

Content creation apps finally get out of the way - nailer
http://mikemaccana.com/

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GeneralMaximus
It feels good to see UX design becoming an important part of writing software,
and it feels even better to see people favoring clean, minimalistic UIs built
with icons and guestures in mind rather than the button-and-text-heavy UIs
that were the norm until just a few years ago. But sometimes I'm afraid this
new trend might be taken too far.

As we begin to rely more on gestures and (unlabelled) icons instead of menus
and (labelled) icons/buttons, we create a new language of pictures and hand
movements. This is not a bad thing. Pictures are easier to process than text
for a majority of the population. UIs become simpler, uncluttered and
generally feel more "loose" and "free flowing", and hence more fun, with
gestures. All this is great, but I see a couple of issues with these "primal"
methods of working with user interfaces.

The first issue is discoverability. Unless they are explicitly pointed out to
them, it's difficult for someone to find out that guestures even exist.
[Aside: non-discoverability is an attribute guestures share with keyboard
shortcuts, except the keyboard shortcut for any action can be discovered just
by looking to the right of that action's label in the app's menu system. This
is possible because we've given names to all our keys and therefore we can
just write shortcuts out as plain text (Ctrl+A, Ctrl+Z, etc.) Perhaps ...
perhaps we could start representing guestures by a standard set of symbols so
we can refer to them as easily as we refer to shortcut keys. For example, ⇠
could represent "swipe left", ⇢ could be "swipe right", ╳ could be "pinch to
zoom", etc. Even then, the issue of discoverability remains with touch UIs,
where there are no menus where we can stick these symbols, no status bars, and
often no manuals.]

Second, icons are often vague. The cognitive overload of figuring out what a
particular icon means is sometimes just too much. I've personally been
frustrated by having to hover my mouse over an icon, waiting for a tooltip to
appear, then finding out that the icon doesn't do what I need and having to
again hover my mouse over a second icon, waiting for the tooltip gods to
enlighten me. Tooltips are not possible in touch UIs, so on tablets you just
have to pick an icon and hope for the best. It doesn't help that many apps
don't have a visible "Help" key. The solution here, I believe, is to very
carefully choose which icons in your UI you want to label and which are
obvious enough to remain unlabelled.

Third, menus lend interfaces a sense of hierarchy. Hierarchy is a great
navigational aid for situations where you have to choose between a large
number of items. People instinctively understand hierarchy. We've spent
centuries classifying information into hierarchical structures, and now
suddenly UI designers are ready to disregard the benefits they bring. Case in
point: replacing the hierarchical menus of GNOME 2 with an icon grid in GNOME
3 and Unity. Apple made icon grids popular with their iDevices and OS X Lion,
but I think Apple is the worst possible company to emulate when it comes to
building efficient, _useful_ interfaces. If you're looking for shiny and cute,
sure. Usable, even. But efficiency and usefulness are concepts Apple does not
understand. The icon grid is possibly the worst possible way of navigating
through applications if you have more than 5 of them. With 30-40 apps, the
icon grid quickly becomes useless and you have to rely on the search function
to get to what you need.

Fourth, with icons and guestures, knowing the "language of software" becomes
important. You can't just hunt around in the menus and figure out how the app
works on your own. No siree, you need to RTFM or watch a tutorial video.
That's fine when you're learning Photoshop, but RTFMing for simple mobile
apps? Not happening.

Fifth, icons make communication difficult. How do you give someone
instructions on how to perform a task over email when the app she is using
uses unlabeled icons and guestures for everything? How do you describe the
undo icon over email? While I was writing this reply, my mother called me
asking how she could pause and un-pause a TV show on a Tata Sky HD+. I told
her to "press the button with the two parallel lines for pause, press the tiny
triangle button to play". Not that big of an issue with
pause/play/rewind/forward buttons, since they're standardized and look exactly
the same on all multimedia hardware and software. But what about, say, the
buttons in GMail? How do you describe the "Archive" button to your iPad-using
mom? How do you describe the "pinch" guesture used to close an app on the
iPad?

