kayvan@mrspoc.transact.com (Kayvan Sylvan) (06/26/89)
Apologies to rms and others who are offended by non-technical information on info-gcc. My wife (who worked as a graphics designer doing user interfaces) asked me to forward this message to interested parties. Forwarded message: Subject: Re: [apple!ai.mit.edu!rms: Standard argument #1] Date: Sun, 25 Jun 89 0:11:29 PDT From: Grace M Sylvan <tigger@mrspoc.Transact.COM> X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.2 PL6] > Subject: Standard argument #1 > > Some people have recently posted the standard argument that no one > could have jobs improving user interfaces without user interface > copyright; and supposedly therefore we would have worse interfaces. > > The standard argument also ignores the fact that user interface > improvements can be, and often are, made as part of a project which is > primarily development. Businesses can fund this without any special > privileges or monopolies. These improvements also do not require > people hired specifically and only to work on user interfaces; > programmers working on a project will often have ideas for improving > the interface. > > Hiring people for interface design alone is only one way to develop > interfaces: it is not essential. I worked for a firm which specialized in designing user interfaces. That's all we did - we did NO programming. We critiqued old systems, giving small suggestions and large ones, totally redesigned systems, and designed new systems. We were hired by some fortune 100 companies, along with smaller firms. User interfaces have (finally) become a noticed aspect of a product. To design a good user interface, there are many elements that need to be checked - what are the standard set of operations the user will do, the order of them, graphic layout issues of the screen(s), consistancy of the command set and behaviors. It was no small or simple task to create a really good user interface. There are also quite a few user interfaces out there that aren't worth much. One of the results of hypercard letting 'anyone' program and create graphic user interfaces is that most of the hypercard stuff out there is pretty poor. The ideas are good, but the people don't have all the knowledge to design a good interface. Many firms have realized that the user interface can make or break the product - there is more and more focus on ease of use and ease of learning. Another example of the knowledge issue is desktop publishing. Now people have the power at their fingertips to create documents with 20 different fonts and formats. But their products don't always look like the nice newsletters displayed in the ads saying 'you can do this!'. So DTP training was born. > However, even without copyright, there were a considerable number of > people working specifically on user interfaces during the 1970's. Actually, the person who owns the firm I used to work for was one of those people. One of a few voices seriously out there speaking at conferences about graphics design and other issues in user interfaces. Back when almost all computer output was character oriented. > Since much work on user interfaces is incremental, it > would be hampered by copyright. Thus, copyright could actually > reduce the amount of interface development. Also, even if people > see how to improve part of an interface, they may not see how to > replace every aspect: such partial improvements would be illegal > under copyright. I agree with this - particularly if 'look and feel' can be copyrighted. Certainly there were ideas (such as windows, menus, using icons, help bars and others) which we proposed in almost all graphic interfaces we designed. We also did a lot of things differently than the mac interface - ie. there was always a command line in addition to point and click. I also do feel that entire layouts or icon sets should not necessarily be totally free for others to just copy... it's a fine line for me - designing a good icon set (this is the exact pixel-by-pixel drawing, not the general stuff like it's a trash can or a mailbox) is quite a bit of work. It's like designing an alphabet, there's a lot that goes into making things look like they belong to a set instead of a random collection of drawings. I guess I'm against pixel-by-pixel copying, but not against idea copying, or even style imitating. So, in summary, I'd say that there are years of education that can be devoted to just learning about user interface design. Some people (programmers included :-) ) are naturally good at this without the official education; most aren't. And there are programmers who have very little patience for anything other than coding. 'Document!?! you want me to DOCUMENT!?! Hire a tech writer!' :-) So I think there is a need for people to specialize in UI design, but that doesn't necessarily mean that UI's need to be copyrighted to pay for it... In the production of anything, there are people involved who do not provide a copyrightable result. *Tigger*