What makes a good UI good?

Serious question.

When one considers the number of drastic changes that Windows, Ubuntu, Android etc undergo with each major revision, the point is worth considering. What makes a good user interface, and why?

When one considers the number of drastic changes that Windows, Ubuntu, Android etc undergo with each major revision, the point is worth considering. What makes a good user interface, and why?

Consistency (same system actions deriving from same keypress/gui button across the OS and derivative applications),
Stability (not forever changing without good reason),
Slickness (prod button for action get action swiftly)

Windows and MS apps tend¹ to tick the first box and fail on the other two.

Linux tends to lose the plot on all three, probably because too much of the visual is open to customisation and the people who produce the custom bits aren’t paying attention to the rules of the game or how bloated their code is getting.

RISC OS tends to tick all the boxes, but misses out on the extent – shortage of keyboard shortcuts for regular actions being one. OK RO is mouse/menu centric but sometimes the keyboard can be faster and easier. We’re missing a few tricks.

I think the main analysis mental viewpoint needs to be:

1. Did I like that? if yes proceed, if no abort.
2. Is it ‘bling’? if no proceed, if yes abort.

OK how many features came through the filter?

¹ I say “tend” because some just say FU to the windows convention of Ctrl-F being find among other annoyances.

OK RO is mouse/menu centric but sometimes the keyboard can be faster and easier.

Yes, that’s a fair point. There is also the time of the context switch between leaving the keyboard and reaching for the mouse, and vice versa.

OK how many features came through the filter?

;-) Unfortunately “like” and “bling” are subjective. So for any given feature, there will be somebody who will tell you it’s the most important change in user interfaces since the invention of the pointer… and if they person is also one of the developers…

Unfortunately “like” and “bling” are subjective. So for any given feature, there will be somebody who will tell you it’s the most important change in user interfaces since the invention of the pointer… and if they person is also one of the developers…

Indeed so. I phrased the sequence the way I did to provoke reaction, and seem to have got very little.

OK maybe if I try a different version.

I think the main analysis mental viewpoint needs to be:

1. Did that actually do anything useful? if no don’t bother programming that, if yes proceed
2. Did I like that? if yes proceed, if no make it a non-default option.
3. Is it ‘bling’? if no proceed, if yes abort.

OK how many features came through the filter?

I’m persisting with the ‘bling’ because I find things like the swirly paper for ms windows file transfers to be totally unnecessary ‘bling’ that actually interferes with the required process¹ and I’d like a handy tag to identify these things when someone proposes them.

It would be interesting to see whether others actually have any variation from that basic sequence and how many of the “missing features” they have on their personal wish list make it through the sequence.

It may also be interesting to run a critique like that on various other OS User Interface offerings.

¹ It would almost be acceptable if:

My basic criteria for the quality of a UI:
#1. Every user action is followed immediately by an acknowledgement.
#2. Every change in the display not triggered by a user action must explain what has caused it.
Multiprocessing makes these criteria hard to satisfy. RISC OS has an advantage because responses are more immediate. I prefer drag-n-drop to clipboards precisely because most clipboard implementations give insufficient visual confirmation. Rule 2 is broken by the blizzard of pop-ups that interfere with using a tablet. Nothing should appear on the screen that has not had the user’s permission to do so; though one can argue about what that means.

I’m persisting with the ‘bling’ because I find things like the swirly paper for ms windows file transfers to be totally unnecessary ‘bling’ that actually interferes with the required process

The swirly paper wouldn’t be a bad thing if it in any way resembled what was going on. But when the paper is flying from here to there and you can see the transfer stall, you know something isn’t right.
Still, I would rather keep the swirly paper and lose the abysmal estimation of remaining time that sees nothing wrong with bouncing from 25 seconds to 47 minutes and back again.

I must now draw attention to the horrible VU bars graphic on iOS and Android beside the currently playing song. Why? Because you could be listening to the quiet bits of Holst’s Jupiter, or death metal, and the graphic is the same. It’s a fake. It’s an animated GIF or something. Why not have a pulsating play button or some other abstract highlight, because if I see VU bars (even 20px high ones), I’m going to get annoyed if they don’t even attempt to match the music (which, in itself, isn’t hard – just look at the audio waveform once a second and update the bar graphic, probably takes about as much code as decompressing a GIF…).

precisely because most clipboard implementations give insufficient visual confirmation

One of the things I really like about Android’s clipboard is that it is layered. You can recall the last so-many items pasted to the clipboard. Something annoying is when you select and copy something, then realise you had active content in the clipboard. With Android? Copy both things. It’ll be okay (except in Firefox that has its own weird editor implementation).

broken by the blizzard of pop-ups that interfere with using a tablet.

What sort of pop-ups? I don’t get that many…

What sort of pop-ups?

