OSNews

It's one thing to talk about interface. It's another to do it.

The problem with UI is simple: you have to put up or shut up.

If you have an interface idea, implement it. UI design isn't like architecture, where people can become famous for designing thought experiments (building on paper). UI design is putting it to the metal and driving it around.

It's a lot harder than you think. Look at the iPod: it wasn't the first mp3 player on the market, but it was by far the cleanest and easiest to use. Why? Because you didn't have to have a very sophisticated mental model to use it. In fact, you could pretty much figure out how to use it in under 10 minutes.

It's the same with cellphones. Cellphone makers made them work just like a phone, which (if you know anything about cellphone technology) was pretty amazing. They're going off the reservation a bit these days, but the concept still holds: if you can allow the user to use familiar mental models, you can take great leaps forward.

The question today is "is that still valid?" In another generation or two the easy mental models will be (and probably are now) the desktop, windows, documents, apps, etc. Maybe UI can stop designing with the computer illiterate in mind and start taking advantage of the new computer fluency.

What does that mean for UI? Who knows...but maybe games will lead the way. Pretty much every game these days has its own unique UI, one that requires a learning curve to climb. One neat thing that games do to make this easier is "tutorial mode", where it walks you through the UI conventions that the game uses.

Those are really neat, and they work pretty well. I'd suggest that if you really wanted to do something new, you need a tutorial mode (create a document, find something, etc) so new users can ramp up more quickly. Go through the basics, and leave the users with enough so they can poke around themselves afterwards.

The other thing to do is figure out what users really do, and how your UI would make it easier for them to do it. Do people really spend a lot of time searching for documents? To read the press, it's the #1 user need. In reality, is that true? Does file navigation really matter that much? Does anyone really give a crap about file metadata?

The UI field is really still in its first or second generation of iteration. Not everyone appreciated the Kai's Power Tools interface, but it was out-of-the-box. The same could be said for most games.

But one thing remains: you can't make any progress until your UI is used and abused by users.