Re: [Usability] Our approach to GUI design

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Mar 21, 2006, at 8:50 PM, Liam R E Quin wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-03-21 at 18:23 +0000, Joachim Noreiko wrote:
> > This makes me wonder: is some of our work on usability the wrong way 
> > round? We leave the developer with the HIG and they do their best, 
> > and then we come along and spot all the mistakes. Programmers don't 
> > draw their own icons, they get an artist to do it -- should we expect 
> > programmers to design their own GUIs?

Of course not. :-)

> We should consider providing higher-level tools -- e.g. dialogue 
> widgets with buttons already in place, although this particular 
> example already exists -- and consider bribing the glade developers to 
> make sure they are supported. Glade could also include pre-built 
> application fragments as templates, which might help.

Glade could help you get your spacing right, and I occasionally pester 
the Gazpacho developers to provide pre-designed alerts and progress 
windows. But it's still easy to make a flawlessly laid out GUI that's 
horrible to use. :-)

> This is similar to the question about "..." in menu entries --
> if a menu directly brings up a dialogue, the toolkit could put
> the dots there.
> ...

Some things that require further input aren't dialogs. Adding ellipses 
for dialogs automatically might cause developers to forget more often 
about adding ellipses for the other things.

--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/