forces the page to load the mobile or desktop version on a site-by-site basis.

Good luck designing such "an easy-to use function", especially when such a large percentage of the population can't perform even the simplest tasks on a computer.

This article shows how wide the skills gap really is. By Slashdot standards, the vast majority of computer users are tech-illiterate. What we take for granted -- for example, knowing anything about Flash security -- is completely beyond them. The linked article also fixes this divide as the reason UI is hard: if you are capable of making one, you are ipso facto not able to judge the needs of the average user. My perspective on this has always been that some of humanity has to sacrifice our brains to this technological morass that we have developed, and the rest of humanity is much happier not knowing. We just have to accept that the rest of humanity is perfectly able to lead rich, fulfilling lives without having to give a shit about Flash vulnerabilities, and try to deal with the consequences as best we can.

"user interface" kinds of things where the response time is not a big factor

Fast response is crucial for a good GUI.

https://www.nngroup.com/articl...

"Before Windows 8 and Metro came along, power users and casual users - the content creators and the content consumers - had to share the same space," he added. "It was like a rented tuxedo coat - something that somewhat fit a wide variety of people."

There's a difference between a physical thing that cannot be changed easily like hardware and software which is more malleable. Also they don't have to share the same space. See Android vs Linux. See iOS vs OS X.

If that's the case, why not allow power users to turn off the settings they find annoying? "We needed casual users to learn this interface," Miller explained. "If there was an option to make all the new go away, many users would do it. It's the same reason why Facebook doesn't have an option to go back to old designs of Facebook. People hate change.

Casual users would not turn off the interface. Casual users would save files to the desktop because they can't be bothered to put them in folders. And another problem is that this new interface still has enough elements of the old interface to confuse both power users and casual users. It is bi-polar at times and more of a sign it really wasn't ready when launched. If history is correct it won't be before the 3rd version that MS gets Metro working acceptably.

He pointed out that power users shouldn't normally have to use the Metro Start screen once they've pinned their ten most used apps to the taskbar. Microsoft's research shows that this covers more than 90% of interactions, and the rest of the time it makes sense to search textually for that little-used app, rather than hunting around with your mouse. "That's why we default to keyboard navigation (search to launch/find) in this situation," he explained.

Most power users I know use more than 10 applications. Also searching pages and pages of unsorted tiles is much faster than using text. Oh, the solution is to manually organize the tiles for each and every program that the user may or may not use right away. Yes, that's much easier.

Indeed, Windows 8 isn't designed to be used with a mouse, he wrote. "It's designed for keyboard (power users) and touch (casual users) primarily," he said. "Time trials showed that these were far faster methods than mouse-based navigation on the old start menu, so we optimised for that."

So that makes sense for MS to put it on desktops where the primary input is keyboard and mouse? Also the interface isn't good for casual users either. UI experts like Jacob Nielsen has listed all the issues with Metro for power and novice users.

"In the short term you'll see less resources devoted to it until we get Metro figured out, but once that happens the desktop is very much a first world citizen," Miller wrote. "It will be equal with Metro. The desktop is not going away, we can't develop Windows in Metro."

So everyone is a guinea pig until version 3 then?

While admitting that Microsoft hasn't done a good job of marketing the changes and explaining how to use the new interface, Miller revealed that he's currently working on new first-run experience tutorials to address that.

While marketing is often an area of fail for MS, the problem is that MS would like to ignore that wasn't the only problem. The interface suffers from many other defects. Scores of beta testers including many loyal Windows fans told MS about issues before Win 8 was launched. Also if you have to teach someone how to use an interface, then the interface isn't intuitive. Not all interfaces should be but an interface for casual and novice users should be.

And he suggested that Windows 9 will help clean up many of the issues with Windows 8, admitting that Microsoft appears to be working on a "tick/tock" development cycle. "Windows 7

No, and this demonstrates that you have not even used Windows 8 and therefore do not know what you are talking about, so just stop your idiocy. For changing the desktop wallpaper [slashdot.org] you can go through the steps outlined in the link or you can do it exactly as you do on Windows 7 which is to right-click the desktop and click "Personalize". But you haven't even used it which is why you don't know this.

You keep saying that it does, yet you have presented absolutely no proof. None whatsoever.

Yes, just like any training but once you've learned it it's easy, in fact in 8.1 they added additional visual cues to help with this.

