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User Interfaces in Free Software
Havoc Pennington wrote a piece on creating good user interfaces, with special attention toward GNOME 2. See also the advogato thread.
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They suck...
But since it's mostly geeks lite ourselfs that uses the software it really doesn't matter much.
follow the Apple UI guidelines :)
Right from the start I think that the free software movement was geared by geeks toward geeks, and it's become a game of catch up developing quality gui's and moving away from traditional cli's. Added focus in this area will surely see a boost in gaining mainstream desktop users and subsequently enthusing them with the free software ideal. Of course a pretty interface is excess baggage and can lead to bloatware, but surely it's imperative to the future of open source?!
A lot of people do not understand how themes and options do decrease the usability of the UI. If you are able to improve the UI significantly by changing a few options or applying a skin, then there was something wrong with the whole thing in the first place. People should not waste their energy on themeing engines or messy options dialogs (my favourite horror is the KDE control center) but focus on one UI style and make that the best. Rather one perfect UI than a dozen so-so ones.
The attitude of free software nerds towards useability is often the defining limitation of the spread of free software.
The fact that it's free should not mean that you should have to be a nerd to use it. Good useability is probably more important than correct functionality.
In a previous posting, I sum up what I think are the main reasons why Linux won't make it to the desktop just yet. Wrapping up my arguments nicely, the article was scored down as a troll.
-- Rolf Lindgren, cand.psychol
To quote Bertrand Meyer from his monumental book Object Oriented Software Construction:
Good user interface designers follow a more prudent policy. They make as limited assumptions about their users as they can. When you design an interactive system, you may expect that users are members of the human race and that they can read, move a mouse, click a button, and type (slowly): not much more. If the software addresses a specialized area, you may perhaps assume that your users are familier with its basic concepts. But even that is risky.
Which lead to the following design principle:
User Interface Design principle
Do not pretend that you know the user; you don't
Interesting article, or set of opinions.
The major stumbling block I see in free desktop software is it's inability to innovate much further than win32 or MacOs, but there's a reason for that.
It's called familiarity - to innovate too far, would be to alienate users, so it has to be a gradual process.
KDE and Gnome have improved enormously, but they are still lacking the cohesive feel that win32 and MacOS desktops have. IOW, things like keyboard shortcuts, copy and pasting text between applications etc. are virtually universal between all different applications.
The question should be asked, are features like transparent window borders, animated icons, slide-out-menus really neccessary for a productive desktop ?
Shouldn't more development time be put into creating an efficient, robust and stable work-horse desktop and less time on the fancy bits ?
There's another aspect to this - the UI 'hobbyist' or 'tinkerer' - the very people who support and participate in the development of free UI's sometimes seem to loose the most important idea behind a good UI - the end user. Much time is spent on the idea that 'total customisation' should be the end goal - is this flawed thinking ?
How many people really want to customise thier UI to the 9th degree ? - surely the majority of people simply want a plain and effective UI that helps there productivity ?
More customisation = more code = more bugs = slower UI
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
As obvious as these sound, here are my rules for a good user interface on the work I do, whether it's a web page or a GUI app:
1) Keep It Simple Stupid
2) Think Like a User (the dumber the user, the better the UI)
3) Make it LOOK better than it WORKS
The last rule is true because if the app looks like crap, no one will be happy, but if it looks GREAT and works so-so people (users, your boss) will be excited and give you more time to get the bugs worked out. This is my main problem with someone like Jakob Nielson's whiny biatching... the app has to be simple, but it's got to have good design too. Colors, buttons, subtle eye-candy, well balanced spaces, etc. Usability is key, but design is always first.
Anyways, many of the people who work on open source software seem like the people who CAN'T STAND USERS. And by users, I mean the stupid, stupid people who might use their software. It seems pretty weird, but it's true... Maybe a little less antipathy for the newbies would go a long way to helping OSS GUI design.
-Russ
Me
While programming is shit easy, based on dicrete theory, UIs are hard and based on hermeneutics and takes alot of effort to learn.
Thus someone doing good interface design takes years of studies, they sure would want to make a buck while free software in principle is out to get everyone who is wants money.
Thus, good user interfaces will never be a thing in the free software world.
Good thing that I'm more about freedom of mind that freedom of source code; thus I support Apple and Microsoft, while I myself run the BSDs.
To me a major component in usability is that the GUI looks good. If the GUI looks like something violently torn out of the goatse.cx guy's anus (fvwm for instance), I don't find it usable no matter how functional it might be.
The owls are not what they seem
The guys at work had a chuckle at the iarchitect.com User Interface Hall of Shame. If companies like Microsoft weren't featured it wouldn't be half the fun!
Everyone enjoys a scape goat; I noticed that a lot of university professors also reference this site in their online GUI course notes!
Anyone know of any other good "chambers of GUI horrors".
Torturé par la fenêtre.
consider coffee a lubricant that helps one penetrate the coding zone
Though geeks like to tinker, there's something to be said about every application being consistent and keeping preferences, as much as possible, to a minimum and also to put them at the system level so they can easily be changed in a way that will modify all applications.
Its nice to be able to sit down to a Windows or MacOS system and be able to start working right away, not worrying what crazy menu is bound to your middle mouse button in application XYZ vs application ABC or where the person who configured this PC hid some other menu you need just because the preference system allows him/her to move it whereever.
I realize one size doesn't fit all and that geeks will always want to tinker, but I think if anyone is to take Linux/UNIX seriously on the desktop, there needs to be one clear Linux UI standard that is followed, and the rest must be relegated to 'alternatives'. This is similar to how Windows has its UI, but you can (if you really want) go swap it out with litestep or windowblinds or whatever.. The option is there, if you really really want it, but there's also a clear default UI system that companies and groups can standarize on.
Why? Because I use Windows NT all day long at work, so that's what I'm used to. Like the qwerty keyboard, 'doze UI may not be the best, but is what most people are most familiar with. This is not a silly attempt to generate flames. I think there is some merit to just conceding the "look and feel" battle to M$ and concentrating on areas where there is a competitive advantage, like security, or just developing quality free software, with no privacy-transgressing EULAs.
Of course, tinkering with window managers and desktop setups is still a fun pastime. :)
It appears to me that a tiny percentage of all programmers know a bit about user interface, while the most of them don't have a clue. Programs that perform well but are hard to use because of an illogical interface aren't cool.
Here's a hint: before you start making the software, ask your would-be users for screenshot mockups how they would like it. You can learn a lot that way.
This article (and actually every article about UIs) reminds me of about ten years ago, when Borland developed the TurboVision UI (for people who don't know, it's a text-based GUI (windows, menus, dialogboxes et al) for TurboPascal and TurboC). For me, as a programmer, it was great! No more bothering about menus, windows, scrollbars, dialogboxes et al, back to core programming. If I needed a dialogbox, I fired up a resource editor (sorry, can't recall the name anymore, think it was made by a dutchman called Berend), put everything in the window and let it create a resource file. A simple recompile and the dialog was ready for use.
:-)
After that, under OS/2, I had something similar but then under the OS/2 Presentation Manager. Then Unix... oh dear... I love the commandline, but sometimes I need to make something graphical and that was a huge job. Luckely I could escape most of it by making the output of the applications as in HTML so I didn't to worry about the drawing and formatting, only about how it should look like.