My own fault for buying a Portfolio tablet. Very cheap but loaded with crap trying to get you to buy stuff, register, etc. Perhaps my body has a strong electric field or something. I find it impossible to avoid making the tablet do things that I do not intend. Perhaps a button which stops things happening while it is pressed?

In my day job, I am responsible for the graphical user interface in a business application that is used daily by hundreds of thousands of users. The one thing I learned over the last 18 years of developing this application is: different users need different things, and different users find different things “intuitive”. The perception if the UI is “good” varies extremely. Users got converted from haters to lovers by explaining a few clever features. What users like is nearly impossible to predict.

At the end of the day, most business users want efficiency and a UI that does not get into their way. But “the way” is vastly different, not least depending on the integration into the customer’s systems and the other applications they use. So the only answer is usually to let the customer (and, if possible, the user) configure and parametrize the application. One size does not fit all.

Very cheap but loaded with crap trying to get you to buy stuff, register, etc.

Aha, yes. I recently ditched an app that I’d used for a while because it got in the habit of presenting full screen adverts right in the middle of using it. I get that app developers these days think advertising is easy money, but there’s subtle advertising and there’s punch you in the face advertising.
And, sadly, internet website advertisers would rather scream about their massive loss of revenue than think about why it is that more and more people are blocking adverts.

It’s getting that way on mobile devices. Couple that with the bloatware and the number of phone-homes…… :-/
[I bet most of the baked in bloatware has permissions that you wouldn’t ever accept if being asked to install the app manually]

I find it impossible to avoid making the tablet do things that I do not intend.

You sound like my mother. She’s found more unusual features than anybody ever knew existed. A couple of weeks ago she managed to get Safari stuck in RTL mode. I didn’t even know that was an option available from the UI? It probably isn’t, just mom’s weird electromagnetic field made it happen. Needed a reboot to get text to read from left to right again!

At the end of the day, most business users want efficiency and a UI that does not get into their way.

Back to my original post and “slickness”

So the only answer is usually to let the customer (and, if possible, the user) configure and parametrize the application. One size does not fit all.

Yes, but you still have to assess value of the specific feature.
Re-phrasing the earlier comment of “Did that actually do anything useful? if no don’t bother programming that, if yes proceed” to say “is it actually useful enough to enough people to make it worth my while expending effort to make that feature a reality” or perhaps that’s just a refining clause in the follow up of the did it do something useful.

One size does not fit all, but bling is bling.
In RO terms, how many people find buttons with rounded corners to be a feature they just can’t live without? How do users of RO5.x survive without them?

How do users of RO5.x survive without them?

I don’t. I cry every time I see boring eighties style rectangular icons and I have a little cardboard cutout that I stick to the screen with blutack to pretend I have a Wimp as cool as that.

Seriously, I see the rounded icons in various screenshots and, well, it’s… just wrong. Not ugly, exactly, but not pretty either. More different for the sake of difference, perhaps? It’s distinctive, so you can look at any picture and know on which side of the fence the user sits.

More technically – how is the effect actually achieved? Does anybody know? Are the tool sprites ‘rounded’ or does that version of the Wimp plot the sprite line by line adding an offset to create the rounding?

a feature they just can’t live without?

I asked this a few years ago – what is it that Select has that RO5 doesn’t, and was surprised that it seems when you get down to it, there are just a bunch of smaller usability features.

Or, to put it like this, if I had my own Jeffrey for a day, it would be much more beneficial for the world to have Paint be able to directly load and save PNG and JPEG (and maybe GIF?) than to have rounded anything in the Desktop.

So, good call. Rounded buttons = bling.

There seems to be a trend in modern apps to hide parts of the UI until the mouse pointer is near where the UI would be. For example, in a list of records, the “delete” button may not show up until you move the pointer over the record. I despise those UIs. I don’t randomly move the pointer all over the screen just to see what happens; what is this, a point-and-click adventure game?

re: ‘modern’ hidden parts of the UI…

Agreed. My pet hate are the scroll bars which only appear when the mouse is over where they should be! And then they ignore clicks over the ‘well’ of the bar, forcing you to drag the bar itself. Madness.

Or, if clicking in the well does anything at all, it may take you far, far past the bottom item in the spreadsheet (Libre Office spreadsheet on MacOS).

I asked this a few years ago – what is it that Select has that RO5 doesn’t, and was surprised that it seems when you get down to it, there are just a bunch of smaller usability features.

I haven’t got time find it again but there is the list Chris Bazley compiled a couple of years ago. A few have been added to RO5 but there still remain quite a few to do.

There are also those programs that haven’t been updated for 32bit that some people still reply on. Not something RO5 can fix but it is a hindrance to upgrading.

I haven’t got time find it again but there is the list Chris Bazley compiled a couple of years ago. A few have been added to RO5 but there still remain quite a few to do.

