Thursday, October 26, 2006

On Interface Design

It seems that taking this design class is really aggravating me. It seems that some of the people in the class think that history is not important when gathering needs requirements, i.e., research. I'm sorry, but that is bullshit. There's a couple of kinds of history when you're thinking about design. There's backwards compatibility, where you take into account what people are used to. This is why we've had the desktop/window paradigm for so long. This is why I still have a panel on my Linux® desktop that looks a lot like the Windows™ taskbar.

On a related note, it really pisses me off when people call me too technically-minded. Sure, I'm mainly a technical person, but when I think about user interfaces, there are three factors that are always in my mind (in this order):

  1. Is it too complicated?
  2. Is it somewhat recognizable to the user so that s/he can use it relatively well?
  3. Can I code this (in a reasonable amount of time)?