User-centric GUI Design Explained to All

TuringTest writes "The webzine User Instinct carries an article on Usable GUI Design showing that good user interfaces are not beyond the means of free and open software development: 'This article presents five key points of user interface design [...] that any software developer should be able to use.' In related news, The Economist writes against software complexity in an interview to MIT's John Maeda, PhD in interface design. See also OpenUsability, a project for testing user interfaces in a bazaar-like model. The specifics of UI design in Open Source projects has been previously debated on Slashdot."

Comments

Firefox's Find feature is not all roses.

[Trejkaz]

I have a number of beefs with the way Firefox does Find now.

• It pretends to be exactly like type-ahead (it looks exactly the same!), but when you press Enter it doesn't take you to the link.
• It searches over all frames instead of the one I clicked in, which I specifically clicked in to search THAT FRAME.
• It's inconsistent with every other Find feature in every other program, ever. Ideally, every program's Find feature should look the same. If that means converting them all to show a bar at the bottom, fine. But that hasn't been done yet.