That's not training. That's having to remember something that should have been self-discoverable. Design experts like Jakob Nielsen have said specifically

In practice, the charms work poorly — at least for new users. The old saying, out of sight, out of mind, turned out to be accurate. Because the charms are hidden, our users often forgot to summon them, even when they needed them.

Second we are talking about 8 not 8.1 as not everyone has the ability to update.

Wrong again

Do you even click on the links I provided? It seems your response to everyone thing is "Uh-uh. Not it's not," but don't seem to provide any proof. Watch the video. The settings menu takes the entire screen. This is a fact.

, if you want to use Windows 8-specific stuff - which is the Metro UI - then yes that stuff is full screen, but why would you want to do that?

What? If you want to change a setting in Win 8, you have to use Metro. Even if you could use third party software to replicate functions of Win8, that's even worse as it you had to use third party software to do things that the OS should have done.

There's no need to do that, it's optional, if you want to just use the applications like you did on Windows 7 then they work in exactly the same way. So again, what programs did you use on Windows 7 that forces fullscreen on Windows 8? Photoshop? Lightroom? AutoCAD? Nope, all work the same as Windows 7.

I don't use ANY of those programs. It seems that all your responses to criticisms about Win8 is that since it doesn't affect you, it can't possibly be true. The real world out there with everyday users disagrees with you. Design experts disagree with you.

In fact, here's the same article written much better back in 2001 by Jakob Nielsen: First Rule of Usability? Don't Listen to Users

What are you exactly trying to say? Are you saying that the products were not functional?

What I would say is that I could typically see why someone might like Apple products, but I could also see that they were always, invariably oversold. Their ease-of-use and consistency and so on were always exaggerated, but Apple users would never point this out, and in fact appeared to be incapable of seeing it.

Are you suggesting that people did not remain satisfied enough with them to buy the next version a year or two later? A scam artist would not be able to get away with that. They typically do not have repeat customers.

Here, I fear you are sadly deluded. Once someone is conned, they have a strong interest in hiding the fact from themselves and from others. They become part of the con artists salesforce. This is how you get "cults".

Many people voted for Bush Jr. twice.

I have to say that I find your theories fascinating and that I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. I have no idea what you do for a living but I write software on the windows platform for a living which is something I have been doing for over a decade and a half which means that the majority of my time with computers is spent on a "windows" PC.

I'm sorry but I happen to have a mac as well as an iPhone 4S and a 3rd generation iPad at home. Many of my co-workers also have macs and/or iOS devices at home. We all get paid quite well to write/test software running on the windows platform. I can assure you that windows software, especially from Microsoft has a great deal of usability issues as well as inconsistencies. I would like to direct you the following article written by a usability expert critiquing the Windows 8 UI. http://www.nngroup.com/articles/windows-8-disappointing-usability/

I deal in facts but you appear to deal in fantasy. Judging by your comments, I would surmise that you either have only a passing familiarity with OS X and other platforms or you are simply parroting common anti-apple memes. My platform of choice is not the one I use the most but you seem to be criticizing an OS that you have never even used.

And if you wanted an article that actually intelligently criticized Windows 8 instead of that completely unscientific article from Scientific American:

Windows 8 — Disappointing Usability for Both Novice and Power Users

I believe that when people labour towards something that is consumed by others, they should be paid.

You also are defending the status quo. Unsurprisingly, there are people who disagree with it.

The status quo reflects a natural phenomenon: the inequality among people. The creators constitute a tiny part of the population.

The ideas behind FOSS should not be understood as an attempt to change that rule, or it will end up in a catastrophic failure like communism, where it was also assumed that everyone wants to work (which turned up not being the case in practice, most people prefer not to work if there's a possibility).

So, FOSS should somehow recognize the observed inequality and should find a way to proportionally reward the 1% of creators.

Unfortunately, he mispeld "Nielsen."

Oh the irony.

Unfortunately, he mispeld "Nielsen."

Those guys get upset when we don't spell write.

As someone who has done plenty of criticizing (and received it), I can say that we need to get our facts straight when we do it.

That said, I'm a HUGE proponent of usability. I think tecchies, as a species, tend to really suck at it (I include myself, there). I am constantly amazed at how "stupid" my users are.

Except...they can be doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, teachers, etc. Real smart folks.

