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July 16, 2002
 
Simon Gronlund Simon Gronlund is earning his Master of Science in Computer Science at the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, as an adult student. He also teaches Java and computer-related courses at the college. When he isn't tampering with his Warp 4 PC, he spends his spare time with his two boys and his wife.

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Does OS/2 afford usability?

The title of this column has at least two meanings. "Afford" can be used as in "Does the OS/2 market have the money to afford to produce usability?" also as in "Does OS/2 afford a beautiful workplace?" Both meanings are valuable to us as OS/2 users (replace OS/2 with eCS if you like.) Can our community afford, that is pay for, the most splendid usability design? And does OS/2 offer both affordance and usability?


Most of us once chose OS/2 because of its interface, its splendid multitasking and for many similar reasons. When Warp 3 came out, it offered us many nice features that were useful to us, Warp 4 added to that, as does eCS. But useful differs a lot from usability. Neither Warp 3 nor its successors can claim too many improvements in usability. And they have rightfully been blamed for that lack. They have had many useful gadgets, but their interfaces have been quite disparate and most often these user interfaces (UI) have not been self-explanatory.

My opinion of user interfaces is that they should not be noticed. Whatever it is, good design does not stick out, you do not notice it, except from a little twist maybe. So I do not support uniform, gray design UI's. But on the contrary, I dislike some design choices that have been seen lately. Why so?

First, let us agree on the fact that a self explanatory -- or as far as you can come to that -- design is the most desirable outcome. That is because then, most users will easily get their work done. And most likely your application will be used by many and, whenever applicable, paid for. As this community would like to see OS/2 prosper, we can see that from the smallest script tool to the most delicate suite, these can add to the usability of OS/2.

Lately, some apps have surfaced that have UI's invented just for the fun of making a new UI. I will certainly not point in any direction, I am not the judge. But anyway, anytime a user cannot get their work done smoothly due to a lousy UI, does that add or subtract from the balance of OS/2? Why have that weird, and in some cases funny looking, UI in the first place?

For example: Ctrl+O and Ctrl+S are frequently used with file operations. Today I find many tools using other hot keys. Why so? In some cases I think that come from porting stuff from *nix to OS/2, warmly appreciated work indeed. But not always (and even then these may be OS/2-ified.) I presume that the other authors haven't thought of the consequences so I'm writing about them.

By the time a user learns the oddities. Does he like them? I don't. And I still make mistakes where these oddities cross common standards. I still have to use these tools since the tools are maybe the best of their group, or maybe they are the only tools available for OS/2. Anyway, these oddities remove value from OS/2. Any new user that has not set his mind yet can turn his back to OS/2 for such behavior.

A UI is not only hot keys and funny icons but is also visible features. Anyone understands that a overloaded UI is hard to use. On the contrary, having too few buttons at hand may delay things as the user has to find the feature elsewhere. That leaves those funny icons. Over time, users become acquainted with common icons, file operations for example. Why change these to something else? What is the reason behind that? Especially when users may become disoriented? Why change the most common X (for eXit) to a door? Okay so far, but sometimes that door saves on exit, other times it does not. And there are plenty of other examples.

Users have to learn, you argue. They do not, I answer. Should thousand of users have to learn your oddities, and not only yours but several sets of other oddities from your colleagues? Is the word from thousands of users of no value to one, single code author? There must be more things that bring joy in your life besides making funny icons. How about user responses and appreciation? Having happy users brings much more fun than having them smile once when they see your icons but curse you later on.

Then over to affordance. The most well known example of bad affordance is the Window's Start button, the place you will find commands like Shutdown. That Start button seems not to afford a shutdown feature. But naming it Shutdown would cause headaches for users that like to start other programs from there.

I think a slider knob has affordance, it invites you to pull it to another value of some kind. Smartly chosen menu bar items afford users guidance. But having for example Copy, Cut and Paste under the File menu is a bad choice. Yes, your app offers these features, but the menu item seems not to afford them there. Not as long as users are used to finding them under the Edit menu.

Hence common, and well established, standards should not be broken unless you have a REALLY good reason to. In fact, so many users are formed by the Microsoftish "standard" that supporting at least the most common hot keys and menu items they have is a good idea. That is, as long as we would like to see converts coming to us.

Personally I consider the Lotus SmartSuite properties floating notebook to be a good example of something that affords value to you. You have it at hand, it gives instant results and it changes its behavior as you work. SmartSuite also supports several standards in parallel. The menu bar is standard. But when it comes down to having you composing your own buttons for the tool bar I am not so sure, some icons are not that self explanatory. But as they do not conflict with standard icons I do not rule them out.

WarpIn is another example of an app that affords users to come and use it. A user cannot fail, he just flows by the developer's guidelines (as long as the scripts are well written that is.)

To sum this up, offering self-explanatory design brings value to OS/2. Conforming to well known standards is a good choice since that really supports the users use of your app. Affordance is something to aim at. Gadgets might be useful but lack of usability is not a good sign.

Giving the user interface and the work flow considerable thought before implementing it gives the best result. And on the contrary, no thought on users' use of your app will certainly produce an unusable app. Can the OS/2 community afford that?

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