So many good systems have been hurt by bad user interfaces. I would say user interface design is a dying art, but a little research shows that it may have never had much life to begin with.
Think about it. Our basic desktop computing windows-mouse-applications metaphor that we use today was pretty much defined 20 years ago with Macintosh GUI (or if you want to be a real purist, you could go back another decade to Unix X-Windows and the Xerox PARC mouse). Since then, applications have taken a muddled approach to user interface design, with more failures than successes. One thing that has been annoying me recently is the treatment of logout commands in Web apps. They always seem to be buried in site navigation controls, when they really fall into a different category completely. Here’s one example from Bank of America, who at least highlights the command in red, but still, “Sign Off” should be a button, and probably should be placed under “Online Banking.”
The real point of this post is to say that I wish more companies in the geospatial industry would do a better job in this area. I think it could really contribute to more usage and revenue growth. Just look at Google. They have no content (even Earth and Maps use content others could buy if they wanted), but they continually capture customers by being the best-of-breed UI. They’ve been so successful at that they even have Microsoft worried that Google’s awesome apps, like Mail, Reader, Docs and Spreadsheets, could actually replace the desktop OS!
So with that in mind, this Infoworld article on Javascript toolkits really caught my attention. Go check out Prototype, Rico and Dojo. They can really help people who usually focus on server-side work to get closer to building more appealing user interfaces. Toolkits are no substitute for truly understanding UI design, but it’s a step in the right direction.
posted on holiday at the foot of the White Mountains..
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Ahem…since we are speaking of interfaces and their ease of use, I just left you a comment, and after filling in the little test to see that I am not a bot…nothing. I couldn’t see anyway to get back to your blog! Should I have to FIGURE this out!!
Anyway, designing good interfaces is an art, like designing beautiful instrument panels on a car instead of the garbage you see in most of them. It takes time, money, and a sort of talent that is not much prized in the computer world, and it doesn’t turn a noticeable profit. Google is popular because it is SIMPLE, and it appears to work really well. (Whether it is really a better search engine is not something I know about at all.) Internet design is brand new – designing door handles is thousands of years old and yet, we STILL get that wrong! How often I have found myself in front of a door with a “panel” for a “handle” that makes it totally unclear whether I should push or pull it. Well, it’s 50-50…sometimes you bang your nose on the door. Surprising that so much of the internet is usable, even if it is godawfully ugly. It’s not just the geospatial field…
Yes, there are many clumsy interface elements in this blogging software (Wordpress). And it’s one of the most popular.
Well, I thought I’d try importing my blog from blogspot to Wordpress just because I don’t like dumping everything into Google, but I looked at it for ten minutes, and still couldn’t find out how to start posting or import my existing blog. That’s about ten times longer than I care to spend.