GNOME Human Interface Guidelines Released

Seth Nickell writes: "We are proud to announce the release of the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines v1.0, the product of usability engineers, designers, hackers, and whatever-keeps-you-writing-calum irish wine[TM]. I hope they'll be useful for improving the usefulness of all free software, not just GNOME apps. Check out the release announcement for details and a plaintive plea for interface coordination between free software projects." (Also at the top of the new Gnome news site called Footnotes.)

Comments

Too little, too late

[PhysicsGenius]

The Open Source community lambasts Microsoft for making security an add-on "feature" instead of engineering it into the lowest, most fundamental levels of the product. We know (and apparently they don't) that security is about more than slapping a lock on the outside and calling it safe. You have to think of protocols, transactions, etc and every stage and with all contingencies in mind.

UI design is the same way and apparently no one in the Linux/UNIX world understands this. You can't make a program intuitive to use by programming it willy-nilly and then putting the right-sized buttons or icons of the correct 16-bit colors on the top. Ease-of-use must be factored in on Day One.

That's why it saddens me to seen GNOME come out with their UI design guidelines fully 4 years after they started programming and after at least two major releases.

If UI design bugs (costing thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars via confusion and "human" error) got the same press that MS's security problems did, ZDNet would have the same biased field days that Slashdot enjoys on a monthly basis.

Re:Too little, too late

[RevAaron]

No one ever claimed that GNOME isn't useful. Not having well designed UI guidelines doesn't make GNOME useless, it just makes it inconsistent at best, and nearly impossible to use at worse. Which it is, unfortunately. Windows is also quite inconsistent, even though they've had design guidelines for a while. But like with GNOME, they were put out as an afterthought.

I'm not much of a fan of Windows, and I don't use it very often, but it's still more consistent than GNOME. (I use Linux at home and work) Maybe in another 6 years GNOME will achieve the same level of consistency that Windows has now, after the same normalizing process that occured with Windows does with GNOME. Windows is still less consistent than some other options, but it's catching up, no doubt because the HIG were put out.

False that it necessarily follows that the GUIs for Gnome/KDE/Windowmaker are therefore costing us money.

They are. They waste time, and as the adage does, time is money. When I'm at work, that 20 minutes a day I have to spend trying to figure out those inconsistent GNOME apps costs me 20 minutes where I could have been doing real work. Maybe your time is worth nothing, but a lot of us have more to do than dick around with poorly designed GNOME apps.

The Mac OS and the Newton OS are two examples where design guidelines were developed with the OS/GUI system and made available to developers from very early on. It's not surprising that they're the most consistent computing platforms around.

Re:Bad Buttons

[foobar104]

Actually, the reference standard for user interface guidelines-- the Apple User Interface Guidelines from Inside Macintosh-- recommend the opposite. Note and stop alert boxes should have only one button: OK. Caution alert boxes should have two buttons: OK (the default, usually) and Cancel. They go on to say this:

Dialog boxes and alert boxes communicate to the user. It is your responsibility to make sure that the user can understand what is going on when you can't be there to explain. Dialog box and alert box messages should be descriptive rather than evaluative. When you're writing messages, try to put yourself in the place of your users and imagine how they will feel when confronted with your message.

A good alert box message says what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what the user can do about it. Try to express everything in the user's vocabulary. Figure 11-3 shows an example of an alert box message that provides little information and doesn't suggest to the user what is really going on.

(Figure 11-3: A poorly written alert box message)

! Error writing file to disk. [OK]

You could improve this message by describing the problem in the user's vocabulary, as shown in Figure 11-4.

(Figure 11-4: An improved alert box message)

! "Monica Stories" could not be saved because the disk "Blackmail stuff" is full. [OK]

To really make this alert box useful to the user, you need to provide some suggestion about what the user can do to get out of the current situation. Figure 11-5 shows the optimal alert box message for this condition.

(Figure 11-5: A well-written alert box message)

! "Monica Stories" could not be saved, because the disk "Blackmail stuff" is full. Try saving onto a different disk. [OK]

In my opinion, the important work on human interfaces has already been done. We just need to go back and read it. I keep a copy of this book on my shelf all the time, and I read it often. It's almost like a Bible for me. I'll even read it sometimes just for inspiration or encouragement when times are tough.

Okay, I'm sick.

Re:Bad Buttons

[foobar104]

"Dismiss" is a better name for the single button, though "Close" is probably a little less idiomatic.

No, it isn't. Remember the part about using the user's vocabulary. What if I walked into your office and said, "The vending machine is out of Spritz." You'd acknowledge my announcement by saying, "Okay." You might not care that the vending machine is out of Spritz. On the other hand, you might be terribly disappointed and upset. But in either case, the correct response is simply, "Okay," as in, "I acknowledge this message."

Don't read too much into it. The "OK" button isn't meant to imply approval on the part of the user. It means the same thing "Okay" means in speech. It means, more or less, "I hear you."

Always putting the "human" back in "human interface."

Re:Bad Buttons

[Arandir]

Somehow I have a hard time believing that a bunch of developers who say "we won't follow any sensible UI design until we get mandatory guidelines" are the sort of people that would follow the guidelines to begin with.

What GNOME really needs is a release manager with the cojones to kick out anything that doesn't follow the standards.