Thursday, September 14, 2006

Set phasers to stun...

The last couple days have been a bit painful for me as I've endured exposure to the white hot burning effects of crappy UI design. My crap-block was only at an SPF level of 20 and I really should have just got the all-over environmental suit and properly protected myself.

Seriously, I don't understand why so many people undervalue good user interface design. At the very least, people should expect some consistency. Love 'em or hate 'em Apple set some pretty good keyboard conventions with:

Command-S == Save
Command-A == Select All
Command-X == Cut
Command-C == Copy
etc.

Even Microsoft's Windows 95 decided to copy Apple's Command key combinations with the likes of CTRL-S and CTRL-A (they even figured out CTRL-X, CTRL-C, CTRL-V for Cut, Copy, & Paste instead of that abomination that was Shift-Del, Ctrl-Ins, Shift-Ins in Windows 3.1).

Apple's human interface design was also heavily copied. For example, potentially destructive user actions were met with a nice little dialog box asking the user to confirm their action.

So imagine my surprise and frustration today when I pressed Ctrl-S to save my work and this ridiculous application promptly threw away my data and selected (as in SQL select) the data from the database again! What I don't understand is that a committee of people reviewed a number of these vertical market candidate applications and chose this one as the best. Good lord I can only imagine what the others looked like!

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