The UI circle is complete | Hacker News Reader

The UI circle is complete

blog.webicity.info

43 pointsMacha40 comments

Both the Win 3.x example and the Ubuntu example suffer from the same (presumed) failure: application organization imposed by the OS vendor.

I can find things on my messy desk because I made the mess. If someone else arranged my desk for me, suddenly I have to understand their mental model before I can locate anything.

Which is why I can never, ever find what I'm looking for in Windows' Start menu. Even if the categories seem obvious, they never map 100% to my way of thinking.

(If those categories in the Ubuntu example are user-defined, then they're OK by me.)

…and let's please not even get into how confusing and redundant the Dock looks in the otherwise nice Lion example.

Try launchy, search beats categorisation any time.

Only for people who memorize application names. I bet you feel fine in front of a CLI, too. (Not a knock against, I like Launchy as well.)

Do some time as a tech support, and eventually you'll get a request to help them with "this application, you know, the blue one. With the pictures and stuff?"

That's true, but are these people likely to have so many programs in the start menu anyway?

I may be tainted by academia: IT loaded computers with about 150 applications keyserve'd.

Surely academics don't look for the "orange curvy thing" instead of MATLAB, though.

Anybody in the hard sciences was pretty competent, except for a couple of HTML-related issues.

Fine arts, education, sociology, and just students in general, however... And I say that with an art degree, too.

Not sure about lunchy, but since it's similar to gnome-do and others - doesn't it search on descriptions or custom aliases too? I never type "thunderbird" for example - it's always "mail" ("ma" actually), or whatever word I associate with the app (this has the added bonus of allowing me to open company's crm via "crap"...)

launchy is great, but since I switched to OS X a few years ago the best replacement I've found is quicksilver. It's free and much more responsive, customizable than spotlight.

Quicksilver made OS X useful, for me. It's absolutely fantastic.

It's been a while since I've used Windows 3.1 but I'm pretty sure you could arrange the icons as you pleased.

When I still used windows (a very long time ago, before 2002), I spent some time organizing programs in folders and subfolders within the start menu. I had "games", "graphics", "dev", etc, with applications subfolders. It's actually very simple to do (well it was back in win98 at least): right click anywhere in the start menu and "browse here".

You definitely want customization to be simple.

But even still, you should be careful about the mental model you're imposing on your users, especially if they're forced to literally dismantle that model to rearrange things the way they'd like.

Cognitively, it's almost more than twice as much work, once you factor in the uncertainty of messing with things you're not sure you can/should mess with. (Were they pre-arranged a certain way for a reason? Will things break if I move them?)

Which means that people are even more likely to leave your default categorization in place, so it had better be bulletproof.

I tried to do this, but there were a few major hurdles. First, MS Windows left a million poorly categorized things cluttering up my program categorization. Second, when new programs were installed, I had to manually move them from where they put themselves in the start menu. Occasionally, this broke them. And if I didn't think to do it, my list of programs quickly became ugly and unorganized. Third, multiple locations for the start menu folder items (all users vs. the local user) made this really annoying.

It was actually simpler than that. Menu items were draggable.

Now there is the extra hurdle of having some software installed system wide and some software installed only for the user.. at least in Windows XP when I last tried to do this, I found that even on a single user system that start menu items were in multiple locations.

Ridiculous - it's a default, nothing more. You can customize it as you see fit, and always could. I find the Mac defaults confusing but that's not because they're bad, it's because I don't use one every day. Turn off all the eye candy and the basic concept hasn't evolved a lot over the last 20 years.

I find the main reason why I can't find things in the Start menu is because they've been buried in <company name>/<program name>. This seems like an obviously bad idea to me, since I can remember the name of the game I want to play but less frequently who published it.

I had a feeling that this was originally Microsoft's idea although I can't back that up since all I can find now is a newer set of guidelines which suggest not doing this. It's all kind of moot since you can search it in newer versions of Windows anyway.

I'd have less of a problem if that hierarchy seemed useful. I usually see a <company> folder, and under that, 3 things. <program>, of course; a link to README.txt; and the uninstaller.

Just put <program> at the root and be done with it. I most likely don't have more than the one app from you.

One of the few vendors that I'm rather likely to have multiple products from is Microsoft, and of course they have to be different and delight in having <Microsoft - product name>.

On the contrary, I think it is something insisted on by MBAs at the software companies themselves. A well-brainwashed MBA thinks in terms of brands: creating brands, growing brands, re-branding, etc. If you have a successful product, the best possible thing you can do with that product is use it to enhance your brand. Good products promote and establish a brand, and then the brand lets you make money selling products whose quality is irrelevant.

Otherwise, you'd be stuck selling products based on their quality and individual value, which is stupid, because the quality of your product depends mostly on people who haven't gone to business school, and is thus completely out of responsible hands.

Therefore, the primary purpose of an installed piece of software is to remind users of its brand, which in most cases is the name of the company or studio that created it.

Whatever the reason, in my experience it is definitely the case that marketing and legal both like to sit in the lap of whoever draws the short stick and has to implement the installer.

