[Sigia-l] Defeated by Orthodoxy, again

[Ziya Oz]

What's a Tuesday without a mental assault on design sensibilities via
Alertbox. 

Jakob Nielsen encounters a badly designed dialog box (it happens :-) and, as
he almost always manages to do, generalizes it into meaningless design
orthodoxy, glued to his rear-view window:

"The big lesson here is the need to stick with the design conventions that
users know."

<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/dialog-box.html>

Since the introduction of the Apple HIG (not Inside Macintosh, as Nielsen
claims with his "33 years' experience using computers and 25 years'
professional experience analyzing bad designs") Apple itself evolved HIG
enormously. 

Of course, the most glaring evidence against the brain-dead fatwa that can
only be made by a small-minded bureaucrat, 'if it's different, users won't
get it,' is the iPhone: not bad because it has "non-standard GUI behavior,"
but great because it manages to transcend Nielsen's conventional
straightjacket.

--
Ziya

"Every problem comes from a solution."