Pinderkent

Early last month I gave my opinion about some OpenOffice.org UI prototypes. In short, I wasn't too impressed. Unfortunately, we now see similarly flawed ideas coming out of the Mozilla Firefox camp with their "Windows Theme Revamp" project.

Take, for instance, this proposed design for the Firefox 4.0 UI. I do realize that it's a very early proposal, and will likely be subject to much change. However, it looks to me like it's heading in a very bad direction from the very start.

My main complain is the complete lack of consistency we're seeing. Functionality that was previous organized in a sensible and accessible manner within menus and toolbars is now spread out haphazardly throughout the top of the window. We have buttons to the left of the browser tabs, along with some to the right. Within the buttons to the right of the browser tabs, one button looks like a browser tab, while the other doesn't. We have various kinds of buttons around the URL bar, and some within the URL bar itself. Then there are what seem to be "Page" and "Tools" dropdown menus at the right-hand side. While likely similar in functionality, these dropdowns and buttons just aren't graphically consistent with one another.

Something that recent UI designers seem to forget these days is the benefit of textual labels. Traditional menus often do a good job of using text to explain the different actions that are available. These days, however, we get icons that probably were descriptive to the designer, but don't mean a damn thing to many of the users stuck using their design. At a glance, I have no idea what clicking on the hat-shaped thing next to the "+" tab in the tab bar would do.

Another uncertain aspect of the design is what clicking on the button to the left of the "Page" dropdown would do, the one with the picture of a book containing a star. I assume it involves bookmarks, but would that bookmark the current page, or would it just expand the dropdown? That isn't clear from just looking at the button. It also isn't clear what the relationship is between that button and the star within the URL bar is. Contrast this to the "Bookmarks" menu of Firefox 3.0, which by its label clearly indicates that it involves bookmarks, and has a very clear "Bookmark This Page" item at the very top.

I'm not sure what drives these UI designers to create these completely inconsistent and unfriendly user interfaces. It's almost as though they're trying too hard. They're making changes and breaking with tradition not to truly improve the user experience, but rather just to be "different". And that's not the way to go. It's good to be different when those differences bring some benefit. Unfortunately, we just don't see that with the differences proposed in the recent OpenOffice.org and Firefox 4.0 design proposals. As a user of both pieces of software, I hope that these design proposals don't become reality. They'd seriously hinder the usability of those applications.