Monday, February 9, 2009

Good GUI's Gone Bad?


This post was inspired by frustration with a particular UI feature in a particular product:  The OPTIONS dialog in AutoCAD.  But this could (and likely does) apply to almost any application out there that uses a GUI (graphical user interface).

If you haven't seen it, even lately, the OPTIONS dialog has gone stupid.  Just totally stupid.  Anyone that looks at it and doesn't immediately think "wow, that's a lot of tabs!" is either blind or numb, or really just doesn't care (more likely).  I wonder if the people working on it ever studied user interface design.  Did they even read a book on the subject?  Read a blog maybe?  I doubt it.

I would strongly suggest investigating a different design.  Maybe a vertical strip of tabs along the left or right side?  Maybe convert the tabs into a drop-down list?  Maybe something else.  Who knows.  But at the current rate, version 2012 will likely reach 25 tabs and have a scroll bar to browse over to the end when they run off the edge of the dialog form.  Holy crap!

3 comments:

JTB World said...

Dave, AutoCAD 2010 is not that bad with its 10 tabs. You don't even need to scroll. It's much worse with the verticals.
A quick search functionality would be useful also including all SETVARs. Like the one on the application menu.

skatterbrainz said...

It's all relative. I agree that the verticals are worse (Mech, Elec, etc.) but since they adopted the current dialog interface it's become a mess. I've spoked with devs inside and they are aware that it will need to be addressed in the near future. I kind of missed the mark in that I focused entirely on the tabs, when really the biggest problem is what's happened in the panels for each tab. It needs to be organized better. Some features are hidden behind buttons when they are accessed more often than features spread on in the panel itself. It wasn't intended to turn out like this, it simply evolved to this.

skatterbrainz said...

Jimmy - Thanks for the info on 18.0 also. I discovered that within minutes after I posted that article. I got your comment but Blogger dumped it for some reason. It's been acting weird lately.