Found this Adobe ui bashing blog today. I really think we need more of this, our standards for ui aren’t good enough. We do a lot of criticism for bad code, because we’re technically minded. But bad code is less harmful sometimes than bad ui.

There’s a reason ui critique is so hard to do without getting into a fit of fury. It’s like a guy standing over you saying “no, don’t tie your shoe laces like that, do it like this”. And then he forces you to do it his way every single day for the rest of your life.

Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Adobe, the tool builders for the designers of the world, complimented on their ui.

Ever lay awake at night wondering what happens when you hit a web page with a java applet on a vanilla Ubuntu? Me neither. It turns out that it’s this:

Embarrassment of riches! There are a few problems with this feature:

1. While it’s great that you help me install the plugin, I have no idea what all these things are. All I wanted was “java”.
2. There is no “default” or “recommended” choice. I can see that one of them is selected, but for all I know that’s because the choices showed up in this order at random.
3. Even if I were inclined to think that the selected choice is selected for a reason, there’s another choice that’s exactly the same.
4. “No description found in plugin database.” is not exactly helpful. In fact, it could be just the thing to help me here.
5. If I wing it and install one of these, and then it turns out it doesn’t work (perish the thought!), the little notification at the top of the web page isn’t going to show up again (because a java plugin, working or not, would be installed). So there’s no way I can come back to this screen.
6. If I am the kind of user who understands that the choices in this dialog represent packages in the system, then I don’t know what they are called, because the package names are not mentioned. So if I want to uninstall a plugin that doesn’t work, I don’t know what to uninstall.

There is another dialog in the Firefox settings for plugins:

Strangely, there is no option to uninstall plugins here, just disable. But I guess that if I disable the java plugin, I can revisit that java web page and get that plugin selection dialog again (and try a different one). Still, it takes a bit of detective work to figure that out, it could be made more obvious.

This example demonstrates the difference between starting on a problem, and actually solving it. I’m very pleased that we have these helper dialogs now, but it needs a bit more thought put into it.

Bug: #320989

I actually picked this example because there used to be two or three options in that dialog, but now there are five.

Well well, what have we here? The omelet is well underway in the pan, but we’ve dropped some eggs on the floor, that’s too bad. KDE likes to try things, and that’s really cool. I’m pleased as long as they do not stop trying until they produce a better, or at least an equally good, outcome. (Which is my experience with KDE so far.)

There is another slight regression here. The click area for the plus (+) sign beside each directory (the one that expands/collapses it) appears smaller now, after the icon has been changed. It’s smaller now, and it was already quite small before.

Ubuntu Bug: #254039

KDE Bug: 168379

I’m not submitting it specifically to kde bugzilla given how Shuttlesworth raves about Launchpad’s synchronization capabilities to various bugzillas every chance he gets. Hopefully that means they have a link set up with KDE as well. The regression was spotted in Ubuntu anyway.

Writing about ui is difficult, not because it’s difficult to describe the flaws of an interface, but because of how emotionally draining and depressing it is to point out the problems in a product with which your experience has been infuriating. It’s like re-living the experience, you just want to forget all about it and run away.

It is hereby my pleasure to present to you a piece of wonderful ui writing which describes the beloved Adobe Acrobat Reader. Here’s a taste:

After the unpacking, the install process itself took 10 minutes. I could only thank Adobe’s engineers, presuming they were filling up my hard drive with yummy icons, tasty DLLs, and amazing 3D JavaScript add-ons. No matter — the 210 MB it required was there to be used.

Today’s example sponsored by gdm. Say that you have a certain session (gnome, kde, fluxbox, whatever) and you’re experimenting with another one which isn’t working quite smoothly yet. Then you’ll be stuck going back and forth a few times. And you’ll probably see this dialog:

The Ubuntu gdm theme is nice and clean and it’s easy to figure out how to change the session. This dialog does the job without much ado. But then you find this:

After you’ve changed the session, assumed that the change succeeded, stopped thinking about it, and moved on to start the session by logging in, you get this idiotic dialog.

This is horrifying in several ways. First of all, the gdm login screen is completely clean of any dialogs, so there is no hint given that you should expect a popup. Secondly, once you’ve set everything using the secondary controls at the bottom of the screen, you just want to login and be on your way. When I’m in that mode, I’ve basically learnt to hit Enter as many times as it takes to get me through, so I’m very likely to accidentally accept the dialog since I don’t know it’s coming.

And finally, the question of whether to make the session the default one is completely cut out from the menu for changing the session, which shows a complete lack of consistency. Here I’m done doing something and later on I have to answer unexpected question about something I already finished.

Not to mention that the “unsafe” choice is selected by default, I might accidentally change my default session just by clicking Enter twice after putting in my password.

Worst of all, even when I know that the popup is coming, I absolutely do not want to have to answer it again and again just because someone couldn’t figure out a better place to put that option. Make it a checkbox on the previous dialog, that’s what everyone else does, why must you be so special?

I’ll be nice and I’ll just call this sloppiness.

EDIT: Bug filed.

UPDATE: Bug fixed in gdm 2.21.