[LINK] Are GUI design standards no longer relevanr?

[Fernando Cassia]

On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 1:07 AM, Fernando Cassia <fcassia at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Sun, Jan 17, 2010 at 1:01 AM, <grove at zeta.org.au> wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 17 Jan 2010, Ivan Trundle wrote:
>>
>>
>>> On 17/01/2010, at 2:17 PM, Fernando Cassia wrote:
>>>
>>>  But then comes this new generation of bold graphics designers, full of
>>>> ideas
>>>> (and full of themselves) wanting to "change the world".
>>>>
>>>
>>> Of course, the previous generation of bold computer programmers knew
>>> better, and were not full of themselves nor did they want to change the
>>> world.
>>>
>>> At the risk of sounding like a Gen-Y'er, I'd suggest that we simply 'get
>>> over it'.
>>>
>>
>> The problem is, many of the people who are designing these interfaces are
>> doing it for themselves or at least their peer group.   There is a lot of
>> hubris in this sort of work.   I have seen some code recently that seems to
>> be a case of "look how clever I am" when creating or overriding a function,
>> instead of making something that is easier to maintain.
>>
>> In my Universe, if I see a monkey wrench icon, it means I have to fix
>> something, not configure it.    I don't suppose anyone reads the OSF style
>> guide for app design anymore?   Too many big words....
>>
>>
>> rachel
>>
>
Thanks.

By Googling around, look what I found, someone echoing my words, one year
ago, in a much more articulate way... perhaps because he´s a native English
speaker, and I´m not...:

-----------------
5. Give me menus!

There are no normal menus in Chrome. Menus in a menu bar at the top is
important. It makes programs look alike and hence give the same look and
feel to different applications on the computer. If you have used one
application you'll know how to use the others. Cars work the same: Steering
wheel, accelerator and brake pedal are in the same place in all cars and
work in the same way. Yes Eleanor, also in French cars. Nowadays.

User interface design principle: Use menus in the standard way for your
desktop environment. In this way the user does not need to learn a special
way of dealing with your application.

Well, Google Chrome does not have menus, at least not in the usual place, in
the menu bar. Menus do not only give consistency across applications, they
are also quite useful. They give the action space of the application, i.e.
the sum of all things you can do in the application.

User interface design principle: Menus help users understand what they can
do in the application. Many people browse through the menus to get a feel
for what they can do.

There are more things to say about menus and muscle memory but I will leave
it at that for now.

-----------------

Top 6 design errors in Google Chrome

http://jorgenmodin.net/index_html/archive/2009/01/19/6-design-errors-in-google-chrome---review/view

It´s amazing that we both referred to cars as an example of "innovation but
with standarization". And I swear to God I never ran across his piece before
now. Perhaps it´s true that "great minds think alike"?. :-)

FC