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GUI Guidelines - GONE!

The Lounge

21 Posts 12 Posters 0 Views 1 Watching

J James R Twine

I have always been a stickler for well-designed GUIs. They should follow a logical flow (for English, left-to-right and top-to-bottom), labels should have colons on them, correct tab order, and things should have mnemonics to simplify keyboard navigation. And that is just the basic stuff - nothing that a quick 15 minute browse through the Microsoft Windows User Experience[^] (formerly the The Windows Interface Guidelines for Software Design[^]) will not teach you. What galls me is the large number of so-called "professional developers" and/or "professional applications" that completely disregard GUI design/implementation. I have even worked at places where GUI bugs are considered low priority issues(!). As a minimum, I believe developers should try to use their application without a mouse. If it is not a mouse-centric application (like a drawing application), it should be fairly usable. Anyway, I recently came across an application called "CounterSpy". I am not yet sure how well it lives up to its claims, but damn if its GUI was not designed by an amature! A quick rundown of issues (in its agent application): o Buttons have varying sizes and scattered placement o Tab order is completely broken o No mnemonics on buttons o No "real" labels on input-capable controls (no colons on them) - and even if there were, since the tab order is broken they would likely not work correctly, anyway o No mnemonics on the kinda-sorta-almost labels that are there o ListView controls use clickable columns, but no sorting takes place o [Advanced] ListView columns are not dragable, and their sizes are not persisted and restored And that is just without actually using the functionality of the damn application! I would KILL a QA gr
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James R. Twine wrote:

What galls me is the large number of so-called "professional developers" and/or "professional applications" that completely disregard GUI design/implementation. I have even worked at places where GUI bugs are considered low priority issues

No true professional would ever do that. That is a sign of the old style programmer who thinks that code under the hood is more important than the ease of use for the customer. Anyone who has ever had to support their own software will quickly understand how critical the UI is. I think all developers should be forced to spend a stint in the support department on a regular basis so they can understand the real world a little better.

"I don't want more choice. I just want better things!" - Edina Monsoon
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