Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 18:33:44 +0200 From: Andre Oppermann <oppermann@pipeline.ch> To: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> Cc: Nicholas Charles Brawn <ncb05@uow.edu.au>, freebsd chat <freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: gui design Message-ID: <36125D68.E4E75C02@pipeline.ch> References: <Pine.SOL.4.02A.9809262257120.3872-100000@banshee.cs.uow.edu.au> <36124FD3.B31D9303@softweyr.com>
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Wes Peters wrote: -snip- > Suprisingly enough, good GUI design doesn't just happen -- look at > the violence Microsoft has done to good design. Ugh! And to think > that every manager in every software company on the whole planet > WANTS their GUI to look like Word. The end of usability as we used > to know it. Thats true... Ever tried to configure M$-PROXY? That is the far the badest GUI design I ever saw! And IE4 is not far from it... like the whole xxx98 stuff... > My introduction to GUI design came way back when I was helping a > friend write an "othello" game for the Atari ST. He worked on the > game engine and I worked on the ST graphics part. I had been > following a series of columns written by one of the designers of > the GEM ui system at Digital Research, Tim Oren. In that series, > Mr. Oren presented a column that was an introduction to user > interface design. I've managed to track down that column and > HTML-ify it. I've placed it on my web site at > > http://www.softweyr.com/~softweyr/gem08.html > > for your reading pleasure. The references to GEM probably won't > help you much, but they are few and far between; the article mostly > covers the basics of good user interface design. The bibliography > is an excellent guide to learning user interface design as well. Another good book I can recommend is the "Indigo Magic User Interface Guidelines" from Silicon Graphics. I don't know if that is online and my version is almost three years old. This guide gives an good overview and step-by-step instructions on how to build a GUI for an application. The two most important rules are: 1. place the stuff where is belongs (don't put "Options" under "View" like in IE, put it under "Edit" like in Netscape) 2. Only one way to the setting/option (not three or more like in Outlook) -snip- -- Andre To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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