Human Interface Subtleties in Software

Disoriented writes "As a GUI designer and programmer I enjoy sites like this. The info here is fairly old, dating back to Classic Mac OS, but it illustrates the kind of details users look for in a well-polished GUI." Mac-centric, but there are good points made in here for anyone working on GUI applications -- less bitter than the Interface Hall of Shame, too ;)

Comments

Re:GUI target size [Tog]

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I think you'd find a menu pallette that popped up under the mouse cursor with a single click - paticularly if implemented as a pie menu - would be significantly faster that the Mac's single menu bar.

Marking menus. Sure, it's okay for selecting from one of, say, six choices. But the menu bar is hierarchical in nature: under the File menu you have these items, and under the Edit menu you have these, and so on. Marking menus don't work well for that.

There is a point at which having to move the mouse only a tiny distance outweighs having an infinitely high target.

Not really. I'm sure you're getting at speed here, and how much of a pain it is to drag the mouse all that way to the top of the screen, but if speed is your criteria then hotkeys will always win the race. They're incredibly fast-- instantaneous-- but they're also incredibly user-hostile.

There are other examples where the Mac's single menu bar is not the best solution as well, such as multiple monitors, or very high resolutions.

Actually, in both of those cases the single menu bar is the best solution, due to that "infinite height" property I mentioned.