Re: UI considerations

[Bruce Stephens <bruce cenderis demon co uk>]

nelson-gnome@crynwr.com writes:

> Microsoft creates their UI like this:
>   o they speculate on what makes a good UI.
>   o they build a UI in those myriad ways.
>   o they test these UI's on naive and experienced users.
>   o they standardize on the UI that proves most usable by the community.
> 
> In the Unix world, we only do the first two steps.
> 
> Is this too inaccurate a summary?

Arguably, people copy what they consider to be good ideas from
elsewhere, so there's a certain amount of selection.  One might hope
that as time proceeds, UIs will therefore get better (as people
discard things they don't like).  

Presumably commercial UIs (like OpenView/OpenLook, Motif, etc.) are
the result of proper testing, and free things such as Gtk+/GNOME and
KDE seem to be pretty close to Motif in many respects.  (As is Tk.)

Presumably Nextstep had testing, too, and Gtk+ with the Gtkstep theme
is quite nice to use.

It would be nice to think that the free software community develops by
natural selection: we start with lots of interfaces, and the good ones
survive, and take over.  I agree this doesn't seem to be true,
though---interfaces don't seem to die, and it's not clear that there's
any standardization (except in a generic Motify sort of way).

One wonders how much testing Microsoft actually does.  Most Microsoft
products are basically OK, but there are some things which really
should have been caught, and wouldn't have been hard to change.  (The
Start button, with its awkward cascading behaviour is an obvious one:
having it at the top of the screen by default would have been an
improvement.)