[Usability]Re: [HIG] Inductive user interfaces

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

Seth Nickell wrote:
 
> But my experience was largely negative. I found it harder to use in
> general, and certainely more tedious. Other interfaces that have
> appeared in Windows since then that follow this model have confirmed
> this. So unless they're holding back... ;-)

For anyone who's interested by this, there was also a discussion about
IUIs on the sigia-l (information architecture) list last month:

http://info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/0202/0034.html

> This is an interface I'd want in my tax program that I use once a year,
> but not something I'd want in a program I use even once a week.

FWIW, the only two such GUIs I use regularly are M$ Money (which I've
been trying out recently just because it happened to pre-installed on my
laptop) and the Windoze XP Control Center.  

I have to admit I haven't found it especially helpful in either case,
and particularly unhelpful in Money-- I've lost count of the number of
minutes I've wasted trawling the sidebar trying to work how to access a
particular feature, when I'd probably have found it straight away in the
menu bar if I'd just looked there first.  For some reason I never do,
though.

I guess since I've been using "ordinary" Windows-style interfaces for so
long I may not be the sort of user the approach is supposed to help
most.  But the fact that as an expert user (of the desktop, if not those
particular apps) I continue to find it sufficiently distracting as to
regularly impede my use of those applications suggests some improvement
might be required somewhere.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems