Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!milton!blake.u.washington.edu!dlarson
From: dlarson@blake.u.washington.edu (Dale Larson)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Re: GUI Style Question
Message-ID: <10219@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 30 Oct 90 15:16:12 GMT
References: <6919@sugar.hackercorp.com> <10177@milton.u.washington.edu> <6927@sugar.hackercorp.com>
Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu
Organization: The Evergreen State College,  WA
Lines: 32

In article <6927@sugar.hackercorp.com> peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>Great, now what happens when you decide to go back to the previous fields
>to change it to make the next field valid? I don't know how many times I've
>been waiting in line behind someone and the operator on the point-of-sale
>terminal has screwed up. Often, even with the intervention of the store
>manager and once or twice myself (though I can usually help if they have a
>manual), it proves impossible to do anything but abort the transaction and
>start over because the UI wouldn't let them go back.

You make a good point.  Idiot proofing is very user-hostile!  Not just in 
the sense that it can make uncommon events difficult or imposible to handle
with the software, but it is also de-skilling in that it removes any need
(or possibility) for significant human thought or action.

I bring up a requester which basically says "This doesn't look right" and
give the user the option to ignore the warning.  

Many proposed guidelines for making software user-friendly include something
to the effect that feedback should be immediate.  If you are entering a date
and you find out right then that it isn't a valid date it is easy to change.
But if you've gone on and done several other things, you have to mentally
'shift gears' and try to remember or figure out which date you really want.

Further, user-friedliness includes providing reasonable default values when
ever possible.  Often, the only was a reasonable default for a later field
can be determined is through knowledge of an earlier field.  Though for this
sort of thing, I suppose you want to check the current value of the string
gadgets buffer, not what it's value was when return was entered.

 
--
-Dale Larson  (dlarson@blake.u.washington.edu)