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An Optimized GUI Based On Users' Abilities
Ostracus writes "Researchers at the University of Washington have recently developed a system, which, for the first time, offers an instantly customizable approach to user interfaces. Each participant in the program is placed through a brief skills test, and then a mathematically-based version of the user interface optimized for his or her vision and motor abilities is generated. The current off-the-shelf designs are especially discouraging for the disabled, the elderly and others who have trouble controlling a mouse, because most computer programs have standardized button sizes, fonts, and layouts, which are designed for typical users."
This will make tech support a lot more fun.
I sure wish people would stop inventing their own user interfaces. Instead just follow the conventions of your operating system. The sluggish and unfriendly custom interfaces I encounter in my day to day work makes me age two times as fast and makes me do my job four times as slow. We don't need a reinvented GUI, we need programmers that enforce just that little bit of GUI hygiene in the first place.
Quothe the fine article:
Interesting enough, but I wonder if the day will come when GUI designers who aren't catering to special-case scenarios will offer the following options:
[x] Make no assumptions.
[x] Get out of my way.
[x] Yes I really mean it.
[x] No I don't want to try things first.
When skill, knowledge and ability are penalised, it's the non-below-average group that becomes the under-represented minority. Those falling into the maligned category range from Firefox users resisting the New and Improved, Microsoft Office ribbon haters, Gnome users who like the clean interface but still resent the near-absence of customisability or documentation, to the subset of Windows Power Shell users who have actually used a command-line before.
Microsoft already tried this with sort of thing with Office 2000-2003. Remember infrequently used menu and toolbar items being hidden away? I do, and shudder. It made teaching people how to use it a total nightmare. Even using it as an expert user always felt clumsy.
Good UI is not about making a UI that learns the user - a computer will never be able to do a good job of that. Good UI is about making the app easily learnable. This is much easier than it sounds: simple tidyness and consistency get you 80% of the way toward good UI. But when you start making dynamic UI, consistency is the first thing to go out the window.
Office 2007 does this quite well (though it is themed differently to all other apps), and so it's much easier to work with than any previous versions of office.