Well a very quick forum search shows you quoting in April 2016 the list of features people would like in RO5 that Martin did:

Martin wrote:
This seems to be more or less all I’m getting, so I’ll work it up into a
page on the ROOL wiki (with far more detail than the short summaries
given here) RSN.


Internal:
– Firewall.
– EDID.
– ImageFileConvert clone.
– BootLog, and SysLog enhancements.
– Startup menu.
Wimp:
– Selectable text in writable icons.
– Rearrangeable window furniture.
– Shutdown confirmation.
– Move opened menus to the left at right edge of screen.
– Adjust click on switcher opens Configure.
– PC Delete.
– Change desktop font size.
– Put !Configure back in Apps.
– Faster opening of very long menus.
– Shaded icons take background colour into account
Filer:
– Double-click renaming.
– Thumbnail display.
– True numerical sort order.
– Display sort order in title bar.
– Filetype menus (customisable) for ‘Set type’.
– Toolbars.
– Per-directory and inherited sort orders.
– New keyboard shortcuts for copy, change display, new dir, run.
Applications:
– Image viewer.
– Clipboard support in Edit, Paint, Draw, etc.
– Configure Boot Look at/Run to Disable as well as Remove items.
– Improve Network configure, remove manual file editing.
– Pinboard: graded/HSV backgrounds, extra display settings, cacheing.
– Logarithmic task display, improve list order, add detail.
– Paint: reorder sprites in multiple-sprite file
Built in support for:
– Waste bin.
– SysLog.

The firewall and network configuration would logically be part of the new network stack work.

There are also those programs that haven’t been updated for 32bit that some people still rely on.

Everything changes in time. I mean, I’d like to see 1stWord+ because I think I may have been the only person on the planet that liked the simplicity. Well, I’d have to roll my own in that case because there’s no way that will ever appear.
Likewise, applications which don’t have source available and aren’t being maintained must be considered “legacy” (as in a polite word for dead).

That said, there may be other obstacles.

– Firewall.

Given the lack of security in RISC OS, is there really any point? Surely any implementation would be fairly easy to work around, thus providing a false sense of security, like the XP firewall that filtered INCOMING connections but didn’t care about data going out…

– EDID.

Done?

– ImageFileConvert clone.

Agreed.

– Startup menu.

Might make sense if the system supports different user profiles, but otherwise surely more time wasted at boot?

– Selectable text in writable icons.

Would be nice, but does it work with Shift-Arrow like everything else on the planet?

– Rearrangeable window furniture.

To quote Steve: Bling.

– Shutdown confirmation.

Wrote my own. Offers a choice of shutdown or reboot (or cancel!). ;-)

– Move opened menus to the left at right edge of screen.

Yes, useful. And also require a motion of the mouse between opening a menu under the pointer and following any of the entries – this is to prevent a menu being opened on the right, and suddenly you whizz through a pile of menus as the Wimp sees you’re over a submenu entry so opens it, then sees you’re over a submenu entry so opens it, then sees… you get the idea.

– Adjust click on switcher opens Configure.

Patched that in my ROM build. It’s not hard to do (instructions on my blog someplace, circa December 2016 I think) but when discussing it at the time ROOL said a definitive NO. Hehe, I can build my own ROMs so nerr! :-P

– Change desktop font size.

Doesn’t that work? *Set Wimp$FontSize? Hmmm, not all fonts at the same physical point size LOOK the same size. Compare Homerton with Trinity. In Frobnicate, when I wanted some offset text in Homerton, I always had to set the size of that a point or two less to make it visually balanced.
This, the desktop at 12pt Trinity might be okay, but the same size Homerton would just look strange.

– Put !Configure back in Apps.

Please, no.

– Faster opening of very long menus.

Not a problem on the Pi, and if you don’t believe me, go download my !Manga from my site or PlingStore…

– Shaded icons take background colour into account

Would be nice. Justin did a ramble about this with examples. But, nice != essential.

– Double-click renaming.

Ugh, get lost. I’m running into this on Windows when the crappy UI takes a long time so I click something again, and even with several seconds between clicks, it gets interpreted as a double-click.
Alt-click works. Leave it at that.

– Thumbnail display.

Would be nice, I used to miss that from Filer+ (RISC OS 3.10) and FilerPro (RISC OS 3.70), but I miss it less now that it’s been many years without. There have been more things I’d have liked from Filer+ such as, well:

– True numerical sort order.
– Filetype menus (customisable) for ‘Set type’.
– Per-directory and inherited sort orders.
– New keyboard shortcuts for copy, change display, new dir, run.

Much of that lot, for example. Plus “hidden” files.

– Image viewer.

