Whatever Happened to UI Consistency?

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21

Steve said:

And yet, with Office 2007, my wife took over 3 hours to figure out how to “Save” a document, and when she did, she was PO’d to find that it didn’t save in the format she wanted. Then, when she wanted to print the document, it took another 2 hours. After 3 days of flailing around, she finally uninstalled it and switched back to Office 2005.

… my wife tried for about 10 minutes to find the file/save (under the upper left icon!!!$#$^#*) … and then gave me a call at work:

(said in a tone that implied divorce if not complied with): You WILL uninstall that and give me back 2003. (click)"

We have 2003 installed still, of course.

If only there was a “2003 mode” to help with the transition. We shouldn’t have to throw away 5 years of training to use the new version.

22

I switched to Mac a year before vista came out. I am now a mac developer with a small company. I really feel for you windows developers. There are many challenges that you guys have to face that we really don’t.

This probably sounds sarcastic and prideful, but I don’t mean for it to come off that way. I am very happy with the system I develop for, and when I remember what it looked like to develop Windows, I can only feel for you guys. It doesn’t look easy on any level. I can only hope that in Windows 7 you get a better environment for development.

23

I hate how every 3 years, a new version of Office comes out and every third party developer trips over themselves to buy some half-assed implementation of the new look that Office brought along for NO APPARENT REASON usually that also chooses not to look like the rest of the applications on Windows. Then they never update that look and feel once they’ve chosen it.

When you use the OS-provided look, you have less code to ship, test, and write. When you let graphic designers design your UI (as is the case with Trillian) or you rewrite all the standard controls to look ‘cool,’ the end result almost always looks horrible if the user happens to have some slightly different display preferences set.

They are called common controls for a reason.

24

“Aren’t these trivial, nitpicky complaints? Yes. They are. And that’s entirely the point. This little stuff matters.”

Damn right it matters! This is the very reason I now have a mac sat on my desk at home instead of a Windows PC.

25

Finally, someone has come up with what I wanted to express about Vista. I think Vista is a very reliable system with many new great features, but the UI really bothers me. It feels very amateur and inconsistent. The Aero glass look is not really good-looking. Just look at the toolbar in Windows Mail, it is very hard to read. Same thing for the taskbar. It has shiny on it just to make items are harder to read.

However many great things appeared in Vista (the thumbnail preview in the taskbar), the Alt-Tab (not the infamous 3D Windows-Tab). The Start Menu looks good, but the in-place browsing feels sometimes more cloggy than the pre-Vista Start menu feeling.

This weekend, I have been changing a friend’s wireless network security from WEP to WPA. Mac OS X had such a hard time figuring out the password and the security has changed. The only way to change it was to remove the password in the Keychain…not very user-friendly.

26

Well I can put up with the a few rough edges in Vista - however I think it shows a general lack of testing and developer care which permeates down through more important areas (at least for me).

The annoying problem with Vista currently is with unzipping, it’s just too slow, I have to use WinRar to unzip most things now…Prior to service pack 1 copying across a network was an exercise in futility as well, at least that seems to be fixed.

I wrote a blog post a year ago on what I thought of Vista:

http://www.feedghost.com/Blogs/BlogEntry.aspx?EntryId=3695

Cheers
Lee

27

@ilan -

I use Vista on a daily basis as does the majority of my office… we have only 2 XP machines left.

No one complains about Vista. Our designers do have problems with their MACs.

28

these inconsistencies really must add a lot of bloat. Think of the addition resources that need to be loaded into memory to spawn a dialog that has windows 3.1 components. It is a shame

29

This attitude is not new …

e.g. the “Designed for Windows” logo campaign … It had a list of rules to follow to make a Windows app … and Microsoft Office broke most of them …

Developers begin to say why bother following the design guidelines when even Microsoft don’t bother …

I have used Vista and after turning off most of the overdone “prettiness” so I ended up with something that looked like Windows 2000/2003 and the most annoying aspects of the added security, it was quite a nice system and a slight improvement on XP …

30

If you think Vista is bad then look at Windows Mobile 6. The main screen looks well designed, but if you go into any of the settings windows it looks like Windows 3.11

31

The point about GUI consistency is the juggling with memory.

Humans (us) have a bad short term memory = we lose attention with blinking menus/high depth tabs or menus.

