SemiOT: Article on User Interface Design

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Jul 24, 2007, Fairlight wrote:
>On Tue, Jul 24, 2007 at 06:52:43PM -0400, after drawing runes in goat's blood,
>J. P. Radley cast forth these immortal, mystical words:
>> 
>> Well, in my book, the article fails to itself have a good user interface.

My first reaction when I unziped the file was ``spaces in file
names! Gack!!!'' :-).

As for the content, it sounds like something I would write as I've bitched
for years about developers who write systems where it's painfully obvious
that they haven't a clue about how people actually use them in real work
environments (I like the term heads-down data entry).

When I wrote my first accounting applications about 40 years ago, the input
media was 80-column punch cards, and I would generally do all the entry for
the first month or so to make sure everything worked properly.  I got
pretty good at laying out the input formats to minimize the amount of
effort required, and to do things like make drum cards that would auto-dup
appropriate fields say when entering time card data for employees.

>But it -printed- beautifully.  :)  (Literally...should see it in colour on
>glossy stock.)
>
>> The black text on cloudy gray background is distasteful to the eye.

I have to agree with JP on this.  I find it hard to read when the contrast
isn't good, and have been known to let my subscription lapse on otherwise
excellent magazines (e.g. Omni) because they had lots of articles printed
on colored backgrounds.

>I have to wonder because the background isn't actually entirely cloudy
>grey.  I have a suspicion that, speed issues aside (which -are- present in
>Reader due to all the transparency use), your rendering in xpdf is quite
>possibly not up to Reader quality.  I say this because NitroPDF, which I
>used to do the final edit/lockdown of metadata and permissions, has a
>viewer that also rendered it "not near what Reader does".

I read it using the Mac Preview program, and while it show the transparency
properly, it was still sluggish on my Mac Mini with 1GB RAM and a 1.42GHz
PowerPC processor.

Bill
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