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UI Designers Hired by Mozilla
ta bu shi da yu writes "Mozilla has hired several developers from Humanized. According to Ars Technica, Humanized is a "small software company that is known for its considerable usability expertise and innovative user interface design. The Humanized developers will be working at Mozilla Labs on Firefox and innovative new projects.""
Humanized is Jef Raskin's son's company. The kid has been living and breathing UI design his entire life. Looks like Mozilla picked a good one.
the Open Office project. ;-) but somehow I've always appreciated indesign more
I always find myself lost when trying even basic stuff, could be I just suck at it
Although Firefox/thunderbird aren't the worst offenders of UI hell, this is a pretty good plan.
Let the devs of mozilla stick with good/safe/functional software, and let 'specialists' take care of the UI.
The lesson here is that to make progress sometimes you have to pay people.
What is wrong with the FF UI. Its clean, not cluttered and readable. Its soooooo much better than Microsofts IE. (This is coming from someone that prefers MS to Linux/apple)
No it doesn't! More important than having a cool UI is adhering to current UI standards and doing things the way users expect them.
In most cases, great UI improvements are the incremental ones, not the revolutionary ones.
Firefox is already on the right track. Change it just for the sake of changing it would be bad.
It really hacks me off when someone changes a UI (or goods on supermarket shelves, for that matter) just for the sake of doing something new.
What we need are some standards here. Preferable just one, so people stick to it.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The Humanized website is an interesting read. While they do make valid points, they seem to fall into the "dummies" culture. Why does everything today has to be "for dummies" or in "24 hour"? What's wrong with learning curves? Learning curves exist for a reason... they're not here to make user's life miserable but simply because an interface that you learn can be more effective in the future. Of course, just because it's hard doesn't mean it's powerful. It is possible to build an unintuitive AND uneffective interface, but I think it is not always possible to be both intuitive and effective. On the humanized website, they seem to solely focus on the former : why is that? I think we are in fact facing a wide cultural problem of high time preference... before are not willing to spend a few minutes reading a manual or a few days getting use to a device, even if it can save them days later. For example, my mother works with computers all day and hunt and pecks at 20WPM. When I told her to spend some time learning to touchtype, she claim she didn't have time. Same story when I was in college, watching people spend hours writing formulas in word because it took too much time to learn LaTeX.
Back to interfaces. If what I describe is indeed a cultural phenomenom, then the guys at humanized are right, they are merely reflecting market demand for simplicity versus efficience, but this is in itself a sad thing. I think they do not emphasize the possibility of satisfying different kind of customers by providing optional advanced options.
\u262D = \u5350
No, they put the SITE MAP at the bottom of each page. The main nav is the navbar at the top of the page. Would you be making the same complaint if they had just made the site map a separate page like most sites do?
This guy's the limit!
But here's the thing... The statement they're making by doing this is that they think the interface they have isn't satisfactory - isn't intuitive enough. Hiring these people says that they recognize that improvements can be made in the UI which will make firefox more intuitive and easy to use. If that comes at the expense of some (quickly forgotten) sense of familiarity, so be it.
In most cases, great UI improvements are the incremental ones, not the revolutionary ones.
It is a gamble. Office and ribbon are a good example. The trasition from the current way of doing things to ribbon can be time consuming, however when you have transitioned it is an improvement. Is it worth the pain? tbd.Proof by very large bribes. QED.
This doesn't look good AT ALL.
"small software company that is known for its considerable usability expertise and innovative user interface design. The Humanized developers will be working at Mozilla Labs on Firefox and innovative new projects."
I hope I'm wrong, but "innovative" and "user interface" in the same sentence are sometimes good, but rarely. I'm thinking of innovations like Microsoft's not showing all menu items, or web 2.0 innovations that move the fucking link when you try to click (ala the firehose, please redesign that travesty, I have to use IE at work!)
OTOH there are good UI innovations, like the circular menu that nobody's used. Fingers crossed, at least they have no monopoly and if Firefox starts sucking I can go elsewhere.
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Powerful and easy to learn do not have to be mutually exclusive.
When they're done with Firefox, could they spare a few guys to work on OpenOffice, The GIMP, and Blender? Those projects seem more in the need of a UI overhaul than Firefox does.
(But still, I'm excited to see that some of the "big" open-source projects are taking UI design seriously. Huzzah!)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
...someone fix the GIMP!
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
I agree that a UI expert isn't going to come up with Vi in its current format, but I think you're equating a complex interface with a complex/powerful program. Ideally what would happen is that the programmer comes up with Vi then passes it to a UI expert who then passes it to an art department.
The fact that Vi is 'impossible for beginners to quit...without a cheat sheet' suggests not that it's a vindication of keeping UI experts away, but instead that a UI expert should've been consulted at some point.
Easy-to-use doesn't necessarily equate to simplistic or a minimal feature-set. Though sometimes it does, of course. But mostly in those circumstances it's because the shiny-UI came before the feature-set.
You're missing the point altogether behind usability. An interface should be intuitive such that someone who has never worked with a computer in their life can walk up and understand what they're doing after a limited amount of time. Vi may be powerful, and I'm sure you'll get modded up on a place like Slashdot for mentioning it. But when I walk up to a terminal using it, what do I do? what are the conventions in place? How does it relate to anything in the real world? Bottom line is that it doesn't meet any of the criteria behind usability. As much as it pains me to say this, Microsoft Word is more powerful than Vi in terms of usability. You push a letter and it shows up on the screen.
That's the problem with that kind of commercial software. You naturally reach a stage where nothing really needs changing much, but to keep making a profit you have to keep radically messing with it to make it look new and shiny so people will buy it. That's why FOSS makes so much more sense since it serves the needs of the users, not a large company's business needs.