When a whole bunch of real smart folks make the same mistake, over and over again, then it's probably a real good idea to examine the usability of the interface.

This book changed the way I view the world (Don Norman is Nielsen's buddy). Ever since I read it, I learned a new appreciation for human interface.

Serving a constituency that tends to take personal frustration and embarrassment out in rather pithy fashion helps to keep me focused on making UX accessible.

I've read the Infoworld review... but more to the point, the review from Jakob Nielsen: http://www.nngroup.com/articles/windows-8-disappointing-usability-both-novice-and-power-users/

I'd take Vista too... at least I could *find* my shit. I swear Win8's interface reminds me of some of the primitive GUIs of the late 1980s. I don't know how much the "Classic Shell" fixes (the "One Window At A Time" thing absolutely kills it for me no matter how good the rest is), but at least it skips the damned Toy Tiles startup.

Didn't find a 5YO on Youtube but I did find a 4YO... just playing as far as I can see, and as you say, what else does a kid that age have to do with their time? Most of us just want to get to our work, or our play, or whatever; we don't want to spend all day looking for where it's hidden this time.

especially in the technology sector this smells like BS. would the wright brothers be expected to provide valuable input on the latest stealth bomber?

If they were still actively involved in the industry, certainly.

You seem to be assuming she hasn't done any work on UI and usability since her time at Xerox PARC, when TFA included a link to a short bio that includes mention of other qualifications.

Just because a random Slashdot reader put an exaggerated and inflammatory leading sentence in the summary (which the editor left in to piss people off, probably) doesn't invalidate the article or the woman's status as a usability expert.

You may not agree with her statements in the interview, and we don't have a lot of information about her qualifications other than the short paragraph, but she obviously did not move into a cave and stop using computers after she left Xerox. It's even possible that she may actually know what she's talking about.

That's a big reason why the media reports on it constantly. They themselves are the fanbois.

Exactly.

And I can say all this talk about the intuitiveness of the user interface is hype.

And the vast majority of usability experts would tell you that you are wrong. Not that Apple stuff is perfect, it does set a high bar. Try http://www.nngroup.com/ for starters.

The first thing that threw me was the titlebar on their GUI, and that's entirely their fault for getting nasty with patents.

No, it is the product of user interface engineering called conveyance that allows the user to always expect a certain behavior to behave the same way (i.e. the title bar is always at the top of your screen).

MS style GUIs have the titlebar attached to the top of the respective window. The Mac has the active window's titlebar glued to the top of the screen.

Yes they do. Not because they didn't want to get sued by Apple, but because of the notion of "proximity". MS decided proximity was a more important design feature than conveyance. While I agree with the MS stance, it clearly is more confusing to have multiple windows with multiple title bars open than having one title bar for the active window.

The next thing I gradually learned about were various "open-apple some-key" commands. Nothing intuitive at all about those.

Nothing intuitive about using English? Apple Key + "S" for "S"ave, O for open, Q for quit (as if ALT + F4 is more intuitive than Quit?) Additionally, Apple does a better job of standardizing keyboard shortcuts. MS does a better job of customizing shortcuts, but that doesn't make it more intuitive (it makes it more customizable).

The other thing about Apple is they make sure young people are exposed to their products.

I'm pretty sure Apple is more interested in people with large amounts of disposable income. I haven't really seen a cheap Apple computer in a while.

They have always pushed their computers hard to educational institutions.

What company wouldn't?

It's no good making sure the school's lab is well equipped if students won't use them.

Not to toot my own horn, but I have published curriculum on teaching technology, and kids now days don't care about the platform as long as it has an Internet connection.

Hi

I am actualy a Software Developer and i specialise in User Interface Design and Programming (mostly in Java). I have done Userabilty Engineering, this is the study of how a UI will be used, how to evaluate an effective UI and how to compare UIs. It go through how to recruite a sample of users and test their reactions to your UI. Using paper based examples, proto type interfaces and such.

But the answer boils down to, 'Ask the Users'.

Also you should remember that most western languages read top,left to bottom,right so if a UI flows in that direction users find it easier to use. Also try to reduce the mouse milage (eg. last thing you need to do on the page is at the bottom, but the ok button is at the top). Having a table row you need to click, but there is a hyperlink on that table row that takes you somewhere else that is wrong (people will click the link, even when they have done it some many times before).

