Re: UI design [was Owen Taylor's paper]

John wrote:
> On Wednesday 18 September 2002 05:39, Jef Spaleta wrote:
> 
>>On Tue, 2002-09-17 at 17:14, Gerald Henriksen wrote:
>>
>>>Of course the ultimate irony is that it is the Red Hat backed Gnome
>>>project that has caused this UI problem for Red Hat by choosing a UI
>>>standard that is opposite of everything else in use on Red Hat Linux
>>>(Motif, KDE, Java, and Windows apps under Wine).
>>
>>Are you saying the gnome UI design is bad in and of itself..is is it bad
>>because its not like everything else.  Does the oppositeness of how
>>GNOME's UI works solve some problems that the other more common way of
>>doing things can't?  
> 
>  
> I will say it. It's bad because it's different from everything else.

It sounds like lazyness to me.
While you're at it, tell the car makers to fix the headlight
dimmer switchs. Is it push/pull for bright/dim and pull to flash,
or is it a toggle where you pull every time with a partial pull
to flash?

(I personaly prefer the dimmer switch on the floorboard, and
hate the push/pull design)

> The ordering of buttons on dialogues is a good example, and that's expecially 
> bad because it's not even consistent with itself.

I would like to see a set of guidelines (oh wait they are done), and
the core apps follow them. But it will still be up to the developer
to choose what he wants in his app. As long as the app is consistant
with itself. Now, an app should not switch between OK/Cancel and Yes/No,
although even ther there is room for debate. I think the answers (button
labels) should match the questions. Sometime changing a question to use
a different set of answers makes the question confusing or less direct.

> These differences mean users, especially experienced computer, users moving 
> between machines and (maybe) operating systems will make errors because of 
> those differences.

Only if they don't bother to *READ* the dialogs and buttons.
If it's new, never assume you know what it is doing. That's
asking for trouble. If you do make assumptions, you deserve
what you get.

> Remember that not everyone does as many of us have, move from Another OS (OS/2 
> in my case) to (almost) exclusively using Linux.

Including many from other unixes. Compare a few of them. I work with
Solaris-7, HPUX-10, and HPUX-9. There are big differences in the UI,
especially from HP to Sun. So should HP change to match Sun,
since Sun has a larger market share? Should Sun match HP so
new users from HPUX aren't confused?


	-Thomas