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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."
google's cache right here
Hi, I'm the guy who wrote the article.
Yes, it's hosted on my 256k upstream ADSL line, which is why I said "Use the Coral cache" in all the story postings!
Slashdot would also choose the day when I switch to my back up server (K6-2 233), in order to fix my main server, to post this on the front page. I was wondering why it was making that funny noise when I loaded the Slashdot front page...
Please use the Coral Cache!
The Mirrordot version and Google cache are also available.
"Usable GUI Design showing that good user interfaces are not beyond the means of free and open software development:"
The problem is that open source is dominated by the uber-geeks, and not enough people who specialize in user experience. So obviously, if more GUI specialists got involved in open source, the better the user experience of open source software. (Need I add a "duh" to this?)
I think most of the issues the author raises are pretty minor. Saving a mouse click here or there is convenient, yes, but its trivial compared to real usability issues like how do I use this application without reading a manual? Large, well placed, and convenient buttons are useless if the user doesn't know what to do with them. Having a good help system that explains the purpose of the different elements of an app is essential. There's nothing worse that being stuck in a completely opaque application with no clue as to how to proceed, and the help system has no answers. For me this kind of program is CAD or (at first) the GIMP. For some users this opaque program is mozilla or outlook. From what I've seen these programs don't really cater to the beginning user that well, there's nothing to really explain the basics like what is email, the difference bewteen a browser and the internet, what is a scroll bar, etc.
Which brings me to the topic of widgets. Why can't you help-click on anything in your gui and have it explain itself? One obvious problem with such an elaborate help system like that is that the infrastructure for it is a lot of work to build. Why should I have to explain what a scroll bar is to some noob, I'm trying to write an email client here! That's why the widgets should have help built in to them.
The other thing is that a lot of the author's issues are with widgets, like scroll bars that don't go to the edge of the screen. Like most developers have control over that! 99% of developers will never bother to develop their own scroll bars to get that extra pixel. And if they did, every application would have different widgets, and that would suck too.
All that said, I do like the point about only showing the user what is really needed. Lately as the app I've been working on has grown, the menus and toolbars have begun to look more and more intimidating. Its much better to keep what the user can see down to a small set of frequently used items, and tuck the esoterica away. Otherwise they end up having to ask themselves whether they are supposed to know what every obscure menu item does, and its a lot of work to know what is important and what may be safely ignored. And that's what I want to minimize: the amount of knowledge the user needs to know to get the job done.
Poor user interface design is the second biggest failure of this kind of software. (The first is failure to plan for failure, but that's a different problem.) The problem isn't that guys like me don't understand how to design a user interface; it's that we don't even think about it because we tend to be thinking in terms of the process or machine rather than the human user.
There are no universal guidelines for how to lay out a user interface. The only sure method is to code it, then try using it and see if it feels natural. Often an interface that "follows the rules" will feel clunky in use, and when that happens you should rewrite it and try again until it is intuitive. When you've gotten it to feel right yourself, you should put it in front of the people who will use it all day long and see how they like it. And you should be willing to rearrange it until they find it natural and intuitive.
One reason those field-programmable controllers have become so popular is that people like me, working in the field, can do this. If a manufacturer builds, say, a batch process controller, it must implement every possible function that any process might ever need. This usually results in a bewildering user interface since most actual processes will only use a fraction of the controller's functions. By writing a custom controller in a programmable device, I can give the user just the controls he needs to do his job.
It used to be a once a month occurrence for us to get a service call along the lines of "our scale is only weighing about half what we put on it," because a user accidentally switched from pounds to kilograms. Newer devices let us turn off modes the end user will never use, and the result is less friction all around.
It goes without saying of course that you put the most-used controls where they are easiest to find and most obvious, you only put controls that are used constantly where they are always visible. You always provide keyboard shortcuts for EVERYTHING. Especially in the workplace, day-in day-out users will learn all those shortcuts, but the temp timer needs the GUI. Both are absolutely necessary. Not putting in keyboard shortcuts is the single biggest screw-up in industrial GUI's I have used.
The art comes in determining what controls are really used most often, and when things like confirmation dialogs shift from being a useful safeguard to an annoyance. I can't begin to count the times when I've installed a relatively simple system only to find that some control I'd buried in a deep menu is used much more often than I'd realized. Usage patterns are often radically different in simulation than they are with a real machine connected to real processes. The job isn't done when you close the build file and put field installation on your calendar; you will almost always have to refactor at least once based on end user feedback. If you don't plan for this and budget for it, it's a big, big mistake.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
What was the proposed solution? Place Shortcuts in Tooltips.
So, when you hover over the refresh button, it doesn't say ' Refresh ' it says ' Refresh (F5) '. Imagine that.
So, if you're among the camp that feels that the fact that, over a year after the wishlist item was posted, this still is marked as 'New' and nobody has even attempted to impliment it, vote for bug 67178 and try to convince them that such a minor change could make a world of differnce for the K Desktop Environment's usability quotient.
That's http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67178 and click vote and you could help revolutionise the Linux desktop!
The automatic transmission shifter sequence is Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive, Low, [Lower, [Lowest]]
But the parent was talking about a manual gearbox. Maybe the positioning of those is mandated by US law too, but I've certainly driven manual cars where the reverse gear has been in the top-left (left of 1st) and the bottom-right (below 5th, right of 4th) and, I think, bottom-left (left of 2nd). Additionally, sometimes you have to pull/raise some sort of flangey thing and others you push the entire stick downwards in order to change to reverse.
Plus, there's always the differences between indicators and wipers (sometimes they're switched).
Without doubt, though, the biggest problem that comes through lack of standardisation is the position of the damned fuel tank filler. If I had a dollar for every time I'd had to get out of a rental car to figure out where the hell it is, I'd have... like... $10.
Registering accounts later than some other chrisb since 1997
Donald Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things
Jakob Nielsen's articles and newsletters on web design and usability testing:
Useit.com
Both are pretty good.
Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment â" Buddha