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.

Thanks to a submission at Slashdot, I became aware of some recent efforts to prototype a new UI for the OpenOffice.org suite. Since OpenOffice.org isn't exactly known for having the nicest UI around, I thought we might see some significant improvements.

Unfortunately, that does not seem to be the case. I think this proposed UI is quite a step backwards, and not just because of its similarities to the "Fluent user interface" of Microsoft Office 2007.

My main complaint is that it's quite wasteful of space. It looks like about a quarter of the window space is consumed by the new toolbar or ribbon. This is partially due to the use of larger buttons. Functionality as simple as copying and pasting ends up using significant screen real estate.

So while we have larger monitors these days, we don't actually make better use of the greater screen area that they offer. Instead, it is wasted on unnecessarily large buttons and ribbons. And with smaller-screened netbook computers rapidly gaining popularity, even the slightest bit of wasted screen space becomes a hindrance.

For power users, a design of that sort is typically a step backwards when it comes to increasing their productivity. As some CAD software packages have shown, it often makes sense to get rid of mouse-based interaction. Some go so far as to offer a command prompt built into the bottom of the window, to allow for an experienced user to very rapidly interact with the software, and minimize the role of toolbars. Maybe this is an approach that OpenOffice.org should investigate.

Even for average or casual users, that sort of a design often proves to be confusing. Even now, a few years after Office 2007 has become widely used, there are many people I work with who just don't like it. While similar functionality is grouped, such a grouping may not be natural for all users. Such users have to repeatedly search through tab after tab, looking for how to perform the action they wish to perform. Their productivity ends up dropping significantly, as what should be simple tasks end up taking 10 seconds or more to perform.

I hope that the OpenOffice.org developers don't go ahead and adopt a design like the one that has been proposed. I'd rather see the UI left as it is for the time being, with more emphasis put towards improving the performance of OpenOffice.org, as well as reducing its often-significant memory footprint. Changes like those will, I think, help users out more than such a radical UI change, especially one that itself doesn't really bring any improvement.

One thing I've noticed getting more and more common is the use of survey hovers on the Web sites of a variety of companies. A typical scenario involves me going to their site to read up on one or more of their products, only to encounter a hover popup requesting me to take some survey, usually about the Web site itself. A good example of this is on Intel's Web site:

These survey hovers are too intrusive, especially on commercial sites. When I'm focused on finding the best product to buy, I want to be seeing product specifications and prices. I don't want to be distracted with survey participation requests.

Now, I could always take the survey, and hope there's some area where I can add my own comments and explain my annoyance with the survey popups. But somehow I think that my participation in the survey would be misconstrued to mean that the survey hovers are in fact working, and getting people to take the survey, ignoring the fact that the user suggestion is to drop the survey hovers. So I'll write about it here instead, and hope that some marketing folks see this posting.

I've got nothing against the surveys themselves, and can understand the need for customer feedback. I just really dislike the in-your-face approach of these hovers. From my perspective, they do more harm than whatever good they might bring. When on a commercial Web site, these hovers distract me (and probably others, as well) from focusing on the company's products, which can negatively affect my purchase of said products.

I just finished reading Marcus Cavanaugh's recent The Cross-Platform Myth article. The first two-thirds or so of it are quite correct. He points out that when an application is developed for two or more desktop environments that differ in some pretty fundamental ways, like Windows and Mac OS X, the result usually isn't too great. The app likely won't fit in well on one or more of the platforms, which can lead to usability problems, and may even result in users not adopting the software.

At the very end of the article, however, he writes the following:

The only acceptable cross-platform UI toolkit lives in your web browser. If you want your application to work on both Windows and OS X, create a web application. In the browser, you can freely design a custom user interface that won't seem out of place on any operating system. Users understand that web sites operate under different rules.

I find this reasoning quite absurd. First of all, Web browsers are some of the worst-conforming desktop applications around. Early in the article, he even mentions Mozilla Firefox as an example of a cross-platform application that just doesn't fit in anywhere. But Firefox isn't the only browser guilty of this. The Windows port of Apple's Safari Web browser clearly doesn't behave like a typical Windows app, either. And to some extent, the same even goes for Opera.

So not only are Web browsers themselves perfect examples of UIs that target the lowest common denominator, but the environment that they present is that very same philosophy taken to the extreme. The only consistency is that there's inconsistency. The built-in UI controls or widgets are extremely limited. And everyone who has even had to do a minor amount of Web development knows that the environment differs significantly between the different browsers.

When it comes to Web applications, it's not that they "won't seem out of place on any operating system." Rather, it's that they won't fit in with any existing desktop environment. In a sense, Web applications are typically so horrible in that respect that most users can't even recognize how bad these applications are. For some odd reason, users tend to use confusing, inconsistent or poor-quality Web applications far longer than they would the desktop equivalents.

