nick@deccan.dec.com (Nick Tsivranidis) (12/21/89)
Distribution: world Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation > >All this talk about commonality of "look & feel" is simply an attempt to > >evade the real issue in the design of user interfaces - does the > >interface for THIS application adequate suit the conditions of use, > >level of user skill and functionality required to perform the job? > >Common user interfsces simply make the life of developer easier by > >allowing one to put on any interface, cklaim that this is good because > >it is "standard" and walk away. No thought or concern about reality required! > > Well - first of all - the person who benefits most from a common user > interface is the user. I would love to have all of tools on all of the > window systems I use have the same user interface. > > -- > Bruce G. Barnett <barnett@crd.ge.com> uunet!crdgw1!barnett I think that Rich's point is that the user doesn't benefit from a "common" user interface but from a "good" user interface. And this: If you look at the real world, there are many different user interfaces for different classes of products (cars vs TVs), and within the SAME class, you can still find a lot of differences (as Mr Neitzel illustrates with his Civic vs some other car example.) What it comes down to is a question of what level of commonality are we talking about. I don't think anybody wants a driving wheel on his TV, just like nobody wants to drive their car with a remote control (even though both are doable if I judge from some user interfaces I 've seen). There is only one golden rule of User Interface design (and the rest of life for that matter): Do what makes sense. Notice that when you follow this rule, all the responsibility falls on the designer's shoulders. No excuses ala 'Well the toolkit supports only remote controls as driving devices and I wanted to follow the standard'. Of course, you can ask the question: How does somebody go about designing a User Interface with no guidelines and no standards? One great example of how to do a User Interface is the real world. If your application doesn't have any real world analogies, the second thing you can do is to steal somebody else's ideas (that's how you get standards to evolve also). If that fails, use your imagination. After all, that's what the fun of User Interface design is all about (I mean stealing other people's ideas :) ). - Nick -