So what is the point I'm trying to make with this immense wall of text? My
point in a nutshell is that while a lot of UI paradigms that are making their
way from the world of tablets to the world of PCs make sense, their overuse
often renders UIs confusing and vague. I'll admit this is not that much of an
issue right now, but it might become one very soon. I'm afraid there might
come a time when all UIs cater to what I'm going to call "casual" users and
people who actually use computers for work are left out in the dark.

~~~
commieneko
Normal people hate hierarchies. I've spent a lot of time trying to teach non-
programmers to us them in their work flow. There is no question that they are
useful, but people resist them fiercely. Many developers have a hard time
dealing with this and are as resistent to acknowledging this limitation, or
feature, of human behavior as most people are to using said concepts.

In a lot of ways this is understandable. You don't see many directly
manipulate hierarchies in nature. People can deal with piles, and one or two
dimensional arrays, and even arrays of piles. And they can deal with sorting
and stashing.

More importantly, they can deal with ask and tell.

I've played with various stack based interfaces and while they are
interesting, I haven't found any that I really like, much less that seem
generally extensible.

I dont have any great ideas here, sometimes I think the answer is to let the
user dig holes in the desktop and bury what they aren't working on in little
treasure caches; this essentially describes most users' desktops anyway. how
you would go about generalizing this to, say, a CAD system interface is
another question...

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rbarooah
I think it's going to be interesting to see how this type heavy UI trend plays
out. It's very clean and appealing looking, and it's fiendishly difficult to
make an icon set look anywhere near as elegant.

However... I personally find words much more distracting when I'm trying to
produce content. I have all my mac toolbars set to 'icon only' so that the
words don't keep drawing my eye. I'm not sure I could comfortably use a system
that was so word heavy, however elegant it looked.

I'm sure that different people have different levels of sensitivity to this,
so it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

~~~
commieneko
One system that some drawing programs on the iPad use is to completely hide
the UI most of the time. Gestures and hot spots cause the UI to manifest
itself when needed; most of the time the screen is empty except for the
painting. I can imagine a word processor that works like this. (Code editors
often _do_ act like this, but use command keys in place of a GUI.)
Discoverability is the big problem here, at least for casual users.

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xefer
The thing about Microsoft tools in general is that their default UI is too
busy, but they can easily be customized to make them nearly as clean as you
want.

My setup for Word 2007 is every bit as clean as the Office 15 example shown.
Just selecting "Minimize Ribbon" gets you most of the way there already. Then
select "Customize Quick Access Toolbar" to remove most other icons. I have a
feeling the main difference is that Office 15 just hides the ribbon as the
default.

You're left with basically an empty window with a sheet of paper.

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rayhano
While it is great to have a 'clean' space to create in, I use tools for the
powerful features that make my creations 'pop' or give them structure. Quick
and obvious access is important. Would be good to address the function of
those toolbars as well as their look and prominence.

~~~
nailer
> While it is great to have a 'clean' space to create in, I use tools for the
> powerful features

Indeed - in apps like CS6 - where the content is created primarily via the
tools, they're shown for quick access, but made less prominent in order not to
distract from what's being produced.

In Word, however the content is primary created with the keyboard. So removing
tools becomes more of a possibility.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
In Word, common tools have keyboard shortcuts too, so there's little point in
using the toolbar except for infrequently used things.

Bold Ctrl+B, Italics Ctrl+I, Underline Ctrl+U. Want to save? Ctrl+S. Want to
print? Ctrl+P. Indent? Tab. Left, Center, Right-align? Ctrl+L, Ctrl+E, Ctrl+R.
Increase/Decrease font size? Ctrl+>, Ctrl+<.

You don't need to use the toolbar at all for common operations.

~~~
dmethvin
Keyboard shortcuts are great--take that with a grain of salt since I like vim
too. Unfortunately, the emphasis of Word has always been to make it so a new
user can manage to do those things by browsing around the menus and toolbars.
It's not a good habit to learn as far as productivity goes, but I'm sure it
scores well in usability labs where subjects have no training and an hour to
do some simple tasks.

Word's problem is that it has evolved so many features that there is NO
reasonable interface to access them. I have been using Word for two decades
and still I find myself resorting to features like the Format Painter because
I cannot find the settings to fix a run of text.

~~~
jiggy2011
I think also the selling point of much software in the 90s , early 2000s was
always how many features it had.

Having a big GUI that looks like NASA mission control made an application look
like value for money.

Now most people have more features in their software than they need and with
apple leading the way in simplicity and usability a sleek interface is much
more marketable.

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droithomme
You've always been able to remove all toolbars if that's what you really want
to do.

Not many people did.

As a forced way to do things, going without a toolbar isn't a good choice for
Word.

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datashaman
So when is the class action for recovering all the licence fees for what
amounts to unpaid UX testing on a worldwide scale?

Why pay for beta software? :P

