24 Apr
2015
24 Apr
'15
9:47 a.m.
On 23.04.2015 22:59, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
And in the case I mentioned (flight deck displays and
user interfaces)
were are talking about*specialists* in ergonomics who have conducted
a not one but a series of studies and experiments involving a large
group of*expert* users and costing tons of money. And the result is
quite different. So whom do you think I should believe ?
Writing a letter sitting safely at a desk leads to slightly different
requirements for a UI than piloting an airplane ...
You do not seriously believe common aspects of mainstream desktop
environments and core applications like the behavior of radio buttons,
checkboxes, menus, dialogs and so on came to be without many rounds of
research and refinement, do you?
There may admittedly be a problem with cargo-cult guideline writing,
copying without taking first principles into account. Plus the people
now working at Microsoft, Apple or Gnome and KDE are at risk of
forgetting some of the things the GUI pioneers already understood.
Now in intensity and information load, applications like Blender or
Ardour may come closer to a cockpit than a spreadsheet application does.
But I guess the glass cockpits, just the screens, are not meant for
direct manipulation, which surely influences the design. Centralized
pure display combined with a shitload of buttons and doodads do not lend
themselves as a model for a multi-purpose computer UI.
--
Thorsten Wilms
thorwil's design for free software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com/