Good UI design blog: flow|state

[zridling]

Here's an understandable and well-done UI design blog by Jan Miksovsky called flow|state. He's not afraid to point out where Microsoft sucks, and now that he has a Mac, shows how it's also awful in some ways. Good reading for developers

[mouser]

i really love these user interface discussions, especiall the ones that discuss user interface bad design - because you kind of know it when you see it, but it's sometimes hard to put your finger on why, and how to fix - and it's great to read some of these people who just intuitively know the proper way to design things.

having helped a person set up a mac mini, i have to say my distaste for apple has only grown; on one hand it was super easy to set up - but on the other hand, when it had a bit of trouble connecting to the lan, the behavior and error messages were totally useless.

[Edvard]

Oh great, now I'm Fitts-izing all my PowerPro thingummys and running everything full screen. THANKS GUYS!
What am I talking about? read where flow|state took me: http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html

[zridling]

Excellent link, Edvard. I often wonder why devs seem to make dialogs too small or with numerous tabs when 2-5 will more than do. The Fitts articles makes a lot of sense. If you make it hard for me to do the simple, repetitive things in your program, I will look for another program rather than risk Carpel-Tunnels Syndrome.

[Edvard]

Also take a look at http://www.symphonyos.com/ and Jason's Laws of Interface Design. I think the Mezzo Desktop concept of desk-wide menus might be confusing at first, but it kinda looks like what M$ may have originally had in mind with Active Desktop. Also a similar idea was asked for in the IDEA: giant start menu Coding Snack request. Hmmm...
Also for those interested, there is the OpenUsability Group (working for usability in Open Source projects) who ran GIMP through the ringer.