It isn't until less than a year ago that I heard about the GDK/GTK/Glib library and actively made a program with it and found it... euh... handy. I also found a dialog-editor (glade) and yes, I like it. Except for the fact that it doesn't use resource-files (files in which you specify how a dialog should look like instead of coding it in C and hardcode every location in the code. Maybe it can be dnoe via a resource-file, I would be happy if somebody could tell me.
Woops, got a little bit too enthousiastic. Just my 2 cents
Edwin
bash$
A canibal walked in to the canibal resturant and was looking at the menu...
Windows Administrator $2
Windows Developer $2
Solaris Administrator $2
GNU Hippie $16
The canibal asked the waiter, "Why is the GNU Hippie so fucking much?"
The waiter replied, "You ever tried cleaning one of those things?"
Don't mod me, bro'!!!!
However, the Man-Machine Interface (MMI=GUI+CLI) is the front-ent between me and the computer. Better yet, is _the_ computer as I see it. And what I like about Gnome is that it is a reasonable good platform with a lot of components (panels, menus, applets) with which I can build _my own_ GUI. Which is surely not the best GUI. But is it the GUI which best fits my needs.
I whish good luck to Gnome developers in their quest. I just hope they don't loose the component approach they had up to now. And don't lock users in _their_ idea iof the best GUI (while I agree that too many preferences are evil).
Ciao
----
FB
Didn't the Gnome Usability study done by Sun cover a lot of the shortcomings of the current GUI? It showed that the GUI was indeed created by geeks for geeks.
The report can be found here.
OS/FS coders are all hairy smelly self-absorbed geeks that need to clean up their act, kinda like me, but this is why the UI suffers. So maybe Occam's razor needs to be ruthelessly applied to the UI but it won't cut it in the face of the fun of coding a new feature. In short features in FS/OS aren't going to be diminished simply because there's a need to simplify. So maybe what's needed is a set of choices in the install that limits the number of preferences installed based upon a user's preferenced. There's a tendency, now changing, to think more is better and dump about 6 gigs o' proggies on a user's machine just to let them know all things are possible and to be had in any GNU/Linux distro... doesn't work the user just ends up really, really confused like say I am but it's 4am here and it coulda been that last toke...
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
I agree entirely (almost) with what you say.
Yes I do use Windows, partly for the fact that it mostly "works" and partly because that's what most folks "out here in reality" use.
Windows does not work flawlessly. I have long since lost count of the number of blue screens and "illegal operations" I've had but it does work well enough for me to use it.
I'm a 30 year computer nerd so I CAN cope with the complexities of setting up Linux, et al but, if I just want to write a letter, why struggle?
Windows has succeeded DESPITE its faults because it's useable. Linux has failed to succeed DESPITE its strengths because, for normal people, it's not useable.
This is one of the reasons why preferences are as common as dirt - you have to write code to make them work.
It is also the same reason why we have dozens of sendmail/ftp/irc etc... replacements out there. We don't need them, there are plenty already, but coders feel they have the need to code rather than feeling the need to think about what they code.
In the last few weeks, my hosting co's ftp software has been randomly giving me errors that suggest it doesn't know how to list a directory, put or get a file. Not that I need any of those features anyway, so I did some research and ended up installing ncftp (Mac OS X installer pkg). I realize ncftp's not a new program, but I am amazed.
It has everything I've ever wanted in an FTP client: speed, easy-to-use "bookmarks" (no more dumping passwords into clear .netrc files or entrusting them to Apple's security-hole-prone Keychain), status reports on transfers, and I can even use wildcards to up/download a whole mess of files at once without having to sift through ftp's man pages. Everything works intuitively, and I suspect there is much more I will discover just by using the tool.
I guess that's what a great UI is -- one that you can use and learn without having to RTFM.
(Before you reply in defense of the RTFM concept, I agree that there are types of software that should not be used until one has RTFM, but it doesn't hurt to give the FM a great UI.)
I've read many programmers views and opinions of UI. What they say and what they do are two different things. I mean, i'm about as qualified as any programmer to comment on UI but no matter what Havoc or anyone says about Gnome and it's usability I disagree terribly.
1. Things are as usable and only usable when people can generally agree on operation or functionality. If only 10 people agree on usability no matter how smart you believe you are, it won't be usable. The most usable applications, cars, planes, clocks, or whatever got that way through the users being able to say, "I want this and I want that". Just because you don't think it's a good idea or it will slow down performance or whatever doesn't mean you should keep those ideas out or wait to act upon them, especially simple things. This is what I see on the Gnome usability list.
2. There is no such thing as a beginner, intermediate or advanced user when it comes to usability. Sure, people need to become accustomed to a new interface but the interface should always be made so that a total newbie could walk by and get the hang of it in little to no time at all.
3. Suns usability team created CDE; have you used CDE? Was it usable to you? Ok.. I won't talk about that anymore and no offense to the Usability guys I'm sure you know more about this than I do but CDE just was not a usable product.
If you want usability in gnome I think you have to start with the basic shit. Like havoc said no one likes doing mundane work but until I'm able to drag something from Nautilus or GMC into my menu or for that matter edit my menu without being root Gnome is less usable.. It's the tiny things that count and I think that Gnome in general has neglected the tiny little things.
Would you rather jump through your window to get out of your car or use a latch mechanism to open the door?
How on earth am I expected to come up with decent user interface? I'm a geek, I don't even have a decent human interface!
one of the common mistakes, is the thinking of a UI as the way your window-manager, desktop, and toolkit look. but one of the most common problems, like setting up hardware, and peripherals, basic system-configuration should be the place where linux-developers should get their ass up. and develop standards please, no one has thought, apart of gnu-step about how applications that users-install should be handled.
.
most importantly system-configuration has to be made much easier.
and someone should develop a GUI and interface for cd-burners, that has NOT to be run as root
as one could say its time we make nails with heads.
Okay, I was thinking about this offline and I wanted to add that there's a perfect opportunity here for an OSS startup:
Give it a cool name like "SimpleFace" or something non-frightening like that (i.e. real words).
Then this company would do three things (complying to KISS):
1) Create a set of rules and guidelines for GUI applications along the lines of Apple's Human Interface guidelines. Include all of the most recent theories and practice. Publish this online. Use versions so that people can tell what's the latest draft, etc.
2) Certify apps that comply to the SimpleFace rules. Open Source Software gets certified for free. Certify non-free software for a fee. They get to put a SimpleFace smile icon on their web pages or boxes.
3) Create a set of classes - both online and corporate training - based on the guidelines. Some for free, others for a fee.
Once momentum started building on something like this, corporations would be more willing to switch to OSS software if they knew that training was going to be minimized because the apps that use the SimpleFace guidelines would be easy to use for those already familiar with other SimpleFace apps.
SimpleFace could also actively participate in the other projects as a GUI testing center. Whereas the rest of the OSS crowd might not pay attention to usability and design issues, SimpleFace would be there to help out. Providing feedback, suggestions, or even app dev for those interested.
Why am I thinking "startup" and not just "movement" or "organization?" because I think that something like this is needed now before the OSS movement loses any more momentum in the UI race from companies like M$ and Apple. (Under the theory that a startup could move faster than a committee.) How many Unix heads do YOU know that are switching to Mac OSX because their GUI is awesome? Lots.
-Russ
Me
Since when did T-shirts become a politically sensitive product?
