Limiting options in UI design: why I like OS X
Posted 7 September 2006 @ 11pm | Tagged OSX, thoughts
I’ve been reading Joel on Software’s ui design book, where he makes several astute observations.
“But wait!” you say. “It’s important to have options for advanced users who want to tweak their environments!” In reality, it’s not as important as you think.
[...] It’s true that the first time they realized you could completely remap the keyboard in Word, they changed everything around to be more to their liking, but as soon as they upgraded to Windows 95 those settings got lost, and they weren’t the same at work, and eventually they just stopped reconfiguring things.
Compare any given program on Mac,Windows, and Linux. You’ll notice OS X apps tend to have the least user configurable options, but that some of the choices that the user shouldn’t have to care about have been made for him (and usually in the correct direction, with some thought). On Linux you have the ultimate freedom to change how things work but an overwhelming number of options.
The reason I love OS X now is because of how long it takes me to get from a clean Tiger install to a system that is usable for me personally: about 30-60 minutes including installing several utility apps. On windows this process takes one to five hours. On linux, it could take a week. By limiting my options and making some of the choices for me, OS X makes my life easy.
Good user interfaces are the ones that figure out which things the user doesn’t care about. Sometimes as programmers or designers, it’s hard for us to put ourselves in those shoes.
2 Comments