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List:       freebsd-chat
Subject:    Re: gui design
From:       Andre Oppermann <oppermann () pipeline ! ch>
Date:       1998-09-30 16:33:44
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Wes Peters wrote:
-snip-
> Suprisingly enough, good GUI design doesn't just happen -- look at
> the violence Microsoft has done to good design.  Ugh!  And to think
> that every manager in every software company on the whole planet
> WANTS their GUI to look like Word.  The end of usability as we used
> to know it.

Thats true... Ever tried to configure M$-PROXY? That is the far the
badest GUI design I ever saw! And IE4 is not far from it... like
the whole xxx98 stuff...

> My introduction to GUI design came way back when I was helping a
> friend write an "othello" game for the Atari ST.  He worked on the
> game engine and I worked on the ST graphics part.  I had been
> following a series of columns written by one of the designers of
> the GEM ui system at Digital Research, Tim Oren.  In that series,
> Mr. Oren presented a column that was an introduction to user
> interface design.  I've managed to track down that column and
> HTML-ify it.  I've placed it on my web site at
> 
>  http://www.softweyr.com/~softweyr/gem08.html
> 
> for your reading pleasure.  The references to GEM probably won't
> help you much, but they are few and far between; the article mostly
> covers the basics of good user interface design.  The bibliography
> is an excellent guide to learning user interface design as well.

Another good book I can recommend is the "Indigo Magic User Interface
Guidelines" from Silicon Graphics. I don't know if that is online and
my version is almost three years old. This guide gives an good overview
and step-by-step instructions on how to build a GUI for an application.

The two most important rules are:

1. place the stuff where is belongs (don't put "Options" under "View"
   like in IE, put it under "Edit" like in Netscape)

2. Only one way to the setting/option (not three or more like in
Outlook)

-snip-
-- 
Andre

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