Eye Candy vs. Bare-Bones in UI Design
uxmag.com
uxmag.com
At the same time it is great to hear Donald Norman perspective 'prettier things are actually easier to use, or are at least are perceived to be.' This is my opinion of Mac's (which I am typing this on now). Pretty, but I think most people confuse that with easier to use.
Things people mistake for "pretty", such as the genie minimising effect are actually cues that show clearly what your action has done.
Similarly, having a single menu bar at the top of the screen gives the menu items infinite height, so they're much easier to target than the menus on Windows (this is especially important on laptops with trackpads).
..of course, some of it is just pretty. damn pretty.
I'm a bit biased, I have double display set up so I constantly switch between 4-5 windows at a time. If I had to click on the top menu all the time as on a mac I would go a little more insane.
Personally I think both the mac and windows setups are junk, which is why I'm making my own desktop shell.
I have an idea for how to shake things up, which is what I'm working on.
You have to be kidding! When have you ever run out of space for a menu? If your menu has that many items in it, I suspect there is something very wrong.
I may have completely misunderstood what you meant (I hope I did).
On the other hand, having the single menu at the top means that the menu is not explicitly linked to the program window. In Mac it is possible (though I haven't done it yet) to save a file, from the wrong window, as it is easy to get confused as to which is the 'active' window.
I think the top menu bar is exactly the kind of thing I'm referring to when I say it keeps the mac pretty, but not necessarily functional. It keeps the menus in a highly ignored location so the features of a program don't mess with the clean look of the window.
With regard to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fittss_law (a law that tells you how likely you are to successfully 'click' a control on screen based on its size and the distance to travel), the target are for the menu click is infinitely high because you can just ram your mouse vertically as it will not move past the 0th row of pxs thus always leaving you in the vertical bounds of the control, all that is left for the user to concern themselves with is x coordinate position.
Additionally the 4 corners of the screen are sweet spots for controls as they have infinity x * infinity y target size.
On the other hand, putting a direct manipulation control in the corner of the screen where it would get maximum fitt's law benefits would mean it was no longer a direct manipulation control which would make it significantly more finickity to perform the actual resize once you have 'acquired' the control_and_ would take that piece of valuable screen real-estate away from more useful controls.
Secondly, by attaching the menu bar to window you still have the same problem with a finickity resize control and you loose the advantage of the top anchored menu bar. Certainly window resizing in Windows is just as finickity (actually, possibly more so, windows in windows don't have to have the status bar resize thumb that is the norm in mac os x. I'm sure theres actual HCI research about windows vs mac os x resize interactions but I don't have any of it handy so wild speculation will have to do).
[Strange aside regarding Chrome: the window itself doesn't have a resize thumb (only border resizing) yet the text areas do. On the other hand there is no visual feedback to indicate that you have acquired the resize thumb]
Allows a more "organic" grouping of functions, e.g. All the design-related items are grouped together, then there is a subgrouping of font, paragraph, etc. Similar items are closer, either horizontally or vertically.
Multiple methods of communications: icons alongside text and color
Allows manipulation of attributes in-place (no popups)
Easy-to-find keyboard shortcuts (hold Alt for a whole second)
While the rest of the screenshot looks pretty consistent interms of colour (low-contract, grey(ish) shades, modest use of gradients), there's this bright, shiny, blue, bubble-shaped scroll bar wedged inside a heavily-gradiented scrollbar background.
Whenever I see UI articles pointing to mac appeal, this is the first thing that strikes me as out of place. And I hope I'm not the only who thinks so.
I think the shiny-blue scroll bars are doomed fairly soon, and looking at iTunes suggests they are indeed. The scroll bars there are a much less obtrusive non-glossy, paler base with a blue-grey tone, all heavily anti-aliased. They're also narrower, which I hope is kept. I rarely use the scroll bar, and most Mac users I know don't either; the two-finger scroll is more than accurate enough, and any specific point is still accessible by clicking on a specific location. Having a large one is unnecessary space waste, and draws your eye away from the content of the application.
Now, I'm in no position to judge UIs, but I am in a position to judge datacenters, and picking the datacenter with the nicest paint is about as retarded as picking the programmer in the nicest suit. I suspect (though, of course, don't know) that a similar principle applies to UI design and eye candy.
Secondly, the floor on the data center to me sounds like its closer to the box the software came in than to the interface itself. From a users perspective the interface _is_ the software whereas the box (and the painted floor) are merely a nicity that you only see once. I can't stretch the analogue any further though because I don't know data centers.
But yeah; I mean, I've seen a lot of really bad websites that have obviously had a lot of effort put into making them pretty. Remember the 'click here to enter' intro screens? or flash-based websites? One certainly can be pretty without being usable.