Complex GUI Architecture Discussion?

Posted by Cliff on Wednesday October 16, 2002 @07:12AM from the nuts-and-bolts-behind-the-desktop dept.

XNuke asks: "I have been searching for intelligent discussion (on dead trees or otherwise) of the issues involved in designing very complex GUIs. Things on the level of TecPlot, AutoCad, 3DS, etc, where there may be very many different views of the same data and there are many degrees of freedom for the user. I am not interested in 'where to put the buttons', but rather the nuts and bolts of making the 'Well Designed UI' work. I guess I am looking for a sort of 'Design Patterns applied to a big deskptop application' sort of discussion. It is no problem to find discussions of Model-View-Controller concepts at the component level, but at the application level there seems to be nothing. Too often the architectural level discussions encompass non-interactive, server side design issues and not the extremely chaotic problems a client side application with many degrees of freedom has. Short of wading through megabytes of source code for KWord et. al., does anyone know of any digested information? There is obviously no 'One Solution' to this, but there must be something out there."

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Anything by Alan Cooper by Krelnik · 2002-10-16 07:36 · Score: 4, Offtopic

Check out anything by Alan Cooper. His "The Inmates are Running the Asylum" is more of a rant than a guidebook, but still excellent reading. "About Face" is probably more of what you want.
He would call what you are talking about "interaction design" not "interface design". The Inmates book makes a good case for how the two are different and why interaction design is a better approach.