While I agree with much of what you write, I think the distinction between "average" users and "power" users is an important one. (I dislike "beginner" and "experienced" because that's not really the issue; often, some beginners will immediately want to learn all the tricks, while some experienced users will never need them.)
To take a prime example, and one of my pet peeves, consider the interface for your file system. On many systems, you can have a CLI with commands to do things like copying or renaming files, creating directories, etc., and you can have a GUI interface with folder windows and so on. Most users are happy using the folder windows most of the time, experienced or not. I'd much rather browse my file system with something like a tree view and file list combination than with a CLI and constant use of ls or dir commands, and I doubt I'm alone here.
OTOH, suppose you want to create a new folder at me/one/two/three/four/new, and currently all you've got is me. It's faster to open up the CLI and use a command that can make five directories in one go than to create one in the GUI, open it, create two under it, open that, and so on. Anyone who's tried to rename "*.doc" to "*.bak" using a windowing GUI is probably familiar with the problem, too: a few seconds at the CLI, a few minutes in the windowing system. And hey, when's the last time you saw regular expressions being used in a GUI? ;-)
So I think it's fair to say that some applications are universally required in some form, and that sometimes, different perspectives on the same functionality are more useful to different people (or to be more correct, are more under different circumstances, and it just happens that some people encounter those circumstances more than others). They key thing, though, is not so much the functionality -- you can rename a file in either a CLI or a GUI -- but the way(s) you provide that functionality to the user.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
You should check out rox. http://rox.sf.net
/usr/share/doc/ folder pretty quickly( and it caches after first load).
;'/
:)
rox rox basically. You can drag folders onto your panel bar(makes a sym link I believe). It comes with one of the fastest file managers I've used too. I can open my
I'v got simple icons where I click on a box, and it opens up all my music. I drag some songs(or albums) onto a playlist. Easy as.
Added an xmms --enqueue icon easy as.
Can drag pictures onto the gimp icon, and have them open up in an allready open gimp. Set movies to be played with a click.
The find files dialog could be faster though, and the icons could be easier to move around on the panel. Apart from that it rox
The default file open dialog in gnome/gtk is one of the worst things about it. Alternatives exist, make one of them the default. Hopefully is the case in gnome 2.
How many Unix heads do YOU know that are switching to Mac OSX because their GUI is awesome? Lots.
Here's one. I bought my first Mac this year and I just love OSX. An excellent GUI with *nix underneath. This is what KDE/Gnome on Linux should have become a long, long time ago.
Have you ever read Orwell's 1984. See there is a big push. (Put everything in control of one company in this case or choose freedom). Personallly I'm a geek and I can't enjoy Windowze, probably just too stiff and closed system for my interests and in front of everything "I like freedom".
Neither of stripping you've mention should happen. System alone already enables to choose X or CLI based interface. Services also.
No it isn't happening if you choose Debian you've choosen Debian, if you choose Mandrake you've choosen Mandrake. Both of them have their great aspects (one for geeks and one for newbies) The only difference is only configuration software. Fragmentation is not the case. Name one thing that would be incompatible between them.
Microsoft = 1984;
Since mpt's (Matthew Thomas) website seems to be down, I'm mirroring his first 9 points here:
There are another 5 points that he added today, but weren't in the google cache.
If you're interested in his writings, please check his site after it comes back up from being slashdotted, as he clarifies some points that upset some people.
"Why Free Software usability tends to suck"
I've been having a discussion with someone from IBM about whether it's ever possible for for Free Software to have a nice human interface.
In theory, I think it is possible. But in practice, the vast majority of open-source projects are also volunteer projects; and it seems that the use of volunteers to drive development inevitably leads the interface design to suck. The reasons are many and varied, and maybe one day I'll turn this into a long and heavily-referenced essay. But in the meantime, here's a summary.
1. Dedicated volunteer interface designers appear to be much rarer than their paid counterparts -- and where they do exist, they tend to be less experienced (like yours truly).
2. First corollary: Every contributor to the project tries to take part in the interface design, regardless of how little they know about the subject. And once you have more than one designer, you get inconsistency, both in vision and in detail. The quality of an interface design is inversely proportional to the number of designers.
3. Second corollary: Even when dedicated interface designers are present, they are not heeded as much as they would be in professional projects, precisely because they're dedicated designers and don't have patches to implement their suggestions.
4. Many hackers assume that whatever Microsoft or Apple do is good design, when this is frequently not the case. In imitating the designs of these companies, volunteer projects repeat their mistakes, and ensure that they can never have a better design than the proprietary alternatives.
5. Volunteers hack on stuff which they are interested in, which usually means stuff which they are going to use themselves. Because they are hackers, they are power users, so the interface design ends up too complicated for most people to use.
6. The converse also applies. Many of the little details which improve the interface -- like focusing the appropriate control when a window is opened, or fine-tuning error messages so that they are both helpful and grammatical -- are not exciting or satisfying to work on, so they get fixed slowly (if at all).
7. As in a professional project, in a volunteer project there will be times when the contributors disagree on a design issue. Where contributors are paid to work on something, they have an incentive to carry on even if they disagree with the design. Where volunteers are involved, however, it's much more likely that the project maintainer will agree to add a user preference for the issue in question, in return for the continued efforts of that contributor. The number, obscurity, and triviality of such preferences ends up confusing ordinary users immensely, while everyone is penalized by the resulting bloat and reduced thoroughness of testing.
8. For the same reason -- lack of monetary payment -- many contributors to a volunteer project want to be rewarded with their own fifteen pixels of fame in the interface. This often manifests itself in checkboxes or menu items for features which should be invisible.
9. The practice of releasing early, releasing often frequently causes severe damage to the interface. When a feature is incomplete, buggy, or slow, people get used to the incompleteness, or introduce preferences to cope with the bugginess or slowness. Then when the feature is finished, people complain about the completeness or try to retain the preferences. Similarly, when something has an inefficient design, people get used to the inefficiency, and complain when it becomes efficient. As a result, more user preferences get added, making the interface worse.
Where a project is heavily influenced by a company under commercial pressure to ship a usable product (such as Netscape, Eazel, or Ximian), you'd expect the interface to improve as a result. But in such projects so far, it would appear that the opposite has happened. I think this is partly because the companies involved aren't large enough to employ designers who are both smart and stubborn, and partly because the business model of the companies involves maximizing the revenue (rather than the user satisfaction) gained from the interface.
Good article. Take for example KDE, nice desktop but too many features. I posted before a comment to the KDE guys that to they should focus on deleting features and just choose good defaults. I am not using KDE anymore, went back to WindowMaker.
In any case, the general problem with OSS is that anyone can add patches/features, but no one dares to _delete_ useless ones. So in the end, a program just grows bloated with useless features. Delete is the key. I'd rather re-learn a few new well chosen key combinations, rather than having the option to make my 100 own ones.
The same argument also counts for the (Linux) distributions, they grow beyond proportions and expect the end-user to plough through the jungle of available features/programs.
It seems to me that this powerful incentive is missing, or at least greatly reduced, for many non-coding areas, such as interface design.
This could be one reason it is hard to get good interface designers interested in helping fix bad open source interfaces.
Don't let some projects get in for free and require others to charge. You're letting politics get into a process which should be inherently apolitical. Good UI design isn't dependant on the license of code. If something is dual-licensed, would it get half off?
