Universal GUI

[Jan Schenkel]

--- Dan Shafer <dan at shafermedia.com> wrote:
> [snip]
> 
> Alternative design: Apple's designers should not
> disable the checkbox; 
> rather they should hide the option until and unless
> the user makes a 
> selection from the popup menu that should enable the
> user to change the 
> checkbox setting. Then and only then the checkbox
> should appear. This 
> is part of another key UI design concept:
> progressive discovery. Only 
> show the user as much of the UI as is needed to
> accomplish the 
> immediate objective. Several Claris products 15
> years ago, for which 
> the UI was designed by one world-class designer,
> demonstrated this 
> brilliantly. Why should I even have to look at the
> checkbox and have it 
> clutter my use of the program if it's not relevant
> to my current 
> situation? No value. No reason for it to be there.
> 

Hi Dan,

The company I work for has been producing
accounting/administrative applications for 18 years on
Mac and Windows, and we've experimented quite a bit
with our interface, both in terms of ease-of-use and
of error-avoidance.

Now we've settled on a design where the user sees all
the fields and option menus and checkboxes, but
they're all disabled until the user enters 'Edit' mode
by clicking the 'Edit button', then they're enabled
until the user clicks the 'Save' or 'Revert' buttons.
During edit mode, other buttons such as Previous and
Next are disabled.

An earlier version would only display fields and
buttons when you were in the right mode, but our users
found it quite disconcerting that fields warped into
option menus and that buttons would suddenly appear
and disappear.

Maybe it's because they were accountants *grin* but
progressive disclosure isn't always the answer.

Jan Schenkel.

=====
"As we grow older, we grow both wiser and more foolish at the same time."  (La Rochefoucauld)

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