Step 1 on the road to better UI design [LWN.net]

Step 1 on the road to better UI design

Posted Mar 2, 2004 19:55 UTC (Tue) by cthulhu (guest, #4776)
Parent article: The luxury of ignorance: A follow-up (NewsForge)

Step one in getting better at UI design is for the head of the open
source project asking a UI designer to help out.

Step two is accepting their suggestions.

I don't know how many open source projects try to get (or have on the
project) a real UI designer to help them, so this may not be fair.
Still, I don't think such projects are much different from commercial
software projects, except that sometimes there's enough in the budget to
hire a UI designer.

I found one book to be very interesting on this subject: "The Inmates are
Running the Asylum" by Alan Cooper. A good read, and he's dead on w.r.t.
the attitude of programmers.

(Log in to post comments)

Cooper's a flake

Posted Mar 5, 2004 4:32 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (subscriber, #755) [Link]

If you don't believe me, go read his earlier work, About Face (what a horrible waste of a great
title), and imagine what your world would be like if you implemented his ideas.

Sure, the world be great if *everyone* implemented his ideas... but that's never going to
happen.

As for ESR:

> ...
If the preceding rules leave just one choice, so inform the user and go straight to the form
for that queue type.
If the preceding rules leave no choices, complain and display the entire menu.

The technical details of these tests aren't important, and anybody who writes me arguing for a
different set will have fixated on the wrong level of the problem. The point is that, unlike a
command tool for techies that should give them lots of choices, the goal of a GUI is to present
the user with as few decision points as possible. Remember the Macintosh dictum that the user
should never have to tell the machine anything that it knows or can deduce for itself.

Fine, Eric. But let's not throw the enterprise out for the desktop, shall we?

If I *know* where the printer's *GOING TO BE*, and you won't let me configure it because it's
not there *yet*, I'll set your hair on fire.

All OS installs make this mistake too, Linux as well as Windows. Out here in "the fleet,
sonny", there are good and sufficient reasons why the hardware you install on may not be the
hardware you deploy on; installs which don't permit the deferment of hardware-based decisions
in such environments are just as unacceptable as the things Eric bitches about in CUPS.

I have *work* to get done, you eeediots!