Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> But there are far worse out there. "Where's the menu?"  "See the thing that 
> looks like a flip-down cover? Click there to flip it down, and the buttons 
> behind it are the menu."  WTF? If I wanted my DVD player to look like a DVD 
> player, I wouldn't be pushing the buttons with my mouse.  I even saw one 
> that had a flashing 12:00 on it when you started it up.

  I really can't understand why the "real-world metaphor" GUI is so
popular even though every single GUI design guide I know vehemently
speaks against using that metaphor.

  Real-world devices are limited by the physical material it's made of.
There's only so far you can go with buttons, LEDs and LCDs. Probably
millions of dollars have been spent during the past decades in order to
study how to overcome the limitations of a physical device as a user
interface.

  A GUI in a computer removes most of these limitations. You are no longer
limited to having one button fixed at a certain location. You are no longer
limited to having an LCD panel fixed at a certain location, with a fixed
resolution and color depth. You are no longer constrained by the physical
size of the device (which limits how many buttons and other controls you
can put on it).

  A GUI allows you to enhance the user interface in great lengths. You can
create menus, dialogs, easy-to-use settings screens with tabs, radio
buttons, drop-down menus... you name it. It's exactly what the manufacturers
of the real devices dream of being able to do, but can't because of the
limits of the physical device.

  Yet so many software houses creating multimedia players go to great
lengths in order to *avoid* the advantages a GUI gives you, and deliberately
impose the limits of the physical device to themselves (and their users).
It makes absolutely no sense.

  The idea behind the real-world metaphor is that, in theory, the program
should be more intuitive because it works like a real device. This idea
is completely silly for two reasons:

  Firstly, people who use the media player program are more accustomed to
using GUI programs in that system (be it Windows or anything else), and a
program which looks and behaves the same way as all the other programs
would be a hundred times more intuitive for them to use than a program
which tries to poorly emulate a real device.

  Secondly, those devices are *not* that easy and intuitive to use, precisely
because of the limitations. By imposing the same limitations to your
program, you are making it equally hard to use and unintuitive as the real
device. Something you wouldn't need to do if you made your program look and
feel like all the other programs using standard user interfaces in the
system.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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