Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror has a truly spectacular example of bad UI design up on his website today. It’s so bad, in fact, that it has been dugg 1087 times. Wow. The piece of UI in question is a VB-based wrapper around the fantastically powerful Wget command line tool.
Part of being a good software developer is knowing your limits. Either copy something that’s already well designed, or have the good sense to stick to coding and leave the graphic design (ed: he actually meant interaction design) to the experts.
I must say that I have some sympathy for the dogpile that Jens Roesner, the guy who created wGetGUI (aka The Dialog), finds himself in, now, as this appears to be his first VB app, but…but…but…
It is my first Visual Basic programme and I think it gives you an easy to use Graphical User Interface (GUI) like you know from every other Windows-based programme.
Many people have held this up as a shining example of how not to design an application’s UI. So many have-and to such an extent-that I would feel redundant for making any further comments about this. However, what scares me is that Jens seems to imply that this UI is as good as that of any other Windows app. Holy cow! Let’s just take this at face value for a minute. If this really is the case (and I am willing to believe it), that is a spectacular condemnation of the state of the Windows User Experience. You would never find such things said about an equivalent application on the Mac. Ever. Period. Full-stop.
I performed a survey of Mac applications from which I could mine UI ideasgain inspiration, and I was amazed at the highly polished state of apps that are given away, let alone the ones that sell for a measly ten bucks. I rarely see the equivalent on Windows, and it makes me very sad. I’ve oft-opined that the best way for Microsoft to improve the state of Ux for third party apps on Windows is to polish the User Experiences that it ships to customers, and I feel like it is working to a certain extent. But it will take a great deal of time for this to come to fruition.
Where are the Panics, Delicious Monsters, or Chimp Softwares of the Windows ecosystem? I’m not even sure if they exist today. But I would love to be proven wrong.
What do you think are the easiest-to-use, best-looking applications on Windows? Why do you think they look and feel as good as they do? What can Microsoft do to promote the sense of craftsmanship that this software has?
2 responses so far ↓
1 Aaron Ballman // Nov 30, 2006 at 7:25 am
I think that part of the dismal state of Ux on Windows stems from the fact that it’s blindingly easy to make a horrible UI and really hard to make a reasonable one. Take a look at RAD tools like VB, REALbasic and .NET. With these higher level languages, it’s quite easy to make a working application, and trivial to make a UI. Unfortunately, that means everyone is doing it, whether they’re qualified or not.
Also, there’s a user mentality difference between the two platforms. Windows users are generally interested in solving their problems as fast as possible and so they’re more willing to let bad UI slip by without comment (assuming the app gets their job done). On the Mac however, users want to get the job done, but if it looks ugly while doing it, they’re more apt to speak up about. This is a broad generalization, of course — but having written cross platform apps for a long while, I can honestly stand by it. So I think that Win32-only products are more apt to let the UI slide because their audience allows it. Mac-only products have no such luck and are held to task more.
What can MS do about it? Probably not much since a lot of it stems from what users expect. But I think the fact that Microsoft is making more visually appealing applications (and the OS) will drive user expect the same from more products. Getting the larger ISVs to hop on board would have the same effect, I think.
2 Aaron Brethorst // Nov 30, 2006 at 9:33 am
You make an interesting point, Aaron, and remind me of something I said to William Parkhurst (the guy who invented AppKit on NeXT/OS X) recently: “we will always have a problem until doing the right thing is cheaper than doing the wrong thing.” It was in regard to a slightly different topic, but it transfers over here quite effectively, I think.
Thanks for your comments!
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