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

Quinn!

[daeley]

Whoa, talk about going back to the future.

For those who don't know Quinn, IIRC he's the guy who wrote Internet Config for the Mac, what 10 years ago? Up until that point, you had to change internet prefs in a bunch of different places. With his program (which, again IIRC, was eventually integrated with the OS), you could change it in one spot.

All hail Quinn! :)

GUI target size [Tog]

[redelm]

This is a good article, and if you like it, you might like some of Bruce Tognazzini's work here.He also has a book out "Tog on Interfaces".

One of his major points is the size of GUI targets. The edges and screen corners are easy to hit, but grossly underutilised by GUI designers. This causes more RSI in users than necessary. I've worked some apps with poorly chosen target locations and defaults that were just murder on my wrist.

Re:GUI target size [Tog]

[Twirlip of the Mists]

The edges and screen corners are easy to hit, but grossly underutilised by GUI designers.

This is, of course, why the Mac has a systemwide menu bar at the top of the screen, instead of a NeXT-style menu palette or a menu at the top of each window. The top-of-the-screen menu bar is said to be infinitely tall, because you don't have to worry about the Y coordinate when you click on it. Just push the mouse forward until the pointer stops moving, then click.

Re:GUI target size [Tog]

[AT]

What about the START button in the bottom left - and top left on Macs?

Bad example. On Windows (up to 2K, anyways), the start button is slightly off the corner. If you whip the mouse down to the lower right until it hits the edge, you'll actually be past it! Those extra pixels between the edge of the screen and the Start button just sit there being wasted. Gnome gets this right, and I suspect KDE and the Mac do a better job, too.

Re:GUI target size [Tog]

[joshstaiger]

On Windows (up to 2K, anyways), the start button is slightly off the corner.

This has been fixed in Windows XP. You can now just throw your mouse to the bottom corner and hit the Start menu. Actually, this is the first that I've noticed it, as I was so used to the flaw in previous versions of Windows.

Re:GUI target size [Tog]

[drsmithy]

This is, of course, why the Mac has a systemwide menu bar at the top of the screen, instead of a NeXT-style menu palette or a menu at the top of each window.

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

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.

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.

Re:GUI target size [Tog]

[davebert]

By default on XP, the start button is right in the corner of the screen, so you can't overshoot. But if you prefer to have a larger task bar, for more than one row of buttons, the start button is docked to the top-left corner, so you end up with a large chunk of dead-space underneath it!

Re:GUI target size [Tog]

[DGolden]

I'm indifferent to pie menus, personally.

But: The very fact that contextual menus keep changing is what makes them crappy. I'd much rather ALL actions were on the right-click, and irrelevant ones GREYED OUT, rather than moving stuff around in a context-sensitive menu and preventing me muscle-memory-learning where they are.

Amiga MagicMenu worked the way I like.

Also, amiga menus allowed you to multiple-select by holding the right button down while clicking with the left on the menus - much handier - meant that most "preference dialog" style interactions could be done instead with toggle items in the menu.

Actually, one of the "subtleties" in the article I kinda-sorta dislike sometimes is the diagonal-submenu thing, since Amiga-pattern multiselecting preferences-menu usage is to scan large numbers of submenus - so the "quickly flashing up and disappearing" submenu behaviour is one that I sometimes prefer.

I also hate the way the top-of-screen menus mean your mouse pointer ends up away from what it was - but I also hate the way right-button menus do that! That's why I experimented with pointer-relative hierarchical right-button menus. You can give them a try by running a .jar file that fakes them by hiding the real mouse pointer - see
here. Note that the jar will just display a grey window - you'll have to click on it.

Attentive User Interfaces

[chemstar]

For those who may be members of the ACM, the new issue of the ACM magazine Communications has an excellent issue regarding Attentive user interfaces.

Nitpick

[bill_mcgonigle]

Quinn is un-exclaimed - it's "The Eskimo!" that's exclaimed. :)

And yeah, anyone who keeps their internet settings at an OS level owes one to Quinn. It's an obvious concept that noone seemed to think of for years before Quinn did. And he didn't patent it.

Re:Ego-boosting?

[stefanlasiewski]

It's just a friggin' ftp program (and one I've never heard of, at that), and it's not exactly ground breaking.

You never heard of it because you were still in diapers.

It was very ground breaking, back in 1994, back when the web was just a small part of the internet. Clean, simple interfaces; oh how I miss them.

Semi-OT: Interface Hall of Shame

[Narchie Troll]

That isn't the Interface Hall of Shame, it's the "OS X-centric Hall of Shit." iarchitect.com is gone, but the Wayback Machine still has it.

Interface Hall of Shame A lot of this OS X IHoS's sections are like those in the original Hall of Shame. Interesting. The original is no longer up to date, however. I'd have loved to see their views of OS X and Windows XP, as well as the up-and-coming X Window desktops.

Who needs them

[__aafkqj3628]

Who really needs a GUI for an application these days, console-based apps will once more rule the world. Bwahahahahahaaha!!!!

Re:I disagree about one thing.

[You're All Wrong]

Well spotted. I too thought that on return to the original window the target highlighting should disappear as, in simple terms, there ain't no bleedin' target as you ain't doin' nuffin!

The other one that I thought he overstated was the fact that his mailer was cool because it had one scroll bar for the whole message composition window rather than the admittedly disgustingly ugly multiple-region setup of the thing he was comparing it to. This is no different from what old text mode (console-based) mailers have done since the beginning of time. (e.g. Pine, which I still use). So the reason the Mac app was so great was because they had't broken an already working paradigm.

I prefer to simply look at the interfaces from hell and laugh/cry than to have a presentation of supposed good ones where sycophants fawn over them barf-inducingly.

YAW.