Can anyone recommend any good books/blogs/websites on the subject of GUI design and usability, I'm getting to the stage now when I'm finding it hard to present all the necessary options to the user in a clear and concise way.
Menu bars generally have poor names for their menus and this should be improved, so they can fulfill their enormous potential for awesomeness.
Name:
Anonymous2008-08-12 19:05
USEIT LOL
Name:
Anonymous2008-08-12 23:29
>>24 their enormous potential for awesomeness
Which would be? It's kind of neat that by typing Alt+key, key, you get hotkeys which are documented right in the program, but it's not like they are documented at all well. If you made it necessary to hold Alt the whole time and refrained from adding other hotkeys it would be sort of cool, but you're still stuck with a bunch of difficult to navigate lists.
>>26
You just answered your own question (well, kind of): if you pressed F1 (or something) and it showed documentation about the menu item you've selected, and made the menus easier to navigate, awesomeness would ensue.
Name:
Anonymous2008-08-13 16:54
F1 is soooooo 1990's. All my programs use F12 for help, it's more original and it's at a safer place on the keyboard.
Name:
Anonymous2008-08-13 22:18
>>29
That would in no way fix the problem, which is that menus are huge linear lists (hard to point to) of commands grouped in whatever way the designer thought was most logical, but which is guaranteed not to be obvious to users, including the designer at some later date.
Name:
Anonymous2008-08-13 22:33
>>31
But you can navigate so quickly through menus that any decent grouping of their commands goes a long way.
Name:
Anonymous2008-08-14 0:20
>>32
No, you can't navigate quickly through them, and there is no way to group them decently; that's my point.
Name:
Anonymous2008-08-14 0:49
>>33
I don't think you have a point. Enjoy your nondiscoverable functionality.
Name:
Anonymous2008-08-14 1:12
>>34
Scuse me? I'd rather enjoy my command browser which can be easily searched without lengthy manual labor.
Name:
Anonymous2008-08-14 1:31
Tons of software allows the user to reconfigure the toolbars and menus. That's great for somebody who's already familiar with the program and wants faster access to things he knows about.
There is no way to make a program easier for novices.
Name:
Anonymous2008-08-14 3:52
>>36
Reconfiguration of toolbars and menus is a terrible idea. Now a person can't move from computer to computer without either setting everything up like their home computer or searching the menus like a novice, which I estimate to take no less than four seconds per menu, unless it's got submenus or collapses like the extra-horrible menus in Windows 2k—then it takes even longer.
The solution is to make it possible to execute any text as a command (say, by middle clicking it), and to provide an area at the top of the screen to type commands where Fitts's law makes them easy to click. Then, since no one can be expected to remember every command a large system supports, there must be a fully searchable command browser in which commands are tagged and fully documented rather than organized heirarchically. Commands can, of course, be executed directly from the browser. Imagine if Acme swallowed Emacs then got infected with classic Mac OS, and you'll pretty much have it.
This will make the program easier for novices and experts alike.
Name:
OP2008-08-14 5:14
>>37
Generally software that allows the user to edit the toolbars and menus also has an option for saving presets and reverting to default layout so that sort of removes this problem.
---
I think many of the challenges in interface design stem from working out a good hierarchy for the menus and toolbars, which controls should be grouped together for maximum efficiency, where would a user expect to find submenus related to various functions. The two most obvious solutions would be to either conduct a sort of 'time and motion' study of how the user interacts with the interface or as stated above straight copy the interface conventions of similar popular software.
Name:
Anonymous2008-08-14 5:18
>>38
It removes no problem. If you configure the menus you'll not have your configuration when you use another computer, unless you reconfigure them completely, which would be a huge pain in the ass.
--
Not at all, these things are completely unrelated to good interface design, because a good interface would not include menus, submenus, toolbars, or heirarchical groups of controls. They are only relevant if you're such a poor designer that you're stuck on fumbling around the dead end we're stuck in.
Name:
Anonymous2008-08-14 5:51
>>39
Yes true, I suppose one possible alternative would be to provide a selection of presets that are geared towards certain tasks and generalised user-profiles (Notepad replacement/Web Development/Programming in a text editor for example).
---
Yes, I admit that I don't intend to spark a paradigm shift in GUI metaphors, sorry if I gave that impression. It is however an interesting subject, are there any avenues that you have explored in terms of novel GUIs that I should look into?