Monday June 20, 2005 If Some Developers Built Houses?
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David John Burrowes, one of the Interaction designers here at Sun, sent out a pointer to a piece in the UI Hall of Shame blog by Duncan Margetts, entitled If some Software Developers built houses?. It's worth sharing with y'all. Be sure to read all the comments. You see that what is considered a good design in one situation, doesn't always work in others. |
I've been writing graphical software for 23 years and working with HCI (Human Computer Interaction) people (or whatever they are calling themselves this week) for about 15 years. I've worked with good ones and I've worked with, um, not so good ones. When they are good, it's a pleasure to work with them. Each person (the developer and the HCI designer) takes a passionate interest in trying to get it right. Great teamwork. Also when working on some software within the confines of a larger project (such as the DeskSet software within OpenWindows or desktop applications for the GNOME desktop), there are usually a set of HCI guidelines that help developers and UI designers do the right consistent thing.
But what about the same application across different larger projects? I wrote the calculator application ( calctool) in OpenWindows. The same code was the basis of the calculator in CDE (although I didn't write that), and now the same code has been the basis of the default calculator for the GNOME desktop. Each time, a different UI designer has been involved and each time, the look and feel has been different. Still, no matter how you look at it, they are all better then what I came up with, circa 1987. I don't know what I was smoking then, but ooh the colors man! (Looks like HP might still be making this version available).
Here's another piece entitled Dear Mr. Architect. The piece begins with:
Software developers frequently complain that the process of specifying and developing software is wildly irrational. If people built houses the way they built software this is what you might see:
As you can see from the article, designing something that will satisfy the needs of everyone that uses it, is not easy.
I'll leave you with a quote from Michael Tiemann, CTO of Linux vendor Red Hat:
"If people built airplanes the way they built software, nobody would fly".
This is for the most case true, but I wouldn't have a problem flying Donald Knuth Airlines. He used to pay a bounty for any bugs found in his TeX software, and nowadays for any typos found in any of his books. He doesn't have to pay out much money though because he does such an outstanding job in getting it correct before it's released. I wish all developers would take the same care (myself included). Of course, Professor Knuth didn't have to deal with a GUI for TeX, so who knows what his bug count would have been like in that situation.
( Jun 20 2005, 08:16:08 AM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [3]
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Posted by anon on June 23, 2005 at 11:05 AM PDT #
Posted by Rich Burridge on June 23, 2005 at 11:24 AM PDT #
I am that HCI guy :)
Both these issues have certainly been pretty controversial within the GNOME community. The file selector was largely designed by the Red Hat HCI guys, so I imagine it underwent some usability testing in the course of that. The idea itself isn't necessarily flawed, for certain audiences at least-- the Mac file chooser doesn't really have an edit box to speak of either, for example. But perhaps it's a bit ambitious for a *nix desktop which still has a largely technical user base. And the fact that the edit box (or any other feature in any other application) is completely hidden behind a keyboard shortcut is certainly both a usability and accessibility issue, IMHO-- there's a bug open to address it.
I'm not aware that spatial nautilus has undergone any formal usability testing, although I missed Anna's talk at GUADEC on the testing Novell have been doing with their mobile usability lab-- they may have looked at this. I'd say there's now some concession (in the form of a visible user preference to turn it off, which the developers didn't originally want) that although it's a powerful idea, it's quite difficult to shoe-horn it into an otherwise not-completely-document-oriented desktop, and it specifically doesn't work too well for people who file things in a deep directory structure. Which again, is often true of the more technical audience that still make up the majority of *nix desktop users.
I think we might see spatial file managers come into their own when file systems that fully support user level metadata become commonplace, as Apple are starting to do with OSX, Spotlight and smart folders... they promise to make deeply-nested directories a thing of the past. Although if anything, 10.4 has made Finder less spatial than it used to be, so I guess there's still a way to go...
Posted by Calum Benson on June 27, 2005 at 04:35 AM PDT #