A Simple Matter of Point and Click

The advent of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) brought with it the notion that the human/computer interface is therewith so simplified that erstwhile practices, such as rich documentation and focus on usability, were abandoned.  Since running every GUI program reduces to a "simple sequence" of points and clicks, one can dispense with documentation.  One doesn't, in practice, dispense with documentation.  One simply creates "help text" that generally isn't sufficiently helpful, but does stand in for rich documentation, as that requirement sits perpetually on low heat over a back burner.  Program complexity hasn't reduced with the GUI.  Rather, it has increased as screens full of icons, toolbars, scantily self-explanatory controls, buttons, and scroll bars, have become de rigeur.  The user knows, more or less, what task (s)he wants to perform.  Yet, the help text and the GUI fail to address tasks and how to perform them.  In the bad old days, the user interface was 80-column punch cards.  That meant the user had to learn some sort of language with which to communicate with the computer.  The language could be simple or complex.  But, documenting a language is a much more straightforward process than documenting a series of points and clicks in a GUI.  Your grey-haired granny can probably poke and hope her way around the e-mail GUI.  Yet some programs defy mastery given the mind boggling complexity of the GUI and the mind blowing obtuseness of the help text.  Apparently, explaining how to use a program is of no concern to vendors or purchasers.  End users will figure it out or seek employment elsewhere.  Finally, the GUI has given us the extreme disadvantage of being unable to automate many mundane processes that heretofore were easily automated.  How do you tell a GUI to repeat a process?  Microsoft's solution is to have the end user learn an extremely difficult scripting language called VBA, which is completely different from the GUI and an alternative user interface that does not involve pointing and clicking.  In the end, this has to do with the nature of program quality.  Lots of time and money is expended trying to decode the intent of program implementers.  It is not so easy.

Very true. Creating good UI is extremely hard and GUIs are hard to automate. Did you get this from a book or an article? Some link we can point to and click on?

NeXTSTEP?

Nightengale wrote:



NeXTSTEP?

NeXTSTEP was good, but it really wasn't geared towards beginners, more as a Workstation OS, where the users would already be familar with key WIMP/GUI computing concepts, so they could dispense with things like the "Start" button. As a result the learning curve for an absolute beginner is pretty steep.

TommyCarlier wrote:

Did you get this from a book or an article? Some link we can point to and click on?

I don't know, but DON'T Google the phrase "grey-haired granny"  to try to find it. N.S.F.W (or much else or that matter).

This thread is the only result on Google for the first 10 words or so of this post.

DCMonkey wrote:



TommyCarlier wrote: Did you get this from a book or an article? Some link we can point to and click on?

I don't know, but DON'T Google the phrase "grey-haired granny"  to try to find it. N.S.F.W (or much else or that matter).

You see, I had a faint idea of what I'd get if I _did_ Google that. So I did, just to see. And now I'm feeling ill.

Thanks for that.

The "user interface" for this post sucks.  I think your "next step" is to learn how to write paragraphs.

lol

JChung2006 wrote:



The "user interface" for this post sucks.  I think your "next step" is to learn how to write paragraphs.

That, and responding to user feedback.