Jason Bassford wrote:
>...
> > Such cheat sheets are the hallmark of poor user interface.
>
> It's an interesting dilemma. If you put all of the "cheat"
> information into the UI then you end up with a wildly unwieldly UI due
> to its size. Nobody would be able to use if effectively. But if you
> make a very streamlines UI that's easy to look at you necessarily lose
> much of the information that would be needed to use it properly. I
> don't think there's any way of satisfying both requirements at the
> same time (complete and streamlined).
Yes. This is one aspect of the perennial tradeoff between learnability
and usability. Interface design gurus like Bruce Tognazinni and Jef
Raskin like to dance around the existence of this tradeoff -- arguing
that in many cases, you can find designs which are both more learnable
*and* more usable than whatever you have currently. Which is usually
true, but that just pushes the tradeoff further out; it doesn't stop it
from existing.
There are several places in Mozilla where an excess of instructional
goop (often caused by a tech writer getting over-excited) has gotten in
the way of producing what I like to call `the invisible interface' -- an
interface which is so good that you don't even notice it's there.
Perhaps the worst example can be found in the mere existence of `Account
Central' (the display you see in the combined thread and message panes
in mail/news when a mail or news account is selected in the folder
pane). Other examples include the Account Settings window, the bookmark
properties window, the bookmarks manager itself, and the Password
Manager. There were quite a few more examples in mail/news, but H�kan
Waara has fixed up many of them in the past few months.
>...
> Thank you! This was immensely helpful and the first clear
> indication I've had that there are well thought-out alternatives to
> the keyword issue that will still help the underlying situation. A
> completely refreshing change from negative comments without any
> positives.
>
> Of course, you know I had to ask: Is anybody working on
> implementing these changes to the system?
Of course not. The resulting increase in productivity for the Mozilla
Project as a whole would be too great. Anyone who tries to implement
such changes mysteriously disappears.
--
Matthew `mpt' Thomas, Mozilla UI Design component default assignee thing
<http://mozilla.org/>
