UI Feedback Wanted

[Uli Kusterer]

On 03.09.2007, at 03:37, Alan Smith wrote:
> Good question… I don't really know… I can't see why a user would have
> more than one account for each service (How many del.icio.us accounts
> do you have?) but Pukka has this functionality so I thought someone
> must use it. If you don't think many people have more than one account
> per service and that including such functionality is a waste of time
> and effort please let me know.

  If you have access to the WWDC session videos, there's at least two  
sessions where John Geleynse talks about usability, and how to lay  
out a GUI. One of the things he outlines there that you may want to  
take to heart is that screen real estate is limited, and you should  
lay out your UI (and particularly your main window's UI) by  
importance and frequency of use. I.e., put the stuff users think  
about the most when using your app (i.e. the main metaphor) into the  
main window, and make it the biggest item, then pick the next most  
important concept, and go on like that.

  One of the examples is iTunes, where he says that songs are most  
important, so make it a huge song list. Then people want to organize  
their stuff in lists of songs (which also include devices like iPods,  
which, after all, can also be seen as lists of songs since they're  
containers for songs), so that's the second list. Then the next most  
important things are a few buttons with the most common actions,  
which are placed near the items they apply to, and since iTunes is a  
Music player and can be collapsed into a minimal play-control window,  
he also puts in a big "what's playing now" area.

  The rest of the stuff he deems as less important and he dumps them  
into the menus, and into secondary windows.

  You should do the same. Don't just take every feature and dump it  
in a window. Think about who is going to use your app, and how. Then  
make sure common actions are really quick and easy to do. Imagine  
iTunes required you to open a separate window and click a button to  
skip a track there and close it again, every time a song came up that  
you don't want to hear right now. On the other end of the scale, how  
often do you enter your iTMS login, or change the equalizer settings,  
or specify whether the mini player should float on top or not? Those  
are things you probably set once and then leave that way, or at most  
change every blue moon, so it's OK to require a few more clicks to do  
those.

  If one of your competitors has a particular feature, don't just add  
it willy-nilly. That's not good business sense. Either it's a good  
feature, and you want to add it for a reason, then you'll know how  
important it is. Or the author of that app made a mistake: In that  
case you don't want to copy his mistakes. Instead, you want to make  
sure your app distinguishes itself by not having a useless feature,  
and take advantage of being able to simplify your UI that way. And  
then you have a leg up on the competition, because you aren't  
confusing your users with things they'll never use.

  Find out how people use that feature, and you'll know how to  
implement it.

Cheers, M. Uli Kusterer

--
My blog: www.zathras.de/blog.htm

// Things I've eaten today ----------
"One sausage"
"Cereals in milk"
"Noodles with tomatoes, tomato sauce, ground meat,
herbs, salt and pepper"