Re: [boost] GUI

From: Ben Artin (macdev_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-09-30 14:47:04

In article <dhk066$su6$1_at_[hidden]>,
 Joel de Guzman <joel_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> Bo Persson wrote:
> > "Stefan Seefeld" <seefeld_at_[hidden]> skrev i meddelandet 
> > news:433C2117.7090405_at_sympatico.ca...
> > 
> 
> > IMO, having an application look native is absolutely highest priority. 
> > :-)
> 
> Why? I look at the Windows Media Player and it doesn't look
> native at all. That's even before I add skins. Yet, no matter
> how I tweak it, my 7 year old daughter still manages to play
> her favorite songs without any problems. Also, I hear no one
> complaining that almost all games have their own unique interfaces.
> Kids manage. So can adults.
> 
> This "everyone must wear black" is simply nonesense!

Let's leave the question of what the app looks like alone for a sec. The 
important question is whether it *behaves* consistently with the rest of the OS.

First of all, the reason why behavior consistency is important is so that when 
you switch from one application to another you do not have to switch mental 
models. Any time two applications do the same thing slightly differently you 
create a usability barrier for the user.

The reason why this is not as pertinent to games as it is to other apps is 
twofold:
 - You almost never go back and forth between a game and other applications; 
more often, you play the game for an extended period of time, then you stop and 
go back to using multiple applications. If you consider games which do use 
side-by-side with other applications, you will see that those games often *do* 
use standard UI elements. This is not an accident.
 - Games often require UI beyond what other applications use anyway -- there is 
no standard 3D motion controller, for example -- so they already have to get 
into the business of substantially extending standard behaviors; from there it's 
a smaller leap to reinventing the entire UI.

The reason that WMP works for your daughter is that it behaves similarly to 
other apps, even though it looks differently.

Now, when you consider the behaviors of OS-provided elements, there is a 
tremendous amount of subtle detail involved. If you have an application with 
minimal UI (such as WMP), then it's not difficult to come close to emulating the 
relatively small set of behaviors in your custom UI. However, as your 
application grows, the set of behaviors that you need to emulate expands until 
it incorporates pretty much everything that the OS provides. So you end up 
having to emulate everything the OS provides *and* you have to maintain this as 
the OS is updated and the behaviors sometimes slightly change.

This generally results in:
 1. a tremendous effort committed to keeping up with the OS-provided behaviors or
 2. an application that constantly behaves subtly differently from majority of 
other applications

Arguably the former option is a colossal waste of time. Without any doubt the 
latter option is what leaves the users with an impression of a sub-par 
application. This is *especially* true on Mac OS X, where users are much more 
sensitized to subtle behavior differences, and developer and users care a lot 
more about this type of polish than they do on other platforms. (I don't want to 
get into a discussion here about why this is the case or whether it's a good 
thing.)

I absolutely do not have faith in the ability of any group of developers to 
maintain a system which correctly emulates OS-provided behaviors, and continues 
to do so over time, and does so across more than one operating system. 
Therefore, I conjecture that any system designed under that premise eventually 
falls away from option 1 and adopts option 2. 

As a developer, especially as a Mac developer, I find option 2 wholly 
unacceptable. That option makes the usability of the system as a whole degrade, 
because the interface behaviors do not scale beyond a subset of applications I 
might have installed on my system. 

It is because of this conclusion (namely, that reimplementing OS-provided 
behaviors leads to an overall degradation in the usability of the system as a 
whole) that I find this option unacceptable.

Ben

-- 
I changed my name: <http://periodic-kingdom.org/People/NameChange.php>