The http://www.nngroup.com/ Nielsen Norman Group are pioneers in Usability Engineering.

Puggs

http://www.nngroup.com/about/

That's not misleading at all -- you're just misunderstanding. OpenLaszlo applications certainly are "AJAX". AJAX stands for: "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML". That's exactly what OpenLaszlo is, whether it's running on Flash or the web browser. OpenLaszlo was "AJAX" long before the term was coined.

Before AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) had a name, there was Laszlo Systems, a software tools developer using AJAX-like methods along with with Macromedia's Flash player to deliver richer Web experiences. David Temkin tells us why he chose the Flash player as a platform. Laszlo went open source and chose IBM's Common Public License as it was flexible enough to fit their needs without curbing commercial use.

Now can you find anything at all misleading about the announcement, once you understand the standard definition of the terms? You told me privately that you were misled into believing that 1) there was a new production ready product available and 2) there were new demos ready now. I can find nothing in the announcement or web pages that states or implies any of that, so you're just making it up, and reacting to your own straw man misunderstandings. Don't blame other people for your own poor reading comprehension.

Who are you to say that I am not entitled to post an announcement about an open source project on Slashdot? Who else shares your unique "school of thought" that nobody should announce anything until beta?

Let's get back to your original argument that open source projects should not post announcements before they're in beta. Why not? Says who? What are the positive advantages of that? How do they outweight the horrible negative consequences of stifling development and supressing community participation?

What do you have against Linux and every other open source project? You don't seem to understand the first and most important thing about open source software development, and that's colaboration and communication. Operating in secret until beta, as you suggest, is totally against those principles.

-Don

To address the question "Is OpenLaszlo AJAX?", here's something I wrote a while ago (before OpenLaszlo's DHTML support was announced): OpenLaszlo Makes Full Blown AJAX Apps on Flash :

The fact that Flash is commonly used for ads, and that those ads annoy everyone and cause many people to hate Flash, doesn't detract from the high quality user interfaces that you can build with it, if you use it for good instead of evil.

Since usability guru Jakob Nielson wrote Flash: 99% Bad in 2000, a lot has changed about Flash. He worked with Macromedia to improve Flash's usability, and he sells a report with 117 design guidelines for Flash usability. So yes, it is possible to develop usable applications in Flash.

OpenLaszlo is an open source language and set of tools for developing full fledged rich web applications, which are compiled into SWF files that run on the Flash player. Laszlo/Flash is presently much more capable of implementing high quality cross platform user interfaces than dynamic AJAX/HTML/SVG currently is.

Laszlo is a high level XML and JavaScript based programming language. It's independent of Flash in the same way that GCC is independent of the Intel instruction set and Windows runtime, because they both compile a higher level language, and can target other runtimes and instruction sets.

Currently Flash is the most practical, so that's what Laszlo supports initially, but it can be retargeted to other runtimes like SVG, XUL, Java or Avalon, once they grow up and mature. But right now Flash is the best way to go, because of i

Jakob Nielsen was once an important voice on usability issues, but that's only true today if you use Lynx or some other text browser. He recently tried to apply his expertise to the topic of "banner blindness" (the tendency of Web users to ignore ad banners) and how it was also undermining contextual ads like Google's AdWords. A lot of bloggers and site owners were concerned about this, given Nielsen's reputation and his use of EyeTracker (a really cool tool) for the research. It turns out his work on "text box blindness" tested pages designed with poorly positioned text ads that were so lame they failed to even follow Google's own heatmap for optimizing ads. Note that the ad in Nielsen's test page is in the least effective spot on the Google heatmap. All he proved was that people who don't pay any attention to ad placement won't get any clicks. Good thing Jakob's not relying on AdSense for his income.

...they're paid to be clever. Sadly, that's also true of private-industry "fellows," "distinguished engineers," and such.

He's a businessman, one of three founders of a usability consulting company with six offices in the US.

Rule number one: you are not your user.
Don't ask us geeks. Ask normal people.

Nielsen Norman Group publishes two sets of guidelines for email usability.
http://www.nngroup.com/reports/newsletters/
http://www.nngroup.com/reports/confirmation/

* Choice is best.
* If it looks broken, they'll notice and hate it.
* The first few lines and the subject/sender have to make the case for reading it at all in the age of spam.