Furthermore, as we've seen discussed, good UI can take a lot of development, intellectual, graphic, and otherwise. A company that has paid for that shouldn't be penalized further by having to pay *more* than a competing project which can further copy the ideas and interface of the first project after the first has been 'certified'.
Keep a fee structure in place which is small, but will help cover the costs of the certification process. The certification process should be independant of politics as much as possible.
If you want more help on developing this idea, please contact me at michael@tapinternet.com or 734-480-9961.
creation science book
I find the software that these people produce absolutely dreadful. Making software so simple that a disinterested moron can use it results in software that usually only a disinterested moron would want to use.
Just as bad is this desire for consistency. Is your car consistent with your washing machine? No? So, why does your spreadsheet need to be consistent with your word processor? Seems to me that if you can get the data from one to the other, you're fine.
Leave the whiners to Microsoft. When you write open source software, write software that you yourself want to use; chances are there are many more people like yourself who like the choices you make. Don't get all worked up about the advice of programmers and experts whose main goal in life is to expand the market share of their product by making it appealing and trivial.
He says he's a professional. Hope you've noticed that he was showing pretty high terms and linux servers.
If you'd read my comment you'd see that I agreed to that points.
(about your points except pretty???? and for you try to make divx work well) Noticed "c. Stick with what you were doing, nobody will force you" in my post?
Things that I didn't agreed too:
1. Low performance of Divx (Performance is much higher than Windows)
2. Allways setting up numerous control panels
I just posted him a tip how to do that well, and how to to that, so it wouldn't need to do that again.
About arrogant, I think you're a bit out off line here. You should read your post again.
And a little tip for you "If you'd like to be concidered seriously in your life, grow up or stick with C64 and PS2"
Signature Pro version 1.13.2-3 release 83.5 beta3try7 after-breakfast edition
Now, if you really like KDE I suggest that somebody set up a web site, download all the KDE source and set some democratic voting system to decide what parts of KDE are junk. Then start removing. I'd suggest not touching kdelibs to keep compatibility with KDE programs, and trying to keep in sync with the original KDE. Look for ways for reducing KDE's memory and CPU use. Maybe KDE developers would then integrate some improvements, or even add compilation time settings, maybe like the system used by the kernel. Isn't this why OSS is so great?
From the article: I don't have any genius definition of "good UI"; I'm not a UI expert.
Super. I stopped reading right about there.
The article lists these issues as why Free Software UI sucks.
Hello? Where is the #1 reason?
Sure, developers write things for themselves. Developers write things for their co-workers. But do developers of Free Software really go out and research the goals of their users?
In looking at Linux user interfaces, I see that most tools merely tie some toolkit strings onto the underlying code so that it can be manipulated. The current thinking seems to be that if the underlying driver can do something, expose that ability directly on the command line or in a preferences dialog box.
A great case-in-point is cd-burning software. Type (cdrecord --help). The typical GUI wrapper is just the Gtk equivalent of (cdrecord --help). A massive soup of options with little help for people who don't know what a leadin is, don't care what a TOC is, don't understand how the lovers Romeo and Joliet got into CD-burning, and don't understand whether they want to fixate the disc or not.
Instead, turn it over.
Make some archetypical example users of your application. Nate the newbie. Seth the secretary. Judy the junior admin. Devin the developer. Whoever it is that needs your help to accomplish their goals, get to know these people.
A useful CD burning tool doesn't need to expose everything the driver can do. Add music files here. Add data files or folders here. Might you want to add more files at a later date? Burn the disc.
In Alan Cooper's words, "don't make the user feel stupid."
A user interface needs to start with the user, and proceed to the interface.
[
...the shutdown button should be where it belongs, after hitting the startup button!
Unless you absolutely want to, you don't need to edit any gtkrc file to change the theme. The Gnome Control Center takes care of it nicely.
(When was the last time you used GNOME?)
and whats about the people that want gtk only without gnome ?
(some mins ago gnome 2 cvs, then i nuked it and restored my kde 3)
gnome developers shot an own goal with gnome 2.
These kinds of guidelines are great, but the most important thing is to get user feedback regarding usability problems, and take them seriously. Bad user interfaces seem to provoke more insightful, on-target user complaints and suggestions than any internal workings would.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I have always thought that the problem with GUI in linux, is because of technical trouble!
o rt / ile_management.html.
The problem is that programmers have been way too lazy when they encounter a problem. They just ignore it or code around.
Look at
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_rep
How many of these problems that people finds is because of the programmers have taken the easy route?
The programmers take the word GUI very literal.
All they have to do is taking the shell features and make a button for it.
I think that the GNOME programmers easily can make a good gui, they haven't just tried yet.
I am really afraid that they will end in the other direction, and make a featureless gnome, that only a moron can use.
SUN DESTROYED MY GNOME!
> Unless you absolutely want to, you don't need to edit any gtkrc file to change the theme. The Gnome Control Center takes care of it nicely.
You can change the theme, but not the theme colors.
> (When was the last time you used GNOME?)
Why would I? GNOME is a piece of shit that only slows down my computer. Give me fluxbox+pure gtk+pure qt apps anytime.
This is even more true when you're installing software. The classic example of this is Linux itself. If you read the documentation on how to install a typical Linux distribution, it's like reading code. If you're installing from this medium, then... If you want this option but not this one, then
Another good example is CPAN. I have a Perl/Tk-based GUI app, which I've tried to make relatively easy to install, but inevitably, the user is going to have to use CPAN to install some modules. The first time you run CPAN, it asks you for decisions about a zillion options. For instance, it wants to know what continent you're on. Are you in Tahiti? Then apparently there's a special CPAN server located conveniently nearby. God forbid that all those Tahitians should be downloading from servers in the US.
The installer is always the first part of your UI that the user sees. Unfortunately, it may also be the last.
Find free books.
You've got to be kidding, right? You are aware that it takes training and getting a license in order to fly a plane. A lot of training. Large numbers of hours logged in a simulator, and tests and such. Do you think that we should just get rid of the whole idea of a "pilot's license"?
(If by usuable you were referring to the passenger, then that's just wrong. Passenger's don't use an airplane. They are cargo that the airplane carries around. You could pick them all up and throw them in a big pile and it would still work (aside from the occasional death-by-crushing). But the only thing that a passanger on a plane has to do to be successful is not try to blow up the plane. That's not using the plane, and the plane isn't easy to use for a passenger. At least no more than your average room is easy to use because you just stand in it.)
And cars - if you had to spend as much time studying to use a web browser as to get a license to drive on the roads, the web would be in pretty sad shape.
Look, just face it. Computers are complex. There is nothing on this planet, made by people, that can do as many different functions as a computer can. Consequently everything else is going to be easier to use because it doesn't do as much.
Oh, and the lach mechanism is more complicated than jumping out your window (which I presume wouldn't have glass in it for simplicity). First, you have to find the latch, then you have to figure out how to pull it. Everyone should have to jump out of their windows so that they're not as confused.
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
The real problem is age and how "applications" are taught in schools, the enterprise and classes.
Schools teach children to use applications specifically. No one sits down and explains to them the concept of a file and actions that apply to a file (open, save, save as, print...) or editing (copy, cut, paste, etc.. )
If the process of educating people in the realm of computer use included a more abstract view of computers and how they work, the average joe schmo wouldn't need to "relearn" every time a new UI design came out, they'd be able to reason through it.
