08 Nov 2002
Fri, 08 Nov 2002
PDA
In some places PDA doesn't mean Personal Digital Assistant. If I didn't know better, I'd have thought John Ashcroft was an assistant high school principal. ;->
Posted at: 00:41 | permalink
Spaces, GUI, and Browsers
Russell Beattie points out that Diego Doval has an email/PIM app called spaces that looks fairly promising. I wonder what this means for Mitch Kapoor's effort.
Russell also makes some commentary regarding his mother's relative ease of use with the web browser versus traditional Graphical User Interfaces.
Russell says, "People, in my humble opinion, have been given too many options in normal UIs. Browsers which limit those options are actually better. My mom can use a browser: Home Page, links, Back, Forward, Favorites, Forms, Address bar. Period. But she normally has trouble with regular UIs which have a different way of doing things for each screen, pop-up box, etc."
I believe this analysis is a bit off the mark, particularly considering that interface standards are generally much better defined in the OS GUI world than they are in the web world. The GUI world has a design guideline for every platform currently in broad use including Windows , Macintosh, and Unix. The web has Jakob Nielsen. If it weren't for his stop the insanity crusade, the web would consist of 2 billion pages of flash splash screens and javascript pop-unders. As it is, a fair number of designers I've worked with still aren't familiar with Nielsen's work. When I designed Windows software, the WIGSD was de riguer.
Comparing the browser's interaction model with other GUI applications is apples and oranges to a certain extent. A fairer comparision would be to examine user's experience with a single part of the application, say the tools/options dialog in both Explorer and Microsoft Word. Another way to level the comparison would be to compare a dialog interaction with a similar web form.
The browser becomes monolithic for most novices these days and thus, so does the navigation model. The browser's page stack back/forward model provides an answer to the discoverability of z-order for novice users in a similar fashion to the way that task bars have done the same for desktop users. In addition, most novices use a very small percentage of the browser's options, just as they would in a word processor. The difficulty comes when they need to go outside the most rudimentary browsing.
The homebase desktop folks have actually taken this idea to it's logical conclusion and implemented the browser's navigation model as the operating system's desktop. While there's some reason to believe that this may be an easier way for novice users to navigate their operating system, it can be incredibly frustrating for experienced computer users. Don't believe me? Try it yourself.
Posted at: 00:20 | permalink
