[Usability]Re: [HIG] Inductive user interfaces

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On the other hand I would consider it useful for things that need
maximuum learnability... e.g. throwaway applications.

So I wouldn't mind having my tax software work like this. I use it once
a year, and I rarely remember how to use it the next.

-Seth

On Tue, 2002-03-19 at 06:07, Calum Benson wrote:
> 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
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