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by Craig Shearer >> Sat, 25 Mar 2000 1:10:10 GMT

One thing I find greatly annoying about Windows Explorer is that it does just that - removes items from menus when they are not useable at that instant. It makes it impossible to tell what all _can_ be done. If the items are there but ghosted, I can tell that the program has the function, but I haven't fulfilled the prerequisites yet, like actually clicking on a file name rather than having the ghosted selection box around it.

I must say that I agree with you John. And to quote Alan Cooper from About Face - menus are the "pedagogical command vector" which basically means that menus are the way users learn what is possible in the application. Removing menu items thus makes it impossible for new users to lean what the application can do.

Craig.

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by Gregory Tolhurst >> Wed, 15 Mar 2000 5:02:58 GMT

Message to Skoda drivers.

The information shown in the interface Hall of Shame by Brian C. Hayes has to be taken with a pinch of salt. He is a well known graphics luddite who completely misses the point of the Apple quicktime player. His information is old news. He is happy to drive Skodas.
<snip>
The challenge is to think Beemer not Skoda.

Sean's analogy (BMW vs Skoda) is an interesting one...

It seems to me that a car with ABS doesn't really need a brake pedal. Brake pedals were a good design when you needed a lot of leverage to stretch a cable actuating the shoes in a brake drum. Now that your average new BMW has computer circuits to actuate disk brakes on and off hundreds of times in a second, the brake pedal is an anachronism.

So why does BMW perpetuate this design? Probably because they don't want to mess with convention - the convention that allows me to get out of my Skoda and into my wife's BMW without having to relearn how to drive. The same question could apply to many other driver-interface artefacts. Cars could be built with joystick controllers, but nobody would buy them.

We can break conventions because our users let us, but that doen't make it right to do so. We should challenge conventions and develop new ones, but it's a big mistake to discard convention outright. Brian C Hayes may be a luddite (any relation to http://www.luddite.com/ ?), but his hall of shame exposes some monstrous cock-ups. Would a 'Juiced' button belong in the hall of shame? Only if misused by the designer.

The challenge is to think professional (cool design) not amateur (kewl design).

Gregory

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by Darrell Duniam >> Sat, 26 Feb 2000 1:30:35 GMT

In my humble opinion (and experience), developers generally are terrible at creating user interfaces. I wouldn't like to guess the number of apps I've seen whose UI resembles the result of a game of pin the tail on the donkey. The temptation I guess, is to slap the GUI form together, then get stuck into the code behind it. In a perfect world, a resource dedicated to UI design would be mandatory, but alas, it's not so.

darrell.

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by Carl Ranson >> Sun, 27 Feb 2000 20:26:59 GMT

I agree totally with your suggestions.

Funny thing with this newsgroup - most of the suggestions seem to be about making JADE more useable, not about adding extra features as such. It seems that JADE has plenty of features now, although without a doubt, there are still some major areas which could improve the product's penetration.

I think Jade has reached that age, where it has to be tidied up a bit to be taken seriously by the rest of the world. Especially since some of the user interface issues are typical "first-year" developer mistakes.

Developers, in particular, seem to dismiss the idea that usability of the product is all that important, but there are plenty of frustrated users out there. I have just finished reading Alan Cooper's excellent book: The Inmates are Running the Asylm. This book and his previous work - About Face, should be required reading for anyone developing user interfaces, and the JADE plant in particular. I believe that it just goes to show that even developers aren't necessarily good at developing interfaces that other developers find usable. Imagine what ordinary non-developer users of software think!

I wouldn't go as far to say that they dismiss the concept of usability. Its probably more a question of differing expectations and experience. User interface design also seems to be an assumed skill in our industry, something that every software developer knows instinctivly.

ITS NOT

"Good" user interface design is something that needs to be learned, just like everthing else in our industry, it comes about through experience, study, and plain old hard work.

The problem, as I see it, is that the usability won't be improved with a minor tweak here and there. What is required is somebody skilled in "Interaction Design" (a term that Alan Cooper uses) to design the entire user interface.

Yes, I quite agree, and that person needs to set the standard that is acceptable.

Just as an example, think about the number of dialog boxes that popup when you're trying to do something. These are like obstacles in the road that need to be avoided in order to drive past - they simply get in your way, and most of the time, ask questions to which the answer is obvious.

There is definitely an issue of "user interface philosophy" here. Does the user feel like Jade is a servant or master?

The site you suggested, Craig, is one of my favorites. Well worth a read for everyone in software development.

Well, that's the end of my rant for now!

Mine too, but Im fairly sure it will happen again...

CR

ps, I'm sorry to the Jade plant if it feels like your being picked on in this news group. Please be assured that I (and I'm sure most others) have a great deal of respect for what you have achieved so far.
I hope you see challenges to the product as opportunities rather than complaints.

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by Robert Barr >> Fri, 25 Feb 2000 0:01:22 GMT

The other one I've thought of recently is having a jump to definition option for just about everything. The scenario was that I was working on a method and checked the value of a global constant. I needed to change the value of the constant so I had to open the constants browser and find the category, then edit the constant.

sound idea - other common cases are a) translatable strings, and b) collection references. In the latter case, you often want to view (and perhaps edit) the reference definition, and often in turn view/edit the collection class definition (e.g. modify key definitions in a memberkeydict class). By the time you'ver trudged through the class browser to modify these definitions, you've usually forgotten what you were trying to acheive in the first place.

Slightly related is trying to trace execution paths when using user notifications. Who has registered? Who triggers the event? F11 tells you what the type is, and value if applicable, but often you want to go further - edit the value, and view it's references.