SemiOT: Article on User Interface Design

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Jul 24, 2007, Fairlight wrote:
>This public service announcement was brought to you by Bill Campbell:
>> My first reaction when I unziped the file was ``spaces in file
>> names! Gack!!!'' :-).
>
>Ya know...*nix does handle that. :) I do it over samba all the time.  In
>fact, I uploaded it from linux with ncftp over samba from my Win2k.  I
>dunno, I got used to it way back when, even before I touched Win95 or
>before it even existed.  People would make files with spaces on systems at
>university.  Go figure.  When you can sneak control characters and things
>like ^H into filenames for hiding them in anon ftp directories, you really
>don't think much about spaces.  :)

The problem isn't that *nix handles spaces, but that many shell scripts
don't handle them properly, expanding the file name into multiple
arguments.  I've seen several occassions when spaces have not been handled
properly, even by OS vendors (e.g.  Caldera's mkinitrd script barfed on
modules with spaces, and Apple had a broken security update within the last
year or so).

The following file name would cause rather major heartburn on most Linux
systems or others running the gnu ``rm'' command which allows options to be
in commands after non-option arguments.

	``i --recursive --force .''

>> 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).
>
>I'll take that as high compliment.  Thanks.  :)

You're welcome.

>I like that term, too.  It's quite accurate.  There's really nothing quite
>so annoying as -waiting- on someone at the doctor's office, for example,
>and they're inputting data from a form you've just filled in, and they're
>looking up at the screen every field or every other field, can't keep their
>hands of the mouse, and you're in a hurry.  <old_man_voice>When I was
>your age, we typed by touch...and we LIKED it!</old_man_voice>
>
>And you just get tempted to blame the actual operator, but that's really
>not even the case.  It's really poor design many times.  I'm all for
>flexibility, but there are points where it's actually smarter to force
>someone down a certain path than to give them the option.  If you have a
>Windows app and -let- people use the mouse, they probably will unless
>they've been doing hardcore entry for a while.  Forcing them to be
>efficient by depriving them of the crutch that slows them down can be a
>good thing.  That's one reason I think fPGI was such a terrible idea--it's
>a step in 180 degrees the wrong direction.

I have a good friend who's a very competent legal secretary, and Sherry
claims that her productivity dropped about 50% when she was required to use
M$-Word instead of WordPerfect, largely because Word required that she take
her fingers off the home keys for most things (I didn't particularly like
WordPerfect because it used function keys very heavily while Scripsit used
control key combinations).

>Not-so-Secret:  I don't even use my mouse to navigate in a GUI browser
>unless I -have- to.  I rely 99% of the time on tab navigation and keyboard
>shortcuts even in Firefox.  The only times I use the mouse to navigate are
>when sites pretty much mandate it for things like Flash.  Well, that and
>-really- poorly designed sites with like 70 links on one page where it's
>just ridiculous to even try tab navigation because then it obviously is
>less efficient.  But that's also a poorly designed web site, IMNSHO.

Personally I would prefer to use the <ENTER> key to go from field to field
instead of the <TAB>, and design my curses-based applications that way.

...
>> >> 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.
>
>Is this a contrast issue, or colour blindness, or preference?  I can see
>any of them being valid points.

In my case it's probably a combination of contrast and astigmatism, as I'm
not color blind.

...

Bill
--
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interpreter. -- Nick Petreley