Re: [Usability] Can't Handle it anymore! (Consistency vs. Design)

[Bryan Clark <bclark redhat com>]

Consistency[*] vs. Design

I was about to reply to a bug [1] regarding this, but it doesn't make
sense to keep it in a bug comment compared to actually responding to
this thread.

First I want to say that I think these toolbar grips are a pretty lousy
idea for most things.  In my view they were put into toolkits as a fudge
layer over the fact that many applications have excessive amounts of
toolbars and toolbar buttons.  I'd actually rather GTK didn't provide
these things and forced application designers to not have a million
toolbars and buttons, but create a application more focused on what
their user is really trying to do.

Application design is the full vision of a persons experience
interacting with the software.  Application consistency is mainly for
ensuring that a person can have some kind of transferable knowledge from
one application to another.  Consistency holds an important place in the
creation of Desktop applications, however consistency should never trump
good design.  This is because good design doesn't necessitate
consistency, good design can have consistency but can still be
compelling enough without it.

Think of all the web sites on the internet.  If you were to write an
Internet HIG with which you required all web sites big and small to
conform to there is a chance to see some real value in this.  People
would always know where the site navigation bar is or where the link to
the site map is located.  This kind of consistency could provide a
cleaner experience for web sites that sucked before, however the sites
that were really designed well would be taking a huge step backwards in
terms of human experience.  Well designed sites already allow the person
to get what they want out of the site and hopefully enjoy getting it.  

The slippery slope of this consistency leads to a bland and boring
internet, where all pages look the same and are so locked into this
consistent view that the content providers cannot have a more compelling
manner in which to relay their information.  You can insert the argument
that the content is the important thing and not the way it's displayed,
however that is false.  

The content and the manner in which the content is provided are so
intertwined that we constantly run into this problem.  This is a
fundamental problem with the .desktop file GenericName vs. ProjectName
issue.  

Great restaurants are just as much if not more about the atmosphere and
a chefs individual presentation of the food as they are about the food
quality.  Food quality is actually the assumed part and everything else
is what people are really looking for.  This is a somewhat contentious
issue for some people who don't care at all about what food looks like
and just want it to taste good and fill them up.  *shrug*  Eat a
McDonalds hamburger, then spend 4 days walking in the Sahara desert with
no food come back and eat that same burger; it will be the best burger
you've ever tasted in your life.  Context is everything.

What does this all lead to?  

In terms of Evince, we only have one toolbar and we've designed it to
work at it's best right where it is.  I don't see any reason people need
to move it around to some other location which isn't better.  If for
some reason the other location actually is better be it because of
circumstances of the person or not then that is a bug and we should look
into it.

In terms of everyone else, if you have multiple toolbars then having
grips for them might be a good idea if your application is designed for
the user to need to move the toolbars around.  To me that sounds like a
bad design, but maybe it's not.  The Evince design does not include the
user ever needing to move the toolbar around, so we don't need a gripper
for it.

The HIG are just guidelines and we follow them when they align with the
design of the application.  The design is always right (not necessarily
your design), the HIG is always there and both are always changing.  I'd
suggest this same thing to any other application designer.

Cheers,
~ Bryan

[*] Consistency can also be thought of as "Usability" and this argument
has been going on for a long time. 
	* http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/onusabilitytesting
	* http://www.ok-cancel.com/comic/77.html

[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=172120


On Tue, 2005-03-29 at 22:35 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote: 
> I've been playing round with Gnome 2.10 and the inconsistent toolbars have
> drawn my attention.