The Gui sonsistency helps short term memory to focus on your action : if opening a document is always the upper left menu File item open, then you can focus solely on opening a document not on guessing where the heck they put the “open document” widget.

I was rather puzzled by last office version which has pastel coloured menus and contextual menus that dont differenciate from the content.

I find change a nice thing, but I am still puzzled by the hubris of computer engeneers consisting of reinventing the GUI, and making us lose the benefit of long learned consistent “habits”.

And yes, linux is quite inconsistent too because of GNOME : KDE has a strong UI interface and guidelines. But, GNOME is mostly an ideological software project that is an inconsistent bloatware full of “astronaut architect” that was made because Stallman couldn’t stand that his “libre” unix (… hurd), hadn’t a GUI to compete with the suppositedly non free “KDE”. As a result, efforts are splitted, and free unices (BSD/linux) application are split between KDE/GNOME/Xlibs … It is a mess.

However, there is a solution : for any developper, I’d strongly recommend using wxwidget http://www.wxwidgets.org/, and its guidelines : http://wyoguide.sourceforge.net/guidelines/content.html

Since wxwidget UI library aims at being portable
1)widget relies on the OS look and feel ;
2)guidelines are “cross GUI” good sense and good practice (when optimizing no one can aim the best choice, juste a good choice) ;
3)developpers normaly dont have an easy way reinventing “their own custom widget” ;

My last point would be that since solution could exists, why isn’t it adopted ?

I’d guess GUI has become a “Someone Else Problem” lost in the lines of specialization ? Anyone has a better idea that don’t involve Chtulu wanting us to become insane ?

32

I use Vista on both of my machines. I say ‘Vista rocks’. But I can’t say ‘Vista seriously rocks’. The little things that are done wrong are perplexing. Number 25 on Long Zheng’s list (which is the active window?) is my most annoying example. In the era of big monitors and multiple monitors, this leaves me speechless. Do all Microsoft developers and testers run everything maximized? How did this slip through? I rarely see the ‘Add Fonts’ dialog, but this one impacts me constantly. Argh!

33

I wonder if you’ve seen this screenshot?

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/microsoft-learn-from-apple-II.media/vista.png

34

This is one of the reasons I’m not so keen on Linux.
The Office UI is fantastic for Office, but Office is really in a niche in terms of UI considerations - lots of functionality needing to be exposed. It’s annoying that so many applications that will work fine with toolbars are jumping on the bandwagon without needing to.

35

Jeff. Once again spot on. I’ve bemoaned UI consistency (or rather lack of) for a while, and it’s certianly my big beef when it comes to Vista.

Seems to be a fine example of design by committee…

Consistency breeds repeated mental models that are easy to learn and transfer. It’s the difference between wandering around a new City with signs or without signs - you could ask the way or find a map, but we’re all much happier learning for ourselves…

36

My sentiments exactly. Vista is really a half baked operating system especially user interface wise. Aero is just a band aid to a really messed up OS, and it really showed this time round.

And that’s why I find it so funny when the Firefox 3 developers work towards a ‘Vista native’ theme, when in fact, such a theme doesn’t exist.

37

Special mention to Office 2007 for using non-standard window title bars, that occasionally revert back to standard title bars when the system is feeling stressed!

38

even the font-list does not show the font: What would be easier than to have an additional column showing “the quick brown fox…” rendered with the given font?

39

If anyone gets the opportunity to hear Ray Konopka give his “Effective User Interface Design” presentation, you should make every effort to attend. It is wonderful.

Ray founded Raize software (http://raize.com), which makes UI components. Originating in the Delphi world, Ray has ported his components to .Net. As a result of all of this component work, Ray has become a UI design expert. He does recommend reading “Design of Everyday Things” and other books.

Ray’s premise is that an Effective (good) UI design is one that is so intuitive that no user training or documentation is required.

40

Interesting article on Ars Technica but I think the author is a bit harsh on .NET - a lot of the new stuff (e.g. WPF) is very promising, as the same author himself described in another article on Vista on the same site (http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/pretty-vista.ars/3). I think Vista’s received so much hate that it’s slowed down the adoption of these new technologies. That, and Microsoft’s stupid decision to backport most of this stuff to XP.