Wandering Thoughts archives

More on standard interfaces

In my biased opinion, one important consequence of who standard interfaces help is that if you are designing a system that people will be using a lot, one that they will regularly spend a lot of time with, please use a good interface for it no matter how non-standard it has to be. The drawbacks of a non-standard interface are more than made up by the benefits of a good one for the frequent users.

(I'm biased in this because some of the best programs I've used have had radically divergent and peculiar interfaces that were very well tuned for their jobs, and I want to see more of that sort of thing. And frankly it's sad and painful to routinely use a program that could have been so much better if only the designers had been willing to get out of their interface straitjacket.)

That said, a standard initial interface has an important advantage: the more standard your initial interface, the easier it is for people to get started with your program and thus get hooked on it enough to start learning the good stuff. However, this only works if people can do useful things with the initial interface, because otherwise the program's not too attractive in general.

The flipside of this issue is that if you are designing a system that will be used infrequently or casually, you really need to stick to the standard interface even if a different one would be better. All of which means that it is very important to identify your audience before you start designing things, and then check your assumptions (as you may find that usage patterns are different than what you expected).

(In this modern age of web-based systems, remember that different bits of your overall system may be used by different user groups. For example, consider an internal expense account/claim system; most people submitting claims will be doing so infrequently, but in a big enough organization the people going through and approving them will probably be doing this all the time.)

Tabs versus windows, or why I usually want windows

Tabs versus windows is one of those eternal debates (well, now that we can have the debate at all). For a long time I was strongly on the window side, to the point where I didn't use tabs in Firefox at all, but I've recently relented a bit on my dislike.

For me, the core difference between the two is that windows can overlap, can be moved independently, and can be organized freely (in two dimensions). Tabs are inherently non-overlapping, and thus for me they only work for things where I only ever want to see one of a number of things and do not want to organize the things separately.

(I make heavy use of icon and window positions for organizing my desktop and keeping track of what is what and how things relate to each other.)

Similarly, it's easy to see the appeal of tabs to someone who runs all of their applications maximized; tabs are lighter weight and enable useful features, and such people don't use overlapping windows anyways. I also feel that separate windows are less useful and more annoying if you're using a window manager that auto-places new windows, because then new tabs are more predictable and controllable than new windows.

Given that most people use auto-placing window managers and (judging from what I see around here) many of them almost always use maximized or near-maximized windows, I am not terribly surprised at the popularity of tabs.

Sidebar: an ideal harmonious world of tabs and windows

In my ideal world, tabs and windows cooperate: you can rip off any tab into a new window, and you can dock any window back into a tab (or a bunch of tabs, if the window is a multi-tab one). This would make it easy to use both, moving back and forth where I was mistaken about what I was going to be using something for.

Right now, my major tab-using application is Firefox. While there are Firefox extensions for better tab handling, I don't think any of them can do this particular set of tricks; the closest I've seen is one that will collapse all of your current Firefox windows into tabs in one window, which is violently not what I want.