We moved our 8 year old daughter and 14 year old son from Windows to SuSE and Gnome, respectively. With the exception of not knowing the names of applications that do what she wants, she can get around just fine because we've taught her the basics, without being specific to an OS. She knows how to manipulate files and open applications, she understands that web browsers and can use IE, Netscape, opera or Galeon with equal ease.
This ease of adaptation is partially due to commonlality of UI implementation across applications and platforms, and partially due to their education @ home, which focuses on exploration and understanding the computer rather than a specific application.
Of course, if schools/enterprises did that, M$ would lose its edge because users would no longer be frightened to death when presented with a word processing app other than Word, or a browser other than IE.
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
IMO the UI of KDE is getting too complex (I know it better than Gnome). So the task is to clean it up, give useable defaults and simplify it. Especially the KDE-menu and the KontrolCenter should be cleaned up.
But what should be removed? What is a good default? Let's ask the user. KDE could collect information on what is used and how the prefs are set, and send it back to the developers.
I think noone would have a problem with that as long as: The info is anonymous, only sent with explicit consent, and it is stated clearly what information is sent.
'Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add,
but rather when there is nothing more to take away.'
(Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
You can increase the apparent simplicity and focus of an OS
simply by consolidating five menubars into one.
--| INTERFACE DESIGN > A SINGLE MENUBAR |-----
>> WHAT? Give me the summary.
A SINGLE MENUBAR AT THE TOP OF THE SCREEN that changes according to
the current context (window) instead of a menubar for every window.
Setting this as a User Default will improve Linux's ease-of-use.
Placing a single Menubar along the top of the screen:
1 - Makes it faster and easier to hit.
(no mouse overshoot to slow things down)
2 - Eliminates clutter in the interface.
3 - Reduces ambiguity (and hence - user error).
--| DISCUSSION |---
>> LINUX MENUS WORK GREAT NOW.
>> WHY SHOULD WE DO SO MUCH WORK TO CHANGE THE ACCEPTED DEFAULT?
In programming, if you compute a static variable within a loop - it is
highly innefficient - it slows down the loop. You optimize code by pulling
all the computes you can out of the loop and processing externally.
Interface design is the same. If a user has to click: A, B, C three hundred
times a day - it would make him 3 times as efficient to collapse those three
steps into a macro and execute with one keystroke. Making things less steps
for users optimizes the UI just like computing static variables outside the
loop optimizes code.
Since Menus are one of the most frequently used items in an operating system,
optimizing something small in this frequent behaviour equates to a Big savings
for the user over time. Therefore getting the menus right is one of the most
crucial and fundamental UI decisions that must be made by those implementing
the OS.
Linux currently imitates Windows' menubar implementation of putting a menubar
in every window. UI studies show this is not the optimal way of implementing
menus in an operating system. Linux can beat Windows in menubar GUI by providing
the option of a single context-sensitive menubar. There are several good reasons
for doing this:
1 - TARGETING CONSTRAINT
How easy it is to hit a target - virtual size.
2 - CONSISTENT PLACEMENT
How easy it is to remember "where" a target is.
3 - SIMPLICITY KEEPING FOCUS
Elimination of extraneous controls that are not
relevant to the current task at hand.
>> See the rest of this posting - Why Single Menubar
best regads,
john.
I see nothing wrong with leaving my browser open, and typing the urls into the browser rather than the file explorer ... kinda make sense to me.
... its not quite IE is it. I have also accidentally done so from outlook, somehow having a lot of sub standard ways to browse the web does not strike me as a good idea.
I like my browser attached to my mail client, seems like a more obvious connection.
Also could you point out which XP features are must haves, is it the left hand pane that wastes screen space ?
I have accidentally browsed with explorer, and I found it confusing
I see your point, but I disagree
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
I'm just the opposite. I bought a new iBook to run Linux on and was amazed at how nice MacOSX looked. Turned out I could actually get some useful work done with it, which was nice when I had all sorts of difficulty get Linux running with all the bells and whistles like power management and sound.
In the end though, little things about the UI wore on me, the quirks when trying to use two applications at once, the lack of virtual desktops etc.
Debian woody with the KDE desktop installed by default is comparable to Windows (excluding the hardware support problems). Not as attactive of as user friendly as OS X, but has the advantage of being configurable so I can decide how I use my computer, instead of leaving the decision to the UI "experts" in either camp.
In the end, now that the hardware problems are solved I always use Linux instead of OSX. OSX's UI drove me away.
I understand targetting oranges to hurt florida etc. and other locations that bush almost won last time (and his brother/cousin/campaign advisor arranged for us to think he had won) but t-shirts seems a little strange!
A useful CD burning tool doesn't need to expose everything the driver can do.
Every little useless (in your opinion) feature you remove from a program will result in someone forking or writing another app. I'd rather see one monsterously complex and overfeatured CD burning program (like cdrecord) than two dozen different little apps (one for audio discs, one for data, one for VCDs, one for gapless audio (DAO mode), one for erasing CD-RW discs, etc, ad nauseum...)
0 1 - just my two bits
I've heard many such arguments before, but I can't help thinking that you're mixing up a good idea (simplify the menu system) with a particular implementation that you're stuck on (top-of-screen menus, a la MacOS). How about a single, context-sensitive menu accessed from a right-click with the mouse? No, wait, we've already got one of those. So, how about having an application menu and a context menu off a right-click, with subsequent right-clicks alternating between them? And so on...
While I'm not necessarily advocating any of these ideas as "better" than the top-of-screen layout, they would appear, at least superficially, to have many of the same advantages you cite in your article: reduced clutter, easy to find (always where your mouse pointer is, some eye-catching animation to make it obvious when you click?), etc. Surely what is needed is a comparison between not just the status quo and a top-of-screen system, but between many different basic ideas, to see which are more intuitive and easy to use for the guy in front of the keyboard/mouse?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
One key to designing good UIs is testing. Just follow the scientific method -- Try to find a way to solve some problem, test it out against a wide variety of users, collect lots of data (generally it's a good idea to videotape them, capture what they're doing on the computer, and to ask them some questions), refine your work based on what you've seen, then try again and see if it helped.
Releasing a beta isn't even nearly the same thing, however.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
I find that most of the "problems" in Gnome are directly related to the Nautilus File browser/manager, and that is why I do not use it to draw the desktop or as the principle file manager. GMC fills all functions admirably. Now for KDE: bloted libraries, many useless apps... and the list goes on. The Konqueror FM is good though, and so is Kmail.... That's about it. I have the best of both worlds so to speak. I find myself using Xfce with the Gnome panel added. I call up both KDE and Gnome apps simultaneously without a glitch. But for everyday use, I prefer Gnome. I just wish thay would totally drop Nautilus, and move totally away from the attempt at eye-candy into something serious.
