Hi all, One thing occured to me the other day, are we going towards a future where we will have less visible widgets and controls in our applications? Seems many of the controls we pretty much takes for given has little or no use for atleast more advanced users A good example is google chrome which has much less chrome than for instance firefox or internet explorer, and I can't say that I miss my titlebar, or menu.
Let's examine: In order from most useless to more debateable: The statusbar: Almost completely superflous, indicating state and progress might be needed but it can be handled more in context (like an icon for a tab or similar) Toolbars: Why clutter the screen with features might or might not be useful for you, if the options are context-based they are better accessed through a context-menu of the entity in question Menubars: If we remove all context-based options from the menu all that's left are things like preferences, exit command like options. They could either be accessed through a "global" context-menu or a single menu-button like in office 2007 Scrollbars: Don't we all use mousewheels nowadays? The scrollbar does have a function in indicating position in current view but maybe that could be shown more discretly in some other way. The desktop: I never understood people why fuzz about their desktop, it's never visible! :) Organizing files on a desktop is generally a bad idea and launching stuff from the desktop also has better solutions. The windows taskbar/The Dock: Quicklaunch/launch options are better replaced by things like quicksilver/launchy. Taskswitching is better done through expose or something similar rather than the dock/taskbar. The only useful thing remaining is some state information like clock, network state etc. The caveat is of course that reducing clutter means hiding stuff, and that makes interfaces less accessible for beginners. But couldnt one argue that if it becomes more commonplace with interfaces like that and users make it past the initial hurdle it should make things much easier for everyone. What do you guys think? best regards -- Mattias Konradsson ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
