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For GUIs, Just the Right Degree of Realism

Posted by timothy on from the insightful-line-drawing dept.

mr crypto writes "User interfaces make copious use of pictures and symbols, but how abstract should images be? Lukas Mathis has an interesting blog entry on where to draw the line."

4 of 256 comments (clear)

  1. many words by Odinlake · · Score: 4, Insightful

    My, that was many words to say one thing over and over and over again. Pretty pictures though.

    1. Re:many words by StripedCow · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Redundancy turns precious information to noise.

      Funny thing is, that was exactly what the article was all about!

      --
      If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
  2. Re:Confusing icon practices by Speare · · Score: 4, Insightful

    There's no such thing as "intuitive" computer interfaces. Instead, you want your interfaces to be "discoverable" and to build on other trained discoveries in a consistent way.

    From that example of the new YouTube buttons, I agree they're bizarre. Pretty much any button that JUST shows an arrow is useless for discoverability. Does the arrow mean 'move' or 'grow' or 'next' or some other action? By "discover," we don't mean to literally experiment with invoking the button to see what it does-- many people are too timid to press anything they don't already understand. Instead, discovery involves finding that there IS a button that PROBABLY does what you already intend to do. For example, follow the mental conversation: "this window is too small, I want to make it bigger, there's got to be a button around here somewhere for making it bigger, oh aha! that one looks like a dark box getting bigger, so let me try that, yep, that's better."

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  3. Re:Confusing icon practices by rantingkitten · · Score: 5, Insightful

    My experience is that people will click with wild abandon when they shouldn't, and be deathly afraid to do anything when there's no real harm involved.

    These are the people who will install anything they damn well please, change important settings for absolutely no reason "because it seemed like a good idea", set passwords on things that don't need passwords and then forget them, forward phone A to phone B and phone B to phone A because "I wanted them both to ring if I got a call," and other general nonsense. They have no problem screwing around to their heart's content and breaking everything and never learning.

    That same person will also submit endless tickets or place endless helpdesk calls because they were afraid to change a trivial setting that involves a single, labelled checkbox, because "I wasn't sure if that would mess anything up."

    --
    mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.