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
I work with Solaris and and have used the unsupported Gnome 1.4 on the following machines: 1. Dual Celeron 533 Mhz PC with 1 GB of RAM, 2x 20 GB drives, ATI XPert 98 video card (24 bit color) 2. A Sparc 20 MP with 2 RT626 125 MHz processors, 336 MB of RAM, 2x 4 GB SCSI disks (256 color) 3. A Sparc 5 85 MHz with 256 MB of RAM, 2x 2 GB hard disks running Solaris 9 Beta. Gnome was loaded on each machine and the results are as follows: 1. Dual Celeron, came up slow but once it was running was as fast as CDE (it ought to be with that much hardware). 2. Sparc 20, despite the 256 colors which made it look like crap was slow and the CPU utilization was around 20% at idle! 3. Sparc 5, forget it! A lot of system administrators are not happy with Sun for adopting Gnome (I am one of them) since "eye candy" seems to be more important than functionality. If I am using X as it was meant to be used (remotely) I do not want all my bandwidth and memory sucked up by "useless" features just to run top or prstat from a term window! Don't get me wrong, eye candy is cool, but I don't need eye candy at work! What I see as wrong with the UI community is: 1. A total lack of standards, this is why the "hardcore" adminstrators will stick with CDE. It was built on a standard that doesn't change with a user's preferences. This is what system administrators want and need! 2. The emphasis on the "desktop" and cool features to mimic Windows, MacOS, and other UI's. It might help in the "experience", but at what cost from a performance aspect? I think too many people are getting away from what X was supposed to be and that is a networked GUI to allow a system administrator to use graphical applications from another terminal. X has been a little long in the tooth for improvement but I don't think this is it! What I want is a stable desktop to run graphical applications, not have the "latest ubergeek" interface that has transparent windows and other nonsense just to run a term window and the java console for NetBackup! There are basically two groups that a UI should be designed for, one is the system administrator who wants functionality and reliability over features, the other is the desktop for the "home user" which has the eye candy and the cool features. What needs to happen is that everybody designing UI's for Unix/Linux should get together and hammer out a set of standards for an extensible UI that meets the needs of both sys admins and everyone else. Make the UI customizable to suit the needs of each and do this during installation (rather than the typical X approach of customizing afterward). And keep the code to a "sane" level, I am not saying that it should be coded to support a 386, but at the same time it should also not require an 8 CPU 4500 to run either! The learning curve of this GUI should be minimal and it does not have to mimic Microsoft, Apple, Sun, or anyone else for that matter. I have used Windows, OS/2, MacOS, SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, SCO Unix, and Linux and for the most part have figured out what I need to do something pretty quickly. If you are designing for the "clueless luser", then it will require a certain amount of "handholding" whereas with the seasoned user it should be "lean and mean". A very challenging set of goals for those who wish to "accept the challenge". Robert Escue System Administrator
That's not the point. One monstrously complex program is just fine - as long as it's simple to navigate.
The problem is that the neophyte user, when confronted with a monstrously complex program, will simply give up. Usually, the user just wants it to work.
In the case of cd burning, for example, the user just wants to pop in a disc and drag-and-drop files onto the thing and burn it. The less options, the better.
Hands together for the pat-your-own-back article for Gnome, thinly disguised as a discussion on User Interfaces.
We see this kind of crap all the time, seems that it's usually Gnome, but KDE tends to do it too.. A developer on (name your window manager here) posts a big ditribe about how (this or that) should be written, and behold, (our window manager here) does it perfectly!
Sheesh.
Remember, don't feed the trolls.
>Pay the Russia to keep out.
Bad idea, if the germans are home to kick your asses and not somewhere out there in russia, your GIs would be running home to mommy in no time. Pay Russia to get involved, cowboy.
Look at MacOS X. I've ranted about it before, so I won't repeat most of my gripes. For now, just take one example: the scalable icons in the dock. They look great, I'll grant you that. However, it means things in the dock move back and forth. There is absolutely zero spatial reference: if you want to find something in the dock, you have to carefully position and "hover" your mouse; you can't throw your mouse in a general direction and expect it to go somewhere useful (contrast this to the butt-ugly, but useful, "dockable" finder windows in MacOS 9).
More relavantly, let's look at our newest X11 toolkits. They are all "themable" as that's what the Oh-so-omniscient users want nowadays. News flash: what users "want" is not always what's best for the users. Look at users who wanted smaller toolbar icons in MSIE: these smaller buttons are a usability nightmare, but MS put them in because users demanded it. Tip: leave the UI design to the UI designers who've studied users and formal UI ergonomics/cognitive science, not the users who want only aesthetics.
What does "themability" give you? Well, let's take a specific example: checkboxes. The best, most usuable checkbox would be one that's immediately visible, using both color and shape. Images are difficult to recognize quickly, but colors and geometric shapes are more quickly recognized. These "themes" give you multi-colored images for checkboxes instead of a simple square (shape) with an immediately visible on/off state (best recognized with color). Extend this example to any other widget.
Same problem with Apple's Quicktime player for Windows and, more recently, newer versions of the MS media player. People want eye candy, not usability, so the Quicktime player looks nice, but is completely unusable (use google: "usability review Quicktime player"). Of course, users never notice when they take half a second more to do some repetetive action, so the themable media players are popular; that's why MS copied the idea (at least MS is nice enough to give us an option for a normal-looking media player). Also look at the myriad of mp3 players, like KJofol (or whatever it's called). Completely unusable with tiny, hidden widgets in unexpected places, but wow, it looks pretty.
Why do people want shaped window borders and pixmap-based window backgrounds? Because rectangular borders and a simple, consistent color background is boring. Those of you who want those transparent, shaded xterms with outrageous borders: talk to me in a few years when you actually use your computer to do real work, and not simply to impress the girl across the hall in your dorm.
Look at Mozilla. It has this damned complicated "themable" XML-based UI. Unrequired Complexity = Bugs, OK? Now look at Netscape 4.x (for unix). Netscape had a damned fine UI. Try this with Netscape: right-drag three or four pixels down in the main window: it goes back. That's because "back" is always the first item in the context menu and there is zero delay when popping up the context menu. Mozilla has a delay with the context menu, as do other toolkits. What's the purpose of the delay? I can't figure out any purpose other than to piss me off. Also, Konqueror tries to move around the items in the context menu and it puts "forward" before "back." What's the reasoning behind that? How often do you use "back" and how often do you use "forward?"
Let's look at most window managers. Now, in X11, the very top row of pixels on the display is not used for menu bar. It will usually contain either nothing, or the titlebar of a maximized window. Same situation in MS windows. Try this with a windows machine: throw you mouse (don't position it, throw it carelessly) to the upper-right corner and click. Although it looks like your cursor is not over the "x" button, it will still close the window. You can close a window in MS windows with only a gesture, not a careful positioning. Now try the same in your favorite window manager which also has the equivalent of an "x" button in the upper-right corner. Probably won't work (doesn't work with most window managers, I've tried a whole lot of 'em). Why is this? Most likely, the titlebar has a "border" around it. This is used to distinguish the window or give it a 3-D look. MS windows has the same thing, but it's borders are internal to the window. Solution? X11 toolkits shouldn't use the X11 "border" since it's not clickable (eg, pass a border width of zero to XCreateWindow(), and do your own internal, clickable, border). People don't do this. It's even worse in KDE and GNOME when you try to have the menu bar at the top of the display, a la MacOS. The only reason to have a menu bar at the top of the display is to make it faster to access (look up "Fittz' Law" on google, this is the very first UI usability example you'll find). So, the top-positioned menu bars are completely useless in the X11 environments that have them.
I apologize for the length of this post. If you've read this far, consider yourself fortunate: you have a longer attention span than most people.
Trying to find "the one true customization that's good for everyone" is like trying to find "the one perfect car that's good for everyone" or like trying to find "the one perfect hammer that could be used as all tools". It can't happen because people have different needs.
