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| Authored by: ailuromancy on Saturday, December 08 2012 @ 02:28 PM EST |
I almost put "The Best User Interface" in the title
of this post. I am sure
the result would have proved
the point I am about to make: people find (or
make) a
user interface they like, and for them it is the
best possible user
interface. A discussion of the
best user interface would produce the same level
of intelligent, polite discussion as
"The Best Religion" or "The Best
Political Party".
For some people <spit>KDE 4</spit> is
the
best. You can uninstall KDE 3.5 when you pry it from
my cold dead hands. User
interface programmers are just
as uniform, unbiased and rational as ordinary
users,
for example take a look at the
ratpoison
window manager. Many of
you will run away screaming,
but for some, it is ideal.
KDE got hijacked
by some developers who have a very
different idea about user interface design
from me
(and a bunch of happy KDE 3.x users).
Gnome 3 went in a new direction
from Gnome 2 and annoyed
many people who were happy with Gnome 2. Luckily
Trinity and
MATE
came to the rescue.
I can
see why you wonder if all OS designers
had a brain burp at the same time: The
two most popular
Linux window managers lept in a direction that much
of their
established user bases hated while Microsoft put
lots of effort into confusing
their own users.
The evidence to the contrary is the
huge
selection
of sane,
eccentric and completely cuckoo window
managers.
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, December 08 2012 @ 11:12 PM EST |
I often think that the programmers that design UI's get caught up in
the "Jee-wiz" of what they are doing.
It's not programmers who
are designing most major UIs these days. It's "designers" with backgrounds in
"design" psychology, or art. Sometimes it's committees following guidelines set
down in a textbook written by a "designer". The designer gives the programmers a
set of sketches or drawings and says "do it like this". Web sites are usually
done the same way.
Designer rarely know how to write software. These
designers are the core market for Adobe development software. This is why Flash
still has a fanatical following, there are people who only know how to use the
Flash software and are completely lost without it. I know someone who was
working on iPhone apps, and the first thing they had to do in each project was
to use their own custom software to extract the artwork from the Flash files
they would be given by the designers.
There are good designers, and
there are bad designers. There are also people who think they know what
they are doing because they've read a few books, but they've never actually
applied any of it.
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| Authored by: JamesK on Sunday, December 09 2012 @ 08:22 AM EST |
{
the punch cards
}
The punch cards spilled all over the floor. ;-)
---
The following program contains immature subject matter.
Viewer discretion is advised.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, December 10 2012 @ 01:11 PM EST |
more things that can be
done to "enhance" the user experience. I
think that most
people just want the computer to be a tool that allows them
to
accomplish something. I also think that most people soon
get over the
entertainment factor
I used to develop mainframe green screen apps.
We had a lot of content packed into each screen to minimize CICS calls. It was
hell for a new user to figure things out but after a few days they got it. The
problem was the casual user, they could never figure things out and adding pop
up help to each field and the cryptic headings didn't help much. My last
employer ended up moving to a .net app with multiple screens to replace the
single screen we had previously. The casual users were now just as fast as the
power user (both slow), but because of this the work that went to the power
users could go to almost anyone.
As someone one who has spent many hours a
day in front of a screen over the past 30 years, it is often hard to think of a
user who does not check mail first thing in the morning and before bed, but
there are large numbers of people who still do not have a computer at home, and
many more who have a computer but have not advanced past opening a browser and
clicking a few links. I have had to rename the firefox icon to internet for
them, and they still cannot install software from CD, download anything, open a
document, print a page, or remember a password.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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