Last week I noted that I'd been looking at the networking user interfaces for WindowsXP and MacOS. I've been building inventories of thse on the OpenSolaris web site off this page Networking "state of the art"
I am intrigued at how different these two interfaces are, even though the deep system architecture is about the same: There is a software representation of each path one can use to access a network ("links" in unix talk). The operating system keeps a group of settings which it applies to the links, one link+settings is active at any time and when applications seek to use a network, they use that active entity.
On Windows, you have a "Network Connections" "folder", which contains an icon representing each physical or virtual/software access point ("link") to a network:
You can get a contextual menu for any one of these:
and perform operations on the connection, or just access its properties:
There are also stand-ins, of sorts, for the network connections that can be shown in the system tray:
and you can perform similar operations on those.
This seems quite logical. In fact, it is very "object oriented", which at least used to be viewed as a great way to model the information in a user interface.
This is clearly usable enough that millions of people manage to get their Windows systems talking to some network.
At the same time, there are some drawbacks to this design. Most folks I talked to about this aren't entirely clear what the icons are in the "Network Connections" folder. They know they are networking related. When there is a network problem, they know the properties of those objects must be manipulated. But, that is about the extent of it.
This direct projection of the system architecture into the user's space, then, doesn't add much value.
One aspect of the "object oriented" approach is that all the manipulation of the objects is done through property windows. If you look at the images on this page, you'll see that almost all of the snapshots are of the main Properties window or windows opened from within the Properties window. There are an enormous number of settings available here, if you are willing to dig down through the interface far enough. Some of the settings bring up windows for other objects related to this network connection.
Certainly, the strength of this approach is that you can probably configure almost everything about the network connection through the graphical interface. If you want to change something obscure, documentation can tell you where the setting is, and as you drill down to find the setting the information in proximity will help explain to you what you are setting.
The downside is that if you aren't familiar with this information architecture or don't want to learn it, this is just a baffling set of random windows and scary looking settings.
Perhaps I'd describe the overall theme here as: system management through manipulation of properties on "objects" (not in the programming sense) in the operating system.
The MacOS X interface for configuring the network interface is radically different. Of course, like Windows, at some level there are "links" and there are settings applied to those links. But, this are in no way prominently positioned in the interface.
Notice that on Windows there are (from a user vantage point) no applications involved in configuring the network. On the Macintosh, there are several. The network configuration is done through the System Preferences application. Another application, Internet Connect is used to control the connection and disconnection of things like modems. There are also a set of little menus which allow you to control individual network behavior.
When you dig into the System Preferences application, you do eventually find the links. They show up in the menu shown here:
Ultimately, choosing one of those lets you specify the settings for that link.
The names of the links are the same names used elsewhere in documentation to refer to the physical ports the user works with on the system (e.g. "Built-in Ethernet") rather than the Windows style of describing the role of the object ("Local Area Connection").
Unlike Windows, I don't think the Mac makes any serious attempt to explain the system architecture to the user. In fact, that architecture is three levels deep in the user experience (System Preferences, then Location, and only then an individual link). I'm not sure this impedes usability, though.
I think the Mac's strengths here are not putting system architecture directly into the user's experience, direct and consistent (throughout both hardware and software) terminology, and a clearer location to find the settings.
There may be a downside when it comes to extensibility. And there are things accessible through the Windows interface which don't appear here. I don't know what this interface would look like, or if you must go to the command line for some advanced functionality.
Oddly, the Macintosh interface manages to pack an enormous number of settings into one window. I'm not sure this is specifically a usability point, but I found it relatively easy to do what I think is a very thorough set of screen-captures for the Mac interface, while I had more trouble doing the same on the Windows one.
What is my conclusion here? I'm not going to say which interface is "better". That isn't my point here. Here, I just wanted to demonstrate how differently these two environments have chosen to present their system configuration.