Take voice recognition, for instance. Someone who can't see would consider this to be an essential part of the OS. For me and many users, it would get in the way because every feature comes with an associated cost that affects usability (witness the "mysterious words that suddenly appeared in OfficeXP documents). You can't satisfy both groups, so it needs to be configurable.
Take GUI interfaces also. GUIs are great and they do make many things easier, but they also have an associated tradeoff in user resources and usability. Don't believe me? In the early days of DOS, it was possible to set up a good "pick a number" interace that allowed novice users to go go to wordperfect, go to lotus, backup files, and other basic things. This interface was completely customized to their needs (much like point of sale cash register GUIs). The users didn't need to know much. They never asked about "right clicking this" or "double clicking that" or "I accidentally dragged this over this other thing and now it's gone" and you never had to worry about clicking on the exact screen co-ordinate of the mouse. Yes, GUIs may allow you to do more, but they do so at the cost of usability because they are so flexible at doing things that users don't want to be done -- especially by accident.
This is not to say that all customization is good. Most older TVs have a knob or two at their back with mysterious sounding names like buzz or dialectic factor. How much buzz is too much? Would a little more dialectic factor help my reception or would it cause my TV to double as a sun lamp? Only the factory makers know.
GUI designers need to take the time to make sure that the most useful and common customizations are easy to find and understand. The rarely useful, but still important customizations should be accessible, but clearly marked as advanced. Hardcore tuning options (like the "buzz" knobs) should be hidden in configuration files or command line switches so people don't accidentally run into them or so they don't get confused.
Besides this, customizations should be visible enough that the user should know they are there, but hard enough to reach so that they don't select them by accident. It should also be possible to revert the changes so that you don't get stuck.
Any good book on usability will cover this.
I have never seen an UI (Usable Interface)
so small, beautyfull, intuitive and functional.
Plus it's not copied from anything i know.
This is the problem w/ KDE and GNOME, IMO. The people working on both are working towards a goal alright, but not one which will bring them anything significant. Both camps are working to bring something down (and I really hate to mention what that something is.. most people should understand what I mean if they have been around on /. and mailing lists long enough).
The idea of developing _for_ end-users is merely a bunch of hotair. The developers are still writing things for themselves--but indirectly. They want what they perceive comes with a desktop--power and control.
The reality is these same people who help GNOME/KDE truely _despise_ neophytes. I have seen countless times where developers on either side become frustrated with newbie questions and complaints. The developers can also be very mocking of the same people they target. Take Lycoris (aka Redmond Linux). There is a subtle (and sometimes not) condescending attitude present. "Linux is for everyone" is their motto. Are they saying that the pre-Lycoris Linux was not for everyone? Are they saying that end-user Joe is too stupid to use regular Linux, therefore he must use dumbed-down Linux?
There are no intended users of KDE and GNOME. There very much is an expected gain--power and control. Stereotypical Linux users (read: nerd) are very controlling. They must be able to control every aspect of their computer, their network, their house, etc. They enjoy this, but they crave more. Who is perceived to have a power on this thing called "desktop" which these nerds might enjoy having (and often times claim a god-given right to)?
This article isn't about usability at all. There are countless usability studies and thesis papers available, but the "Linux for the desktop" developers never seem to take notice. This is merely developer propaganda to tell others (and themselves) that they are doing this for the "end-users" and take focus off of their true intentions. Perhaps their true intentions are hidden even from themselves? Which I think is the case for many of them.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
It worked in the 1940s.
A perfect example of the problem with Linux for the average desktop user. Thank you.
FYI,
MOST people just want to get in a car and get from point A to point B. They don't want to deal with a manual transmission.
MOST people don't want to fly a 747. They want to get in one and get from point A to point B.
MOST people don't want to jump from a perfectly functioning aircraft.
As long as average people have to deal with that extraneous arcana to get simple (or even complex) things done, they will not use Linux on the desktop.
And when hardware and software support for desktop oriented technologies starts or continues to lag or fade because other platform providers do cater to the average user's needs, I will have no sympathy for you.
DCMonkey
But the profit was made by the Euros.
UI design is ultimately about presentation, articulating the system's functionality in a natural, powerful, and engaging manner. But the ability to make a solid presentation is a rare human attribute. Otherwise, we'd all be superstars.
Michael Crichton, for example, is not the most rigorous author, but he understands presentation - his novels read like scripts. Likewise, Britney Spears is not a songwriter, but she is a polished act. Bill Clinton was a flawed leader, but we loved him anyway.
What these examples have in common is charisma. They have established a feedback loop with their audience, and they work hard to maintain it.
Apple continues to succeed because they understand that UI is about presentation, charisma, and connecting with the audience. Microsoft used to listen to their audience, which is how they got to this point. Linux is only starting.
I think the Gnome and KDE teams understand that UI is about charisma, which is why the flame wars are so rampant between their adherents. But I doubt that they are agonizing over the shape of their widgets the way that politicians agonize over their choice of words.
A good presentation involves sacrificing some of one's substance in favor of broad appeal. I remember the article about how first-time Gnome users had trouble identifying the footprint-labelled Start button. How about labelling it "Menu"? A modest, ego-less presentation can often help one's cause more than trumpeting one's depth and individuality.
But humans are born with tunnel vision, that's a fact. They present themselves to themselves and only the rarest among them look to the audience. Thus, I'm not holding my breath waiting for good UI. Not unless Clinton's pollsters and Britney's songwriters get in on the act, thereby dumbing it down and making it more accessible in the process. That's what Microsoft did with Windows95, and now look - Gnome and KDE have copied it, start button, taskbar and all.
Why do geeks and especially graduate students insist on refering to themselves by their three initials, such as the article's author mpt (Matthew Thomas)? My theory is that they are vain and pretentious. To assume that THEY ALONE would be uniquely identified by some three letter abbreviation is quite an assumption of their self-importance..
cpeterso
The article makes some excellent points - mainly from a marketing/popularity perspective. And these are probably good ideas that should be implemented.
But... the continuous removal of preferences and features is one of the major reaons I came to Linux. I may be in the minority, but why should that mean that I must be forced to work the way somebody else thinks is best?
The obvious answer, of course, is that we need many different word-processor applications - each with [slightly?] different UIs. The OS system is uniquely set up to handle this (since anybody can make and modify anything they want). Like some features of KWord, but not others? Branch it!
But let us not lose sight of the reason that many of us fled The Microsoft Way - because we didn't like the non-preferential features they chose to saddle us with.
* Not enough software designers to get the work done.
* Too many cooks spoil the code's architecture.
* Free software doesn't innovate, just copies.
* Volunteers only want to do cool stuff.
* Volunteers don't do boring details.
* Maintainers cave in and add misguided features or code rather than endure flamewars.
* People want their own features to point at.
* Workarounds are introduced during the devel process and never removed.
if these points would apply to free software and volunteers only there were only volunteers working at Microsoft and Windos would be free software.
That's why the GUI worked so well in the first place. It used a nice, simple metaphor that people could learn easily: the desktop. Hence files, folders, the trash can, etc. You needed to grasp the metaphor first, but grasped, the UI became very obvious. Which is exactly how it should be.
To take a simple example, an FTP client. The metaphor is so thin as to be almost non-existent: that of files on a remote machine and the local machine, and transferring between them. So the UI's job is to present that metaphor as clearly and directly as possible. Let me see those files! If they're in a hierarchical structure or whatever, let me see it. And let me move those files by moving the stuff on screen. If I can, I'll probably find the UI easy to use, regardless of the details.