These reports cost money but they are still much cheaper than losing customers.

Rule number one: you are not your user.
Don't ask us geeks. Ask normal people.

Nielsen Norman Group publishes two sets of guidelines for email usability.
http://www.nngroup.com/reports/newsletters/
http://www.nngroup.com/reports/confirmation/

* Choice is best.
* If it looks broken, they'll notice and hate it.
* The first few lines and the subject/sender have to make the case for reading it at all in the age of spam.

These reports cost money but they are still much cheaper than losing customers.

Provide me the scenario when multiple differing items can be grouped into one box. This case only works when every item is shipped in it's own box. This would be great if that was the real world case, but it is not.

Put a field for zip code and a drop-down of shipping methods on every item page under the price.

Jakob Neilsen would have a fit with this one. Maybe on the side bar of the page, but under every item?

Since usability guru Jakob Nielson wrote Flash: 99% Bad in 2000, a lot has changed about Flash. He worked with Macromedia to improve Flash's usability, and he sells a report with 117 design guidelines for Flash usability. So yes, it is possible to develop usable applications in Flash.

OpenLaszlo is an open source language and set of tools for developing full fledged rich web applications, which are compiled into SWF files that run on the Flash player. Laszlo/Flash is presently much more capable of implementing high quality cross platform user interfaces than dynamic AJAX/HTML/SVG currently is.

Laszlo is a high level XML and JavaScript based programming language. It's independent of Flash in the same way that GCC is independent of the Intel instruction set and Windows runtime, because they both compile a higher level language, and can target other runtimes and instruction sets.

Currently Flash is the most practical, so that's what Laszlo supports initially, but it can be retargeted to other runtimes like SVG, XUL, Java or Avalon, once they grow up and mature. But right now Flash is the best way to go, because of its overwhelming installed base and consistency across multiple platforms.

The problem with SVG is that it's extremely spotty and inconsistent across the different browsers and plug-ins and cell phones that implement it. So the lowest common denominator is very very low indeed. Dynamic HTML has the same inconsistency problems but with much worse graphics, and it's that horrible inconsistency that forces cross-browser web applications to be so clumsy and hard to use -- because they must restrict themselves to the lowest common denominator. But Flash is consistent across all platforms, and it has high quality graphics.

I've written complex, rich interactive web based applications in both SVG and Laszlo, and I like them both. I've also used Microsoft's VML, which enabled animated vector graphics inline with html many years ago, and Dynamic HTML Behavior Controls, which work pretty well, but only in Explorer, so they're a dead end.

SVG is wonderful, but it's lost its steam: too little, too late. Adobe, once its main proponent, has totally forgotten about it, and they're quite unlikely to put any more effort into it, now that they've bought Macromedia. Batik development has been stalled, and it's slow because it's "100% Pure Java". SVG has some nice advantages over Flash, but it will never beat Flash's 98% penetration.

I'd love to see SVG get its shit together, but it's going to be a long time the way the companies that were once sponsoring it like Adobe, Canon and Kodak, have appearently given up and gone on to other things. I'd love for somebody to prove that I'm wrong, but Flash has kicked SVG's ass in the market.

Once there's a fast, stable, full featured, ubiquitious SVG renderer (like Firefox may someday support), it will make a lot of sense to target it with the Laszlo compiler. But SVG is a huge complex standard, and it will take a lot of work to completely implement it in Firefox.

But there's a much more interesting and efficient route than building everything including SVG and the kitchen sink into a web browser, and that's to factor out and develop a reusable open source Flash-compatible SWF player,

I'm very curious to see Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini's, him being an interaction design guru 'n' all. For that matter, I wouldn't mind seeing any of the alleged experts' from the Nielson Norman Group.

The problem with large projects is that they require different skill sets that are usually not present in one single person. Someone might be a good coder, someone else understands a specific (business) problem and a third person is skilled in streamlining the UI. There is a real challenge in getting people whose expertise is something other than programming to participate in community projects of this kind.

Case in point: At the moment I'm forced to use Windows by (among others) an accounting program. I do not know of any Linux based programs that I could use for accounting in Finland, where I live. In order to make one, one would need skills in the local accounting standards (economical), in the Finnish legal system governing taxes etc. (legal) as well as UI design (psychological and esthetical) and programming (technical). It is extremely unlikely that any one person would master all these skills, and have time to spare to code free software.

