Thomas Williams

Guesswork and the UI

Jeff Atwood posts about a word often meaning more than an icon in a UI (see his post for a hilarious picture of Word with all the possible toolbars open). His post raised an "Amen!" from me; lucky I'm alone in my office today!

I take Jeff's point further - I can't even begin to think how many times I've opened a downloaded app to be faced with a "mystery meat"/"russian roulette" interface like I've hastily put together below:

This isn't to denigrate developers or programmers or even user interface specialists who have had a hand in programs like Word, FreeMind, Audacity, Visual Studio or Paint, that all resemble my crummy diagram on first opening (full disclosure: some of *my* applications do this too!) I can see how various things like wizards on startup and task panes have helped take some of the guesswork out of these apps, but perhaps that isn't far enough?

In my mind, the best designed apps allow you to not even think about their design or toolbars or options, and just get on with the job. Of course this implies some knowledge of "the job" beforehand, just like with Word, FreeMind, etc.

For me, a good compromise and an example of the "less guesswork" sort of design is Picasa,  the free image management app from Google, which "just works" without me having to learn how to use it. There's an old Ars.Technica article that compares it to 4 other photo album tools (some costing $$$) and explains the pros and cons of each at http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/photo-albums.ars (spoiler: they reckoned that Picasa was pretty good).

Picasa maybe has an easier job because it's more focused in its purpose than, say, Visual Studio. But it still does what it does well. I reckon that contributing to Picasa's success is that when it opens, your pictures are there ready to work with. It has surprisingly few of the "icons with no explaining text" that Jeff points out. It's toolbar is only 6 or so buttons depending on your current "mode" (it still has a very complicated menu structure, though). The fading, pulsing, partial transparency graphic effects are nice but not too distracting. In short, I reckon the people that wrote Picasa have done a good job on the UI, which supports the good job they've done on the core functionality of the app (I know I've recommended it to various family and relatives).

I wonder how Vista and Office 2007 are going to address the sort of UI deficiency that I've described? Hmmm...