Okay, it's a stupidly simple example, but it illustrates the point well enough. If you keep what's inside people's heads simple, and you put that stuff simply and directly on screen, I think you'll have a good UI.
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
Ok is usually the right most button on a dialog in the Mac world, with windows it is the left most button
The fact that both of them have OK buttons is indicative of how little UI design went into either platform.
OK, Cancel, Yes and No buttons are the worst, because they require you to read and comprehend a paragraph of text before you click. I've never seen a situation where OK and Cancel couldn't be replaced with Save/Don't Save, Restart/Don't Restart, Proceed/Do Nothing. This is critical, because Cancel doesn't always mean Do Nothing. It should, but since it doesn't, semantic labelling neatly solves the problem.
You very rarely see it. And IIRC, you see OK buttons on Macs more than anywhere else. Not surprising, as the Mac paradigm seems to be that users need to remain ignorant. Try that with an automobile...
"You have crashed the car."
"OK!"
is a good book about user interface design (not for any one particular operating/windowing system) that I haven't seen mentioned yet. He strongly emphasizes usability aspects and draws heavily from Donald Norman's work (e.g. Design of Everyday Things). Come to think of it, Norman's book is a good one for UI designers to read too.
Do you think that the more I drive the more I want to jump outta my window because somehow I've become such an expert at driving that I would jump outta my window?? Does that make sense to you??
:P
No, what makes sense to me is that they weld the door shut to make the car safer in a crash
In the army all interfaces on anything are written for the lowest common denominator. Any Joe Schmuck can come off the street and jump into a Hummer and get by, any Joe Schmuck can learn how to effectively fire a m16.
Well, actually driving a car takes about 3-6 months to learn. I'm sure I could fire an M-16 but I doubt I could handle the kick, hit targets, and clean it without someone to show me how.
I'd say that cars and guns aren't the best examples of things that are drop-dead easy to use. They are examples of good interfaces, though. If a sharpshooter can fire an M-16 better than a trainee, then that's a good interface. But on Windows, I can't batch rename files any faster than my grandma can. That's a bad interface, because the power of the machine is being thrown in the trash.
Who needs power when grandma just wants to get on the internet? Never mind that all she's going to do is download viruses, sign up for Passport and install Comet Cursor. They have yet to make a car with a big fat START button for my half-blind grandma, but they think they can program a way for her to drive safe on the internet. Not bloody likely, unless you toss out the "safe" part.
She can work at McDonald's, though, because those fast-food machines have been thoroughly de-skilled. They have made sure that those machines can be operated by everyone. They are automatic and they have START buttons, which means that if they don't like you, they just fire you and hire my grandma instead.
It's a great system. Grandma gets a crack at a low-paying, exploitative job, the burgers taste like shit, and the consumer pays $5 for the chance to eat a piece of some immigrant meatpacker's arm. All made possible by the fact that the machines can be used by "everyone."
Cars and guns are for anyone. Not everyone. But the hype is that computing is for everyone. Well, if that's true, then what do you need me for? Answer: Not much. And in that scenario, the computing experience will be about as impressive as a fast-food hamburger.
I was looking at their HI Guidelines just now, and you're right, they do recommend naming buttons by verbs. They do a good job of contrasting OK with Done and Cancel with Stop. However, they seem just as attached to the concept of OK and Cancel, because they spend a great deal of time articulating and defining what these words mean:
How about Accept? No, let's pick OK and then translate it.
They also classify pop-up windows into three categories, two of which result in nothing but OK. The third kind has just OK and Cancel. In fact, OK and Cancel are littered everywhere throughout the HI Guidelines. Mac and OK are in love.
Not much of a troll; I intuited their actual written policy, which is that OK is the Macintosh Verb. Cancel I can live with, cancel is actually in the dictionary as a verb.
Furthermore, the fact that Macintosh articulated a verb-only policy and then picked an adjective as their primary verb says something not-so-subtle about the kind of respect they have for their users.
If I wrote a GUI, I would at least have enough respect for my users to pick Awesome instead of OK. That way, when the computer crashed, the user could click on a button that said, "Awesome." But Macintosh is not awesome, Macintosh is OK, literally hundreds of times a day. What a comforting thing for buggy piece of software to say...
But really, how many people are going to back down when a UI expert pounds his fist?
(Personal note: My profession is Philosophy, and like UI design, everyone seems to feel qualified to make a contribution. I can tell you that the effect can range from quite funny to very frustrating. I'm sure real UI experts must see our feeble UI musings the same way.)
Well, I find it eminently useable, but then again, I am using Debian. KDE 3.0 is good, but most of the mathematical and scientific apps I use are not QT-based. I find Sylpheed-claws and Balsa superior to Kmail. Of course most of the apps I use may be called up from the KDE desktop, but why bother? The fact is that in major commercial distros, including Red Hat much of the stuff in Gnome is botched together, apps are just thrown in there with little attention on useability. Try Debian and you'll see the difference. GMC is a good file manager, one of the best. If you compare libraries and apps in KDE to the similar stuff in Gnome, you will find that the applications in KDE are bloated on an individual basis. KDE is slower. I too was obliged to use KDE in Red Hat 7.2 because of many broken applications in Gnome as presented by Red Hat. RH 7.3 may be an improvement though. All I know is that I can launch OpenOffice more quickly from Xfce than I can launch Kword from KDE 3.0.
Rien n'est plus beau que le creux du 0.
Because most people do not want to learn a bunch of stuff just to sit down at a machine and use it, the default should be simple, but I like being able to configure colors to soothe my eyes, or configure how many virtual desktops I have. Nifty features are useful once you take the time to get used to them but they are annoying if you don't want to take the time to use them just to send an email or something simple.
Eat at Joe's.
..are there so that people can customize thier computer, noone is the exact same so they should be able to change thier settings(including thier software/os, which i don't see how it is lazy to add new features since it is more effort than saying "i think this is the best, you don't need more").
The Truth: There is no string:)
You answered your own question: because free software developers develop for themselves, they know the goals of their users. With the exception of some messianic and confused free software developers that see themselves in some odd race with Microsoft, it's a good arrangement. Let's not spoil it by making free software useless for its primary audience by trying to cater to an audience that couldn't care less.
That's a mix of pseudo-scientific gobbledygook and mis-applied cognitive science results. There is no indication whatsoever that applying ideas universally lead to user satisfaction or even overall improved user performance. For example, most of the programs I am most effective and comfortable with display none of their options; sacrificing screen real-estate to displaying options would decrease their usability for me.
There are two things HCI needs. The first is less of a reliance on pseudo-science: while cognitive science results are valid within their domain, they are completely misapplied in HCI. The second is a clear understanding that people differ widely in their preferences, styles, and interests. Maybe you like the stuff Microsoft and Lotus's highly-paid UI designers put out, but I find it awful and ineffective.
By your argument, one size of car or one size of clothing would fit everybody as well. Well, it doesn't, and for HCI researchers and UI designers to pretend that it does is merely arrogant.
Exactly. If you want to satisfy the power user, you can have those options available, in the "Advanced" settings or something, but keep it simple for the average user. ...". The UI should be the same way.
Take Larry Wall's guidance from Perl (here, 3rd bullet): : "Common operations should be ``Huffman coded.'' That is, frequently used operators should be shorter than infrequently used ones.
Complexity is Easy. Simplicity is Hard.