The situation likely won't improve. Like Marcus mentions in a footnote in his article, RIAs only make the bad situation even worse. They allow for further inconsistency in an already inconsistent environment. And the other "innovations" we are seeing are just poor attempts to bring existing desktop application concepts within the browser. The canvas element and O3D are good examples of this. They both pale in comparison even to the cross-platform, desktop-equivalent abstractions of libraries and APIs like wxWidgets, GTK+ and OpenGL.

In fact, the Web development community has even gone so far as to try and abstract away the variety of programming languages we have available with a typical desktop environment. We are stuck using JavaScript, which ends up bringing us the worst of all worlds, like the Web application development environment itself.

All in all, those of us who have developed real desktop applications for years and year end up being quite disappointed with what Web development offers, or more correctly, all that it doesn't offer. We've thrown out everything we learned during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, only to replace it with half-baked, browser-based "alternatives" over the past decade. We've essentially taken a huge step backwards, amplifying the very problems that Marcus spoke out against during the first part of his article.

Recently, a new version of the freshmeat.net Web site was made public. For those who may not be aware, it is (or at least was) one of the best software directories out there. Its emphasis on open source software makes it particularly useful. But until this new version, it also presented a very clean interface that was practical to use. Unfortunately, I think we have lost much of this usability with this latest version of the site.

Let's start with one thing the previous design of the Freshmeat site did right. Notice that it uses the entire width of the browser window. This is very useful for those of us with larger monitors or those of us with higher screen resolutions. While we often want to restrict the width of a prose-based Web site to improve readability, as in the case of blog postings and news articles, I don't think it works so well in the case of Freshmeat's new design. Its width is currently 960px, which leaves literally inches of wasted space on even just a 22-inch widescreen monitor at a resolution of 1680x1050.

The image below compares the old design at the top, above the red line, to the new design at the bottom of the image, demonstrating how the old site made more effective use of screen space:

On the old design's main page, along the left side and throughout the center of the page, we get a listing of the most recent software releases. This very quickly tells us the name of the project with the new release, the new release version number or identifier, when the release notice was posted, a summary describing the software, a summary describing the changes, as well as other information like categories the software falls under, its license, and relevant URLs. We get access to a lot of information very quickly. This is something else the new design isn't as effective at doing.

As an example, we can look at the entry for the NorfelloCMMS OS 2.0.0 release, made on November 22, 2007. Under the old design, it looked like:

With the new design it now looks like:

One thing to notice is the different date format. The previous design mentioned the release year, which is absent from the new design. As is shown by this example, it's important to show the year, as we may be looking through the archives at releases several years old.

Another difference is that of the length of the description. This is perhaps the worst aspect of the new design. Notice that with the new design, it's truncated after a couple of lines, with it necessary to click the "more.." link to see the full description. On the other hand, the old design provided the full description. While something can be said for writing short, concise descriptions, sometimes it isn't possible to do that effectively in the mere 200 characters that the new design seems to allocate to project descriptions. A truncated description like that is more awkward to work with than a description that is slightly too long.

Although not visible in the NorfelloCMMS OS 2.0.0 release example, it looks like the change descriptions are truncated as well under the new design. The old design displayed the full changelog, without truncating it and forcing the user to click on a link to see the rest of the changes.

Where available, a screenshot is shown for each release. Unfortunately, on the main page, the screenshot thumbnail is nearly useless. They're just too small to be of any practical value at 90px by 70px. Unfortunately, clicking on the thumbnail brings you to the project page, which has only a slightly larger, but nearly as useless, 133px by 100px image. It takes yet another click on that thumbnail to finally display a larger, somewhat comprehensible, version of the screenshot.

One other useful feature of the old release entries was the hierarchical categories. For example, the NorfelloCMMS OS 2.0.0 entry was listed under "Information Management :: Issue Tracking", "Office/Business" and "Office/Business :: Scheduling" with the old design. With the new design, it's under the single-level "Office/Business", "Information Management" and "Scheduling" tags. I personally found the old hierarchy more organized than the new scheme.

The greater usage of images, in the form of per-release screenshots and gravatars, has also increased the size of a request for the various pages. Although it's not a perfect example because it's an archived version of the page, the November 22, 2007 release listing comes in at a mere 48 KB, according to Firebug. The new listing for that date comes in at 426 KB. Although not a huge deal in these days of widespread broadband Internet access, that does translate to the difference between a site that feels snappy, and a site that feels slow.

The above highlights just a few of the problems I've noticed with the new site. I've tried to give it several days of use, to see if it'll grow on me, but so far it hasn't. Some of the more serious issues, such as the truncation of the descriptions and changelogs, would be relatively easy to fix. Others, such as the new tagging scheme, may be more difficult. And although I probably won't stop using Freshmeat altogether, as it is a valuable resource, its usability has taken a hit for me.