Usuability vs. Fetish
I see a lot of interface designs lately that have this glossy look to them. I think this gained a lot of popularity on the Apple platform with Aqua and then more recently with Vista's Aero interface. There's some nice stuff about these interfaces, I have to admit. But I'm really finding them overrated, and honestly, rather fetishistic. Let's take an example...
This is a beautiful screenshot. It's got a great esthetic appeal. It's nice and trim. But I think this is an effect more that it's sparsely populated with data than because of it's design. Does it really serve the user better? Let's break it down...
1) The whole object has a drop shadow around it. Does this serve even a mneumonic purpose? Can I put something behind it? If I move something to that part of the screen, will this stay on top in a higher z-index? If so, great. But I suspect it doesn't.
2) What does this icon mean? At first I thought those might have been some kind of priority indicator, but in that case, we would assume that the ones on the to-do would be ranking. Is there a cultural meaning behind blue, blue and red as a priority color series, instead of the more common green, yellow, red? Or are these just arbitrary, rounded, drop-shadowed bullets?
3) There's an etched line between every entry. While this looks good with 3 entries, what happens when I have 15 or 20? That's a lot of strong horizontal interruption. Ever worn a shirt with horizontal stripes? It works if you're a fashion model. It doesn't you're horizontally gifted. The moral of the story: when it comes to horizontal division, size matters.
4) The text is embossed. While this is a nice decoration for headers, what's going to happen to readability here when my appointment is listed as: Meeting with the Very Large Corporation of America to discuss possibilites of total interface overhaul on all intranet applications? Do you think the embossed text will scale well, or will I start to lose legibility due to crowding? Note that this also means we have light text on a dark background, which becomes harder to read from projected light sources (like your screen) very quickly. You have to bold face it to get clean rendering, as they've done here.
5) What does this button do? Yeah, I realize it probably has a tool tip in real life. But is that not an ambiguous symbol? It looks like the RECORD button on a cassette deck, but I really doubt that's the intent. (Actually, it looks like the CUE button on a high-end mixer -- but that makes even less sense, unless they're trying to make a pun with QUEUE.)
So when we see something like this, have we seen something with improved usability? Or something that's just a fetish for pretty screens?
Don't get me wrong, I love pretty screens. I long for pretty screens. I want my visuals to look like a cross between Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, but when it comes to software, it's definitely more important that it has a good personality. And maybe a nice sense of humor.
Comments
Posted by Mika Heinonen At 08:15:22 PM On 03/23/2007 |
Posted by Mika Heinonen At 08:12:21 PM On 03/23/2007 |
Designing a screen to match colours by colour depth (e.g Green, light blue and white) can make a screen easier to read because they don't cause our eyes to automatically refocus because of different colour depths. Traffic lights are designed to exploit this visual effect.
Colours are also highly cultural. For example wedding dresses are white in western cultures but draditionally red in chinese weddings. Although with global media coverage many of these cultural differences are melding into a global culture.
Colour perception also varies between men and women and more so at different times of the lunal cycle.
Even fonts such as Helvetica have a strong cultural connotation.
You also need to design for the differences between on-line and printed output.
Posted by Ian Randall At 06:47:14 AM On 03/24/2007 |
I just want to differentiate from the esthetics of the glossy interface from the functional improvement of trim information presentation. Too many people confuse sexy with good.
Posted by Nathan T. Freeman At 04:03:28 PM On 03/23/2007 |
Ask yourself why people love the ipod menus? They have NO GLOSS. But they work, are minimilistic, and give you just what you need.
That was the point.
Posted by Anthony Iannotta At 03:45:22 PM On 03/23/2007 |
Posted by Markus Koller At 08:10:56 AM On 03/26/2007 |