UI designer will take a look at how a tool is currently being used and try to find ways to make that tool more effient.
A good UI designer will do this, but a really great UI designer will be involved in the initial stages of design, doing a task analysis and coming up with the basic program interaction before any code is ever written or any features decided upon. UI designers can make a program so much more usable, but often they are brought in well into the late stages of design. By that point so much of the product has been designed and decided upon by programmers and so much code has been written that there's really not much a good UI designer can do make the product usable without a major rewrite.
Your example is totally wrong
on
Version Fatigue
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· Score: 2
It's much worse than that.
It's more like the developers are saying"we thought that the gas pedal would look so much cooler on the left, but then we had nowhere to put the brake so we just stuck it on the right. Please try not to get into any situations where you have to suddently avoid hitting children until you unlearn your 15 years of trained reflexes."
Oh, and adaptive menus that constantly change on a user, adding confusion and blowing away the motor muscle memory that has been acquired for each of the menu items. This is one of the stupidest things ever done in an interface and has been very severely criticized by the UI design community.
I should have remembered to add this "feature" to the original post. My bad.
Remond? Aren't they the same people who gave us multi-row tabs, despite much of the UI design community calling them stupid for doing so? Ditto for talking paper clips, and zillions of tiny toolbar buttons with indistinguishable icons, and window-in-window MDI? This isn't the same Redmond that basically ignored these criticisms for years and perpetuated these ill-conceived designs.
You're probably talking about a different Redmond. I've often heard of Cupertino described as the Redmond of California. Maybe that's it.
Yesterday at Wal-mart I saw a suspicious-looking guy wearing a"Death to America" T-shirt buying up all the smoke detectors. I just assumed he was overzealous about fire safety.
Bill Gates in no way resembles a loud, fat, big breasted nordic messenger of doom.
It had to be Balmer.
Problem is unix people and not open source?
on
Open Source Limitations?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If a certain group of developers doing open source work come from a developer community that:
has for the last 30 years told confused newbies to shut up and read the manual
has attributed end-user confusion to "people not wanting to learn"
has never cultivated the necessary "let's make it easy to use" design ethos
does not consider making usable, high quality GUI-driven software to be fun
has up until recently derided GUI's as toys for children
has not built up the necessary usability-design infrastructure, and in fact have done just the opposite by claiming the field of UI design is BS and telling usability experts to "stop whining and shut up and code"
is their lack of mainstream penetration really due to the fact that they are not getting paid for their work, or is it because they might be the worst kind of people you could have ever tasked with designing software for the average joe?
Perhaps the success of open source in the server arena and its failings on the desktop have to do with the fact that the current batch of people doing open source stuff have certain skillsets/mindsets that lend themselves well to doing one type of design but are totally lacking in the skillsets/mindsets needed to do a different type.
I'm not surprised that the University of Maryland is creating a program to deal with human issues of computers. For years they have had a very good HCI department. I certainly hope they incorporate the design of better human-computer interfaces into this new program.
Most Techs (not all, but many)are the real newbies. They barely understand people. They refuse to read any books on GUI design (not taking their own advice to RTFM). Many of them consider the field of usability to be a bullshit field dominated by the psuedo-science of cognitive psychology. And then when non-techs get really confused by the crap they program, the techs are too dumb to know why it's happening. They're simply too stupid to learn the protocol of the end user.
Read The FineManual or shut the hell up and go back your server closet where you belong.
The material reminds me of those plastic chairs that we had in elementary school.
That would explain the rumors floating around Apple Tech Support that "got sat on by a confused first-grader" is the most common support incident with the new iMacs.
If you buy a computer with that new fangled Transmeta chip, where the hell are you going to find 2 to the 256th power bytes of RAM you need to max out your machine?
Satire is a constitutionally protected form of speech, and I believe that's how weird Al got around it (although he might change a note or two here and there). Especially considering the political nature of this EFF satire, use of the basic tune would almost certainly be protected under the first amendment.
