Beginner user interfaces should contain pointers that allow you to do
everything you can, expert user interfaces should contain everything
to make you accomplish as much as possible with as few as possible
keystrokes / mouse clicks and mouse/keyboard switches. The system
described above for expert input is a very good example, Windows'
common behaviour on me is a really bad example. Everytime I type
something I can't know what to expect since it depends on a lot of
things - my computer being slow (work computer) being one of the major
factors. Since it's slow it doesn't process events for a few seconds
causing my key strokes to be sent to the wrong application or plain
ignored. I also have to use a number of applications that were
designed in a time when the user was some after-market consideration
and where the main point was being able to keep data integrity. It can
usually keep data integrity, it crashes more than once a week and it's
horrendous to work with, pestering you with message boxes, very very
unpredictable behaviour (example: if you click the scroll bar before
it appears, you click the underlying window instead. It takes the
scroll bar about a full second to appear, so I regularly press the
button below) and being generically slow (10 minutes for an operation
seems like it's trying to keep data integrity by doing one thing at a
time - what in gods name does that do on a 2.8ghz HT computer?). I'm
usually annoyed when I get a UI that doesn't allow me to work while
it's updating the UI.

This isn't limited to Windows or obscure applications though. I run
KDE at home, when I start up I want to start gaim, xmms, kmix and
firefox. Starting them as fast as I can type doesn't work - KDE misses
a number of the ALT-F2's and newlines, causing it to complain in a
message box that it can't find gaimxmmskmix and beeping 7 times since
it can't use the characters "firefox" in that window. Going to three
websites in firefox is a disaster too - after pressing enter, ctrl-t
and www it ignores the www since that either goes to the wrong window,
it's busy or something.

Just a short rant.

On 25/01/07, Tony Smith <ajsmith@rivernet.com.au> wrote:
> > > The argument should not be CLI vs GUI, but good vs bad interface.
> >
> > There are things that you need to accomplish that are going
> > to be "obscure."  I don't see any difference between having
> > to issue an obscure CLI command vs following a obscure GUI
> > path, except that the former would seem to be a lot easier to
> > document and less prone to errors of interpretation.  GUIs
> > are a bear to document...
> >
> > BillW
>
>
> With the GUI you'll find it eventually, aka 'discoverability'.
>
> That's much better than a CLI, which is:
>
> >_
>
>
> Tony
>
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