unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Evan Huus wrote on 27/07/11 17:21:
>
> On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 7:39 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas
>...
>> This is what Havoc Pennington called "the misguided 'hmm, maybe I can
>> autogenerate my GUI' stage".
>> <http://www106.pair.com/rhp/free-software-ui.html> Artificial
>> intelligence researchers work on many things, but I'm not aware of
>> any who are working on the problem of making an auto-generated
>> settings interface anywhere near as understandable as a
>> human-designed one.
> 
> One project that is already sort of doing this is Wireshark.
> Individual protocols (TCP, IP, etc.) register their settings with very
> simple API calls along the lines of
> 
> register_boolean(&bool, "Name", "Description").
> 
> Wireshark does the rest behind the scenes.
> 
> The result is certainly usable, although probably not as usable as it
> could be. They're located under Edit->Preferences->Protocols in
> Wireshark if anyone actually wants to take a look.
>...

That's a great example of how terrible it would be if applied to every
application.

To be fair, there are several mistakes in the Wireshark presentation
that could be fixed even while keeping it automated: checkbox labels are
to the left when they should be to the right, numeric fields accept
non-numeric characters, 1-of-many options are presented using radio
menus even when there is plenty of room for radio buttons instead, the
controls use tooltips when text-based controls never should, and so on.

But there are many parts of that interface that just couldn't be
designed well without a human. The "ASN1" panel, for example, includes:
*   three fields for entering multiple port values, with no help in
    separating them
*   labels for those three fields which are mostly redundant with each
    other, because the presentation engine can't know how to (or even
    that it should) factor out the common words
*   a field for entering a file path, with no button for opening a file
    picker
*   a checkbox for "Show full names", with no hint of what the
    alternative is.

It actually reminds me a lot of WordPress 1.1, which also had an
auto-generated settings interface. I designed a manual layout, and Matt
Mullenweg implemented the redesign for version 1.2. It's far from the
only reason WordPress then became wildly popular ... but it probably
helped just a little bit.

- -- 
mpt
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