Assuming the only GTK code you've seen is the C code (which I agree looks incredibly rowdy) you might want to have a look at the Gtk-Perl or PyGtk. I've used both and they make writing gnome/gtk applications tolerable.
Also, learn how to use the Glade feature of Gtk. You design your interface in the Glade wyswyg UI editor, which generates an xml file describing the layout of the interface. You can have any number of scripting languages with Gtk bindings (Perl, Python, Ruby etc) at runtime load up the Glade xml file to build the GUI. Once you get Glade under your belt you'll be surprised how amazingly fast you can bang out workable GUI program.
From 1998-1999, I worked at a Radio Shack in NC. We were actually one of the first stores in the country to go from SCO unix to Win95 POS.
The win95 machines were somewhere in the region of pentium 75-133's. Yes, Radio Shack management was dumb enough to buy their hardware and then wait two years before shipping out the system with the software. One of the silliest things about the "upgrade" is that it was really nothing more than making almost an exact carbon copy of the curses-type SCO interface in a Windows 95 GUI, essentially replacing CLI text fields with identical GUI text boxes that really don't take advantage of the GUI paradigm. Just because you make a bad interface pointable and clickable doesn't mean you've made the interface that much better (in his book GUI Bloopers, author Jeff Johnson refers to this as a "TTY problem"). Our manager was discouraged by Tandy technical support from calling a bug a bug. He was told to call it an "issue".
One of the silliest things I remember about the radio shack machines is that none of them had a cd-rom drive. Guess what we had to do if we needed to look at the Tandy catalog CD-ROM? We needed to get the key to open up one of the cabinets for the display computers (the ones sitting above the fake computer shells they use to demo the latest models), type in the password to stop the demo, stick in the CD-ROM to get what we wanted, restart the demo when we were done, relock the cabinet, and then finally put the keys way. There was not a whole lot of incentive to get out the CD-ROM when it wasted time we could have used to earn the commision necessary to put ourselves over minimum wage.
Whenever I hear of Radio Shack being called "America's Technology store" I laugh heartily.
>The military is always claiming that Force Protection is one of the most important things they do.
I never knew the U.S. military was using The Force. But that would explain their fascination with hokey religions and ancient weapons.
In place of these silly features
on
Google Experiments
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
I'd rather have the Google API allow me more than 10 results per search. Let's say you write something in Java which uses to Google API to archive postings of Slashdot Trolls. If you type in "Natalie Portman Hot Grits" into your web client, you may get back the following:
Corporate Home of Portman's Tupperware Store
XXX hot chimpanzees
Quaker instant grits
Gritty instant quakers
Hot XXX babes
Hot XXX gritty Instant Quakers
Star wars collector mugs
Hot deal on 100 grit sand paper
Natalie Merchant Home Page
IMDB: "True Grit" Starring John Wayne...
If "Let's Dump Hot Grits Down Natalie Portman's Pants" is search result #11, you're fscked and have to result to screen scraping Google and using 3 times more of their bandwidth than you would have used if they dramatically increased the result limit.
You're totally right about the stupidity of putting the "danger" button right next to buttons that do other stuff. Unfortunately both desktop environments (KDE and GNOME) bought totally into this bad design that has been criticized by many UI design guru's. Yet one more reason why I feel so justified in creating a GNOME fork.
Incidently, you can change the button order in sawfish. In fact, I created a theme that does precisely this. However the key word here is "create a theme". You have to mess with sawfish's quirky, poorly designed "Sawfish Themer" program in order to do this. Or you could code it in rep if you're really a masochist. The point is that you can change the button order in sawfish, but it requires way more work than should be necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
UFO nuts explain it in terms of aliens being attracted to remote areas.
I think it's more that remote areas are unusually attracted to large masses of drunk rednecks.
