Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1998 09:35:47 -0600 From: Wes Peters <wes@softweyr.com> To: Nicholas Charles Brawn <ncb05@uow.edu.au>, freebsd chat <freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: gui design Message-ID: <36124FD3.B31D9303@softweyr.com> References: <Pine.SOL.4.02A.9809262257120.3872-100000@banshee.cs.uow.edu.au>
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Nicholas Charles Brawn wrote: > > I'm descended into the scary world of xwindows programming and am > looking for some help. :) > > I seem to recall last year there was a heated debate on -chat regarding > gui design, flaws/etc of various products out there. I'm hoping some of > the battle-scared survivors are still around and able to point me > towards any (preferably online) documentation/papers on how to design > *good* graphic user interfaces. > > Any tips, pointers etc would be much appreciated. 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. 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. Note: the article text I retrieve didn't have a copyright on it. I do not recall a copyright on the original text back in 85 or 86. If anyone out there knows of a copyright on this material, please tell me so I can contact the copyright holder or remove it from my web site. To this list, I would add two books. The first, "Tog on Interface," was written by Bruce Tognazzini (sp?) while he was at Apple. It's quite a good book to get you to think about what it is your program does *for the user,* and how to make it do *that* better. The second book, if your program crunches numbers or statistical data in any way, is "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" by Edward R. Tufte. If you need to display masses of numbers to people who don't grok masses of numbers, this book will help you display them in meaningful ways. -- "Where am I, and what am I doing in this handbasket?" Wes Peters Softweyr LLC http://www.softweyr.com/~softweyr wes@softweyr.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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