Personally I think that Spotlight style search launchers are the best way to launch applications. If the search launcher is designed halfway well, with learning about which applications you use most often it only takes a few keypresses to bring up the applications you need.

Of course with touch devices it is probably more convenient to swipe to the application icon you want and touch it, but on the PC I find it much easier to click the search icon, type the app name and press enter.

If you can remember the name of the application without prompting.

I'll frequently have to troll through my /Applications directory looking for something that does X that I know I installed ages ago and will recognise when I see it.

It's important to have multiple useful ways to get to your applications. My unprompted recall, in general, is quite weak, but someone else might have vision issues that makes distinguishing icons apart difficult. For this kind of basic functionality, I think that having several high-quality approaches is best.

A good reason to include meta info about applications, so it can be pulled up after name matches.

Personally, I've almost quit using the Windows start menu. I hit win-key and start typing. Utterly pathetically slow and inaccurate compared to using something like QuickSilver or Alfred, but I can still get places much more quickly than using a mouse when I'm programming.

For inspiration: things that reject this same old paradigm: http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Desktop-Metaphor-Integrated-Env...

No it isn't. I still want a Conetree godammit:

http://www.infovis.net/imagenes/T1_N173_A1014_ConeTreeIntera...

What about...

The Original Mac:

http://www.old-computers.com/MUSEUM/computer.asp?c=271

The Xerox Star 8010:

http://lowendmac.com/wale/07/the-roots-of-the-mac-os.html

Every GUI is a descendent of the Xerox Star

I remember when the screenshots of Windows 95 first came out in the magazines and people's reactions. With the people I knew, at least, was an almost universal hatred of the Start menu which I put down to it merely being "new." In retrospect, it was a pretty stupid idea UI wise that, sadly, so many others copied (IMHO, of course).

What? That we are back to icons? The icons never left from OSX.

That's what I thought too: "what? icons within rectangles!?"

But maybe the intended parallel is Program Manager's [1] MDI[2] interface. Maybe the author thinks Lion and Ubuntu are re-invinting MDI?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Program_Manager

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface

The main way of launching applications in Program manager was a program containing a grid of applications. Replacing the Applications menu with a dedicated grid of applications for Ubuntu, Applications folder with dedicated grid of applications for OS X. Which is basically what Program Manager was.

(Yes, I know plenty of people probably do this ad hoc with their desktop anyway, but you were _supposed_ to use the proper methods)

Back to screens full of icons for applications.

Since Win95's Start Menu (I'm sure there are perhaps earlier examples in other desktop environments, but Windows is what I'm familiar with), users have been encouraged to keep documents on the desktop, and keep application shortcuts filed away in the Start menu or on the Quick Launch bar or other similar launcher. OSX and various Linux desktops are organized in the same way: you can put application shortcuts on the desktop, but the desktop is better for documents.

Why did this happen? A)Even for non-tech-savvy people, the idea of a "file" makes perfect sense if you think about a document, B)Someone realized that opening a document in an application made for that kind of document should be a first class action, and shouldn't necessarily require you to first open the application and then use the application to open the document, and C)When you start putting documents on a desktop, putting "applications" alongside them using the same visual representation (a clickable icon) can be confusing. The result was a more literal "desktop," complete with your click-to-open documents laying around. Tools (applications) were put away in the desk drawers, so to speak.

The widespread usage of iOS has put apps front and center again, both figuratively and literally - users have again become accustomed to seeing grids of icons for their applications instead of their documents. This is reflected in the Ubuntu and OSX screenshots.

users have been encouraged to keep documents on the desktop

Almost every piece of windows software I can remember installing has asked me if I wanted to create a desktop icon for the application. I have a whopping...2 documents there.

This hasn't required any special effort on my part, many applications default to saving in the user or (later) 'My documents' folders. I typically open documents from the file manager or via a 'Recent' menu, but prefer to launch the app if I starting a new document, and can't say I've noticed an irresistible trend for doing things the other way - if you ask me, it depends on the person rather than being driven by the OS.

Almost every piece of Windows software tries to add itself to the quick launch too.

It's more about self-promotion than following best practices. "Hey, look at me, I'm here! Use me, tell all your friends"

It's interesting that UI's started out program-oriented, then document-oriented, and now going back to program-oriented.

Ubuntu decided to go that way for some reason, but I think that vanilla Gnome tries to continue on the document-oriented path. gnome-shell searches documents by default, includes Beagle (or whatever the native tool was called) and lately the Zeitgeist project. We'll see what they plan to do with Unity...

I agree! Very interesting.

I remember when "document-centric" was all the rage in UIs (often went hand-in-hand with the term "object-oriented"... right around Windows 95/OpenDoc/Workplace Shell timeframe) and I would think that it seemed odd, because most users I knew had nearly no real concept of document/folder hierarchies.

You'd ask a user where their document is and they'd answer — just like they do today — "It's in Word."

Brings back memories of DESQview

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DESQview

No arrange by penis?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com