[Sigia-l] Nielsen: It's the end!

[Listera]

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers"

"While a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 10000 vacuum tubes and
weighs 30 tons, computers of the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and
weigh only 1.5 tons"

"I have travelled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the
best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't
last out the year"

"There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in the home"

You've heard'em before, the arrogantly confident prediction turns out be
laughingly wrong. For example those who have been proclaiming
"HTML is dead" didn't quite understand the use of in-line info updating
features without page-refreshes, today however they are on the revivalist
Ajax bandwagon. :-)

Now comes a pure Jakob Nielsen gem:

"we've now reached the limits of the current GUI paradigm."

He says: "Displaying commands in menus, toolbars, and dialog boxes works
with a limited number of elements. But Microsoft Word 2003 has 1,500
commands, and users typically have no clue where to find most of them."

It may not occur to non-designers like Nielsen that an app does not have to
have 1,500 features, and all the attendant problems thereof. We don't have
to solve problems *after* they have been created; we can design them out of
existence to begin with.

"Much as I have criticized Microsoft for its thousands of buried features,
the company actually has a good usability team and was well aware of the
problems. Basically, it tried to retrofit usability onto an overly
complicated foundation and failed. Microsoft has now finally realized that
enough is enough: The company is parting ways with the old UI and going for
something completely new."

Apparently one thing the MSFT usability team hasn't learned is the pathetic
notion that everything under the sun has to be squeezed into a few
applications whose learnability curve will forever be steep no matter what
paradigm they choose to impose.

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/wysiwyg.html>

(Incidentally, I'm someone who has been using and advocating app design
without menus for 15 years and have ranted about it here on more than one
occasion in the past. So I have nothing against not using menus per se.)

---- 
Ziya

Best Practices,
For when you've run out of your own ideas and context.