They probably will not cover any visits to a psychiatrist. Ebay explicitly prohibits any dealings involving drugs or shrunken heads.
For some reason, I forsee a lot of these devices getting lost around laudromats and arcades.
UI designer will take a look at how a tool is currently being used and try to find ways to make that tool more effient.
A good UI designer will do this, but a really great UI designer will be involved in the initial stages of design, doing a task analysis and coming up with the basic program interaction before any code is ever written or any features decided upon. UI designers can make a program so much more usable, but often they are brought in well into the late stages of design. By that point so much of the product has been designed and decided upon by programmers and so much code has been written that there's really not much a good UI designer can do make the product usable without a major rewrite.
It's much worse than that.
It's more like the developers are saying"we thought that the gas pedal would look so much cooler on the left, but then we had nowhere to put the brake so we just stuck it on the right. Please try not to get into any situations where you have to suddently avoid hitting children until you unlearn your 15 years of trained reflexes."
Oh, and adaptive menus that constantly change on a user, adding confusion and blowing away the motor muscle memory that has been acquired for each of the menu items. This is one of the stupidest things ever done in an interface and has been very severely criticized by the UI design community.
I should have remembered to add this "feature" to the original post. My bad.
Remond? Aren't they the same people who gave us multi-row tabs, despite much of the UI design community calling them stupid for doing so? Ditto for talking paper clips, and zillions of tiny toolbar buttons with indistinguishable icons, and window-in-window MDI? This isn't the same Redmond that basically ignored these criticisms for years and perpetuated these ill-conceived designs.
You're probably talking about a different Redmond. I've often heard of Cupertino described as the Redmond of California. Maybe that's it.
Yesterday at Wal-mart I saw a suspicious-looking guy wearing a"Death to America" T-shirt buying up all the smoke detectors. I just assumed he was overzealous about fire safety.
DRM is probably one of the hottest, most relevant areas of the tech industry right now.
Scary, ain't it?
- no incentive to add usefuless features which don't add to (and in some cases severely detract from) from the total user experience.
- no marketing department to push a piece of software out far before it is ready.
Government lacks the financial incentive needed to screw up software.Bill Gates in no way resembles a loud, fat, big breasted nordic messenger of doom.
It had to be Balmer.
- has for the last 30 years told confused newbies to shut up and read the manual
- has attributed end-user confusion to "people not wanting to learn"
- has never cultivated the necessary "let's make it easy to use" design ethos
- does not consider making usable, high quality GUI-driven software to be fun
- has up until recently derided GUI's as toys for children
- has not built up the necessary usability-design infrastructure, and in fact have done just the opposite by claiming the field of UI design is BS and telling usability experts to "stop whining and shut up and code"
is their lack of mainstream penetration really due to the fact that they are not getting paid for their work, or is it because they might be the worst kind of people you could have ever tasked with designing software for the average joe?Perhaps the success of open source in the server arena and its failings on the desktop have to do with the fact that the current batch of people doing open source stuff have certain skillsets/mindsets that lend themselves well to doing one type of design but are totally lacking in the skillsets/mindsets needed to do a different type.
I'm not surprised that the University of Maryland is creating a program to deal with human issues of computers. For years they have had a very good HCI department. I certainly hope they incorporate the design of better human-computer interfaces into this new program.
Most Techs (not all, but many)are the real newbies. They barely understand people. They refuse to read any books on GUI design (not taking their own advice to RTFM). Many of them consider the field of usability to be a bullshit field dominated by the psuedo-science of cognitive psychology. And then when non-techs get really confused by the crap they program, the techs are too dumb to know why it's happening. They're simply too stupid to learn the protocol of the end user.
Read The Fine Manual or shut the hell up and go back your server closet where you belong.
Responses
That
Further
Microsoft
The material reminds me of those plastic chairs that we had in elementary school.
That would explain the rumors floating around Apple Tech Support that "got sat on by a confused first-grader" is the most common support incident with the new iMacs.
