User Interfaces

Modern Computer and Phone User Interfaces

User interfaces - what happened to ergonomics? It's been replaced by PRETTY GRAPHICS, TRICKY SHORTCUTS, and CONSTANT CHANGES.

Graphics user interfaces reached their peak usefulness around Windows XP. A simple two (or three) dimensional menu at the top of the window. After learning an application's menu, you could find a needed function quickly and easily. Some of the menu items had keyboard shortcuts, noted on the menu. The right mouse button invoked a menu of often used functions.

Office 2007, I think, introduced the ribbon and a horrible new interface for graphs in Excel. The ribbon is just a funny looking free form menu where the items are not clearly delineated. And they moved everything. I wasted hours searching for function that I could get to very quickly in previous versions. And on the Excel graphs, you have to specify a myriad of details that defaulted nicely in earlier versions. And for what improvement in function? NOTHING.

Icons - as often suggested, a picture is worth a thousand words. But an icon is worth about one word - IF you can figure it out. Why do people think it's easier to understand the meaning of a simplified American house than the word "home"? Especially now that the word home is easily replaced by the equivalent in whatever language has been specified by the user. Why does three horizontal bars mean a menu? Why does a picture of a globe mean notifications? Why did we advance from the abacus to the computer, just to regress from words to hieroglyphs.

And how do you help or get help over the phone - how do you specify an icon by word? "Click the menu icon." "Which one is that?" "The one with three horizontal bars." "Why didn't you just make a button named menu?"

Why do people like grid menus? It is much easier to scan a list menu than a grid - much less eye movement.

Menu choices should not move unless specified by the user. I expect to find a given menu item at the same place on the menu every time I open the menu. If the menu choices move (based on how often they a used), they are not where I expect them and I have to search. The time saved by having a menu choice at the top versus bottom of the menu, given ordinary mouse control of the cursor, is essentially zero. Worse, when you are looking for an unknown second level menu choice, and the top level menu changes, it is very confusing to do an exhaustive search of the menus. This is a regular occurrence on tabbed menus with two lines of tabs, because typically an upper tab becomes a lower tab when chosen.

Hover action - this is web page issue. When the cursor is over an ad, name, etc. the browser will display information about the ad, name, etc. Naturally it does that right on top of what I am currently reading. I didn't specifically put the cursor on the ad, I just shoved it aside to get it away from what I was reading. Web authors - please don't interrupt me when I don't ask for it. Hovering is not asking for anything.

Gestures on touch screens make fine shortcuts for those who want to take the time to learn them (and then relearn when things change in the next version of the software). But for those who haven't seen the documentation, there is no indication that a gesture is needed and, sometimes, no way to invoke a function without the gesture. You should have access to all function via menus.

And you should be able to turn off gestures. Google Play for books - I often try to turn the page and accidentally do some unknown gesture that magnifies the text about 5x. Then pinch to get it back to the normal size. What a pain. In Dolphin browser (on average, way better than Chrome or Firefox) I will scroll down a long page, only to find that the last scroll sends the page off the screen, irretrievable. Then I have to reload the page. I don't know what gestures I've done to cause this and I can't find an option to turn it off.

Squeezable sides, pressure sensitive touch screen buttons - how are you going to communicate to the user what these do and how are you going to handle situations where they are invoked accidentally? And why are they needed?

Blinking cursors, blinking anything on a screen, are very distracting. Some people (me for one) cannot concentrate on an application's function while something is blinking on the display. It is an ongoing series of interruptions. I can't edit text while a cursor is blinking. I can't play a game while an advertisement is blinking.

Full white on all displays that I have ever seen is painful. But if you turn full white down, the other colors become too dark. There needs to be a way to darken full white easily.

Is there anything more idiotic than the Windows Registry? Take all of the user settings for every program on the computer and put them in one place - incomprehensible, uneditable, unmovable. When you update the operating system or the registry gets corrupted ALL of your settings are gone. Is it any wonder that people don't want to update the operating system or switch computers - it takes days before you are up and running again. This replaced INI files - attached to their application, editable with any text editor, easily scanned to find and set available options, easily saved and copied for use with new versions of the program. Why did such a simple and effective system get replaced with such garbage?

Mice could be vastly improved, but no one bothers. How often would you like to move the cursor only vertically or horizontally? A simple button on the mouse could be set to handle that. How often do you want a very low cursor movement to mouse movement ratio for detailed cursor movement? A simple button on the mouse could be set to handle that. Why don't computer companies give us useful function instead of useless features?

Laptop computer touch pads - why are they in the middle? I'm right handed - I want it on the right. Other people would benefit from having it on the left. It can't be hard to make it movable or optional. Instead, it sits in the middle, on EVERY laptop computer that you can buy, and causes HELL from accidental touches.

And most important of all - STOP CHANGING THINGS for no good reason. Why do you think that I want to relearn a device's user interface every year? Maybe you can speed up the interface by 10% (or maybe not). But it is likely that I will spend more than that learning the new interface. Why do you think we still have QWERTY keyboards? It's not because it's the most efficient. It's because we don't want to learn a new interface. (We even use it on those horrible little phone keyboards where touch typing is impossible.) Why don't you spend your time fixing bugs and filling in basic function instead of changing the user interface?