Your second point about licenses not helping in this problem is most probably correct, though.

And before I accept your point about the GUI not working as an add-on, I'd like to hear what systems you like.

Here I would like to offer another example. I was once working as a trainee for a company making CAD software used in piping. There was a function to make a pipe transparent on one section. Technically it worked by making a 3D box that was clipped out from the model before rendering, thus making the pipe and everything else transparent where the box was. The original UI was just a front end to this OpenGL code and the user was required to give the box anchor, width, height and 3D rotation. It turned out that no user understood about this box and couldn't use it (to use it you would have to think about it like the developer sees it: OpenGL calls, rather than how a user sees it: "I want to see through this pipe). A solution was to allow the user to just click the pipe that was to be cut (at the position to start cutting) and another click to show how far to cut it. This redesign, of course, required a redesign of the code - which goes to prove that UI design should be done at an early stage if you want a good product.

Some of the UI gurus advocate the extreme version of this with the workflow: design the UI first, write the manual second, and implement it last. This of course depends on what you are building. I assume you have looked into the UI literature if you are into making things more usable. If you haven't come across them yet, Nielsen and Norman provide some interesting text on the subjects discussed above. A lot of Normans texts are available here.

Considering how hostile the linux community tends to be towards interface designers, it's really not surprising that most of the Linux desktop applications that are turned out are unusable crap.

UI design has always been extremely devalued in the Linux community. It is seen as nowhere near as important as something technical like kernel hacking, and this can be clearly seen in the amount of resources spent both in manpower in the developer communities (e.g. Debian) and in money by Linux distribution companies, like Red Hat. Red Hat spent $650,000,000 buying out a technical company like Cygnus, and then their programmers tell me their software is so unusable because they don't have the money for a usability department. And to think this company actually thinks it deserves a piece of the desktop pie. Until Red Hat spends $50,000,000 to buy out the Nielsen Norman Group, their software shouldn't be used on anything that runs outside of a server closet.

Even if an interface designer manages to get his foot into the door of an Linux project, the crap he or she is put through by Linux coders makes them so ineffective at changing the course of the interface development that it's pointless to join the project in the first place.

To begin with, in order to make a really good, consistent, integrated user interface, you have to design the UI before any major coding is done. Technical decisions influence the UI, and you can never totally abstract it away. Too often, a technical decision is made before the UI is designed, and then when the UI is 'grafted' on in the form of a front-end on top of the technical stuff, it's just too out of sync and there's no really integrated feel like some of the Apple apps have.

Linux desktop software would be so much better if the folks designing it would just figure out the user interaction first and then write the code. But this conflicts with the traditionalist unix
ideology on software development, so it's not done. In fact, pretty much any tenet of UI design that clashes in any way the The Unix Philosophy gets thrown out, no matter how much it might improve the UI. And there's damn nothing the interface designer can do about it because he or she doesn't have the ability to code and change it back.

And then there's the issue of the coders' geeky preferences outweighing the user interface designer's knowledge and experience. If there's a button that's just not working out in some location and the coder feels its perfectly okay there, guess what happens? The button stays there. Or maybe it's just that the coder doesn't want to put in the 2 seconds of work to change it, and tells the interface designer that if he wants to change it, he can damn well write the code for it himself. And again, if the user interface designer can't code, then the unusable design is just gonna stay that way. If anyone reads the GPL, they will see that they are permitted to modify the software and make it better. If they read the fine print, they will find this freedom only pertains to programmers.

Especially in light of all this stupidity, I think it's perfectly fair to expect Linux coders to consistantly produce interfaces on par with professional user interface designs, as they keep trying to convince CIO's and IT managers to force desktop Linux as a replacement for Windows in corporations and schools. If Linux coders want to declare themselves "only hobbyists" and refuse to take blame for their bad designs, then they need to go back to the server closet they came from. The desktop needs developers serious about providing excellent usability to end users. It doesn't need volunteers.

Just so no one accuses me of having an anti-programmer bent, I should also add that part of the reason why Apple succeeds where Linux fails is because the mac users have a culture of criticizing unusable software. They will not take an ounce of crap from developers and will vocally express their opinions about the software they use. Contrast this

Spolsky encourages showing the in-progress software to users and watching them use it. I think one of his best points about usability testing is that if the programmers and designers cannot bother to watch the users during the testing, they're unlikely to gain much from a thick report by a testing lab. He encourages simple, quick, and casual usability testing, something even the smallest firm could afford and from which they would could draw useful improvements.