If you buy a computer with that new fangled Transmeta chip, where the hell are you going to find 2 to the 256th power bytes of RAM you need to max out your machine?
Satire is a constitutionally protected form of speech, and I believe that's how weird Al got around it (although he might change a note or two here and there). Especially considering the political nature of this EFF satire, use of the basic tune would almost certainly be protected under the first amendment.
Previous McKinleys haven't fared very well.
Assuming the only GTK code you've seen is the C code (which I agree looks incredibly rowdy) you might want to have a look at the Gtk-Perl or PyGtk. I've used both and they make writing gnome/gtk applications tolerable. Also, learn how to use the Glade feature of Gtk. You design your interface in the Glade wyswyg UI editor, which generates an xml file describing the layout of the interface. You can have any number of scripting languages with Gtk bindings (Perl, Python, Ruby etc) at runtime load up the Glade xml file to build the GUI. Once you get Glade under your belt you'll be surprised how amazingly fast you can bang out workable GUI program.
No wonder we keep seeing Cheech and Chong at every global hotspot.
From 1998-1999, I worked at a Radio Shack in NC. We were actually one of the first stores in the country to go from SCO unix to Win95 POS.
The win95 machines were somewhere in the region of pentium 75-133's. Yes, Radio Shack management was dumb enough to buy their hardware and then wait two years before shipping out the system with the software. One of the silliest things about the "upgrade" is that it was really nothing more than making almost an exact carbon copy of the curses-type SCO interface in a Windows 95 GUI, essentially replacing CLI text fields with identical GUI text boxes that really don't take advantage of the GUI paradigm. Just because you make a bad interface pointable and clickable doesn't mean you've made the interface that much better (in his book GUI Bloopers, author Jeff Johnson refers to this as a "TTY problem"). Our manager was discouraged by Tandy technical support from calling a bug a bug. He was told to call it an "issue".
One of the silliest things I remember about the radio shack machines is that none of them had a cd-rom drive. Guess what we had to do if we needed to look at the Tandy catalog CD-ROM? We needed to get the key to open up one of the cabinets for the display computers (the ones sitting above the fake computer shells they use to demo the latest models), type in the password to stop the demo, stick in the CD-ROM to get what we wanted, restart the demo when we were done, relock the cabinet, and then finally put the keys way. There was not a whole lot of incentive to get out the CD-ROM when it wasted time we could have used to earn the commision necessary to put ourselves over minimum wage.
Whenever I hear of Radio Shack being called "America's Technology store" I laugh heartily.>The military is always claiming that Force Protection is one of the most important things they do.
I never knew the U.S. military was using The Force. But that would explain their fascination with hokey religions and ancient weapons.
- Corporate Home of Portman's Tupperware Store
- XXX hot chimpanzees
- Quaker instant grits
- Gritty instant quakers
- Hot XXX babes
- Hot XXX gritty Instant Quakers
- Star wars collector mugs
- Hot deal on 100 grit sand paper
- Natalie Merchant Home Page
- IMDB: "True Grit" Starring John Wayne...
If "Let's Dump Hot Grits Down Natalie Portman's Pants" is search result #11, you're fscked and have to result to screen scraping Google and using 3 times more of their bandwidth than you would have used if they dramatically increased the result limit.You're totally right about the stupidity of putting the "danger" button right next to buttons that do other stuff. Unfortunately both desktop environments (KDE and GNOME) bought totally into this bad design that has been criticized by many UI design guru's. Yet one more reason why I feel so justified in creating a GNOME fork.
Incidently, you can change the button order in sawfish. In fact, I created a theme that does precisely this. However the key word here is "create a theme". You have to mess with sawfish's quirky, poorly designed "Sawfish Themer" program in order to do this. Or you could code it in rep if you're really a masochist. The point is that you can change the button order in sawfish, but it requires way more work than should be necessary.