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Last updated: April 6, 2007 6:15:46 PM Pacific Time
Useit.Com: R.I.P. WYSIWYG. For the last twenty-five years, one user interface style has reigned supreme: the Macintosh-style graphical user interface. It's now reached its limits, however, and will be replaced by a style that partly reverses some of its most treasured interaction principles. IBM developerWorks: Watchen das blinkenlichten. In software design, as in other areas, ideas that seem brilliant at first can be disastrous in practice. In this month's THe cranky user, I'll point out software features that are little more than a flash in the pan, and suggest a functional alternative. Useit.Com: Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2005. There's value in reminding ourselves of past findings and raising their priority on the agenda of things to be fixed. Because these mistakes continue to be so common, it makes sense that people continue to complain about them the most. Cooper: Typography and the User Interface. There is a quiet issue that nags at the computer industry. While processing speed and computational flexibility have grown at incredible rates, our displays, the most human-facing elements of our digital lives, lag behind. Useit.Com: The Power of Defaults. Users rely on defaults in many other areas of user interface design. For example, they rarely utilize fancy customization features, making it important to optimize the default user experience, since that's what most users stick to. Scott Berkun: Why software sucks (And what to do about it). No one makes bad software on purpose. No benevolent programmer has ever sat down, planning out weeks of work, with the intention of frustrating people and making them cry. Bad software, or bad anything, happens because making things is hard, making good things doubly so. Useit.Com: Forms vs. Applications. Most big companies, however, have a legacy of paper forms. As a result, their intranets are littered with online forms that attempt to meet needs that are often better served by real applications with a real dialogue flow and more of a full-fledged GUI. Wired News: Hands On With the Revolution. Its Japanese designers call it a "game remote control." Nintendo's American employees have taken to calling it "freehand style." Whatever you call it, the controller -- which uses motion-detecting hardware to pinpoint its distance from the screen, location in the room, and even pitch and yaw -- promises a whole new way to play console games. IBM developerWorks: But does it come in purple? Most customization options do very little to alleviate repetitive tasks. Cutting a few centimeters off of the total area a mouse travels in a 10-step process does not substantially alter the time it takes to perform the process. On the other hand, certain customization options are very important, at least for some users. Useit.Com: Open New Windows for PDF and other Non-Web Documents. All these guidelines stem from the same underlying phenomenon: the non-Web documents are native PC formats. These formats have their own applications, each of which gives users a set of commands and navigation options that are completely different than the ones for browsing websites.
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