justaddwater.dk

Joseph Cooney found a fantastic example of a confusing user interface. (via Jeff Atwood).

In a comment on Atwood’s blog, Aaron G adds:

The people saying that the UI is good “for people who know wget” are only reinforcing my original point that it provides no useful abstraction to wget and is hence useless as a GUI. If you already “know wget”, why would you want to use a GUI, when clearly the command-line is much faster and less of an eyesore?

Joseph has a list minded at developers on how to avoid ending up with an interface like this:

Here’s my quick checklist of things to look for if you’re trying to avoid create “the dialog“ yourself.

• Strange aspect ratio/portrait aspect ratio (I think portrait just looks odd for dialogs, except maybe property-page style ones)
• Lots of controls (because you’ve allowed too many options)
• controls of same type with differing sizes near eachother
• Non-standard behavior for controls (checkboxes that function as hyperlinks etc)
• non-standard placement of controls
• looks different to every other screen in your application
• options don’t seem very cohesive
• lots of explanation required for options
• you wish you’d just used a property grid, or think you might need to add just one more tab

Joseph Cooney “Developer UI” (via Jeff Atwood “This Is What Happens When You Let Developers Create UI“).

Technorati Tags: usability, ui, user interface, codinghorror, wget

This entry was posted by Jesper Rønn-Jensen on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 20:25 (GMT-1) and is filed under justaddwater.dk, User Interface. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.