? We have PrivateEye, SwiftJPEG, and the slow ChangeFSI which scores a win for supporting numerous bizarre formats.

Do we need yet another image viewer?

Maybe what we need is a plug-in protocol whereby a person can write a filter to change ‘X’ into a sprite, and a sprite into ‘X’. Then supporting a new format is as simple as creating the code to do it…

– Improve Network configure, remove manual file editing.

…yeah, ’cos that worked so well for me.

– Logarithmic task display, improve list order, add detail.

Isn’t it already logarithmic? What sort of additional detail? TaskManager is already way more comprehensive in how system memory is actually used than anything else I’ve seen on other systems.

[okay ProcessExplorer gives ridiculous amounts of information including lots of deltas (whatever that means) but there’s nothing that says simply: your machine has XXXXMB inside it, and this is how it is currently being used, like TaskManager does]

What would be nice to have is a power user option (possibly hidden by default) to allow dynamic areas to be killed. It’d simplify tidy-ups. [yes, I know DebugTools can do this, that’s how I currently do it]

Built in support for:
– Waste bin.

Always very useful, an Undelete…

– Adjust click on switcher opens Configure.

when discussing it at the time ROOL said a definitive NO.

I think it’s because having Select and Adjust do exactly the same thing is just So Useful.

– Put !Configure back in Apps.

Please, no.

Saw that in the list and it reminded me to check something – there’s this option in !Configure labelled “Add to Apps” and guess what – if you drag the !Configure out of !Boot.RO300Hook.Res to it it does what it says and adds it Apps. Obviously that’s too difficult to do once so we need a default…

– Double-click renaming.

Ugh, get lost. I’m running into this on Windows when the crappy UI takes a long time so I click something again, and even with several seconds between clicks, it gets interpreted as a double-click.
Alt-click works. Leave it at that.

You not keen on Ctrl-R ?, because that works on the selected file. Two methods is probably enough.

Built in support for:
– Waste bin.

Always very useful, an Undelete…

I’ve had Fred Graute’s TrapDelete/Transient in use alongside Filer modified to do Delete when I hit “Delete” for quite a while so I tend to forget it isn’t standard.

Delete puts things into Transients recycle (with aged purge) and Shift-Delete is the thankyou and goodbye forever.

I think it’s because having Select and Adjust do exactly the same thing is just So Useful.

Select opens Task Manager, not Configure.

You not keen on Ctrl-R ?, because that works on the selected file.

I’m not at my RISC OS machine right now; is that shortcut key listed in the menu? I wasn’t aware of it.

Edit: I could, of course, look at the screenshots in the User Guide. ^R is not listed in the menu, so adding it could be a simple improvement.

– Per-directory and inherited sort orders.

There’s an app for that :)

I am reminded of a utility I have often used which allows the use of the ALT key as a modifier key to provide an alternative option via a system variable.

More lately I have used a more comprehensive utility which tests for the ALT, CTRL and/or Shift key as modifiers. It is helpfully called TestACS!

It contains no copyright information, and, as such, seems a useful candidate for inclusion in the OS itself!

Or perhaps, at least, in the library of the HD image?

It is very handy for, for example, invoking a logging mode for an app.

Also for invoking differing actions for an app – I use RDP with differing parameters for different purposes using alternative window sizes!

Does this idea belong here?

It contains no copyright information, and, as such, seems a useful candidate for inclusion in the OS itself!

Just the opposite, I believe. I remember when ROOL was assembling the original Pi image there were a few apps “rejected” because there was no clear licensing and the authors were not contactable.

I think it’s because having Select and Adjust do exactly the same thing is just So Useful.

After my submission to ROOL for ‘Adjust click on TaskManager opens Configure’ was refused I just wrote a little module (based on Will Ling’s QuickConfig) so that an Adjust click calls an Obey file. Now it can open Configure, a TaskWindow etc. In combination with TestACS (see other message) it can even do multiple things.

You not keen on Ctrl-R ?, because that works on the selected file.

Steve, how are you getting on with keyboard shortcuts in the Filer?

I’ve had Fred Graute’s TrapDelete/Transient

Yeah, I need to get back to that. Unfortunately BASIC isn’t the best language for this, in particular managing the restore data, which is why I’m writing AppLua ATM.

It is helpfully called TestACS!

It contains no copyright information, and, as such, seems a useful candidate for inclusion in the OS itself!

If you load it into an editor, I think you’ll find at the end: © FJG 2006. Licence GPL.

I wrote it to combine the 3 utilities TestAlt, TestCtrl and TestShift that came with Director.

Steve, how are you getting on with keyboard shortcuts in the Filer?

Got distracted by that paid time occupier called “work”.
Started looking again very recently – takes me ages to get my head into the assembler that’s required in that part of the OS.
I’m sure Rick would have it all sorted in a day or two if he tried.