On Sunday 12 January 2003 23:24, Tim Churches wrote: > Apropos the recent discussion on GUIs versus terminal-mode interfaces, > some very thoughtful and thought-provoking notes (complete with > screenshot examples) by Richard Terry on GUI design for medical record > systems can be found at http://gnumed.net/rterry/Index.htm
Thank you. I had not seen that but agree with him. When I first saw the GUIs being produced by two of our suppliers in the UK I described them as "quadruple glazed" becuase of just that appearance of windows popping up all over the place. At the time I was working on a re-implementation of an old system and using VB3 myself, as he was, and I chose a slightly different way to approach the same problem - less uniform through the program (becuase it was re-implmenting not going from scratch and I wanted to keep things that people had been trianed to expect) but of drawing data entry controls and forms on the single window that held the main information rather than poping up another one. GUIs are super for unpredictable demands for information, and unpredictable and rare actions, but once you are into something predictable and sterotypical like prescribing or entering an immunisation or the results of an examination of a system, there is a lot of benefit from being able to type, return, type, return, type, return accept. So using a GUI to hold an interface or set of interfaces designed using the lessons learned from data-entry and from word-processing is a sensible combination approach. -- From one of the Linux desktops of Dr Adrian Midgley http://www.defoam.net/