This is probably one if the most important things, especially in corporate/commercial software development where you don't have a feedback system to see what users like and don't like. At several places I have worked the engineers would ignore or just give lip service to the results or ignore them completely. Frequently developers get defensive when presented with recommendations or changed requirements because they view them as a subjective attack on their work. It's not. Although really inventive UI design will always require novel thinking it's important to understand that there is a lot of existing best practices and knowledge out there and it will make your products better.

While I do I make my living at this stuff I'm all for as many people learning the best practices of UI design as possible. It means that my work is less teaching and more designing. I love engineers, without them I'd have to write my own code and nobody wants that [my old Data Structures classmates can attest to that].

One other important thing mentioned is that despite some astronomically-priced pundits' opinions to the contrary, testing doesn't need to be a monolithic process that costs tens of thousands of dollars.

For a very casual overview of usability I recommend Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think!". It's mostly focused on web usability but it's extremely readable and covers all the basic topics. It's also very short which makes it easier to talk your coworkers into reading.

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.

It appears that a LOT of readers either don't have or have disabled Flash, and I'm one of them. It might be worth waiting until the website repairs their site into something standards-conforming. HTML + PNG preferred.

give me a break... you know what you are? a standards snob. is xhtml ok? will gif cut the mustard if it's lighter and looks the same? do you roll over all of the images of every site you visit and get their url to make sure they conform to your standards?

marshall mcluhan aside, the medium is not the entirety of the message. it's really pigheaded to reject content out of hand based on the delivery format.

flash is an open file format (look here and the latest version of flash has gone a long way towards meeting accessibility requirements. so suck it up, and stop spreading FUD.

Other posts have mentioned the many sources of information available, I myself am also partial to Don Norman's work (The design of everyday things). I would also study the work of his associate and a usability expert, Jakob Nielsen. Although he focuses mainly on web interfaces, the core concepts can be applied to any UI design.

After all the patterns and charts, you'll have to start somewhere - and simple is better. Here I think you can derive some benefit from agile methods like eXtreme Programming, which, among many other things, emphasize continuous user-involvement and development over many iterations, with each iteration resulting in a product that can be touched and observed by users. Breaking down a hugely complex UI into interlocking pieces, then developing it piece by piece, testing all the while, will definately help.

Then kick in your usability program. Although emulating successful interfaces (many have been mentioned in these posts) can get you a certain ways, the biggest mistake I've seen in projects is that the end-user of the application is NEVER consulted during development. Certainly you won't let your users design the UI, but you should set up a program whereby you observe them attempting to use what you have designed, keep a thick skin, and be willing to change things that don't work.

Usability testing does not have to be complex, expensive or even terribly scientific, there are plenty of resources (Google is your friend). You could start with the Nielsen Norman Group

Actually, the newest Flash version has capabilities for disabled people. the Nielsen Norman Group helped them in adapting the product for different target groups.

The latest Alertbox of Jacob Nielsen talks about Making Flash Usable for Users With Disabilities - also the subject of a tutorial at Macromedia DevCon in Orlando.

The Jakob Neilsen story was on ActionScript.com (a Flash news blog) yesterday. Here is a list of the HORRIBLE USABILITY BUGS on the Nielsen Norman Group's own web site. Fortunately (unfortunately for my karma? ;-) these problems were fixed last night.

1) broken graphic at bottom of page
2) click on People, you go to Services
3) click on Services, you go to Publications
4) click on Publications, you go to Events
5) click on Events, you go to About
6) click on Jakob Nielsen, you go to Don Norman's web site
7) click on Donald A. Norman, you go to Ask Tog
8) click on Nielsen Norman Group Members, you go to Events
9) click on User Experience 2001/2002, you go to Services
10) click on Usability Testing and Reviews, you go to Process and Strategy
11) click on Process and Strategy, you go to Seminars
12) click on Contacting, you go to the MM/JN press release on Yahoo

It's striking that only two of the 12 research medals went to universities. I think this is because university departments seem to view the best HCI research as both too mundane and too resource intensive. Many academics disdain research topics that are closely connected to real-world needs.