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From: KEN%ORION.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU (Kenneth Ng)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards
Subject: user interfaces
Message-ID: <9735@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 12-Oct-87 21:26:20 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-adm.9735
Posted: Mon Oct 12 21:26:20 1987
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[edited discussion of making a system usable]

>motivation to make use of it. You can make an interface a lot more
>friendly by giving the employee involved a significant raise in pay.

I'd say an employee's willingness to use a given interface may be
affected by a significant raise in pay.  For example, I may be more
willing to use Microsoft Word given a pay raise, but I will never
pass an opportunity to blast Microsoft for what I consider a very
poor and inconsistent interface.

>It would be nice if people would perhaps rise above this hot-rod
>mentality and try to provide balanced examples and maybe even some
>reputable research from the human factors engineering or similar
>fields, even just some metrics and hypotheses statement would help a
>lot (user-friendly?  to whom? Our administrators? scientists?
>students? small warm-blooded animals of unspecified lineage?)

For starters, make the utilities consistent with the rest of the system.
For example, on a VM system I can enter a file name in upper, lower,
or mixed case almost anywhere and get the desired file EXCEPT for
Waterloo Make, where it must be in upper case.  The '-v' option
for almost all of Unix turns on a verbose feature EXCEPT for grep
where it does something different.  On Microsoft Word I use the cursor
keys to move the cursor around EXCEPT when I'm on the command line.
On Microsoft Word I use the space bar to move the options selection
EXCEPT on certain format menus, where I must use the tab key instead.
The Unix vi editor enables one to enter most of the ascii character set,
EXCEPT NULL and a couple others.  Sure I can memorize all the exceptions
to the rules, but why should I have to?  Why not design the interface
to be consistent to begin with?

Another item is to have the input somewhat human readable.  I still
cringe from my electrical engineering courses where the person who
wrote the routines used fix formated fields when free format options
existed in the FORTRAN he used.  Another example is the Unix terminfo.
AT&T decided to rewrite termcap and made the definitions incompatible
with the old one.  What is even worse is that they rigged up a different
gobbody gook that is even more arcane and harder to read than the old
one.  Why didn't they look at other humane languages like REXX for
examples on a human readable language?  Another example of line noise
are the uucp system call command streams.  I have to remember that
backslash b is a break on System 3 and its a backspace on System 5.
A break on system 5 got changed to a backslash K.  Why not use something
similar to Procomm 2.4.2's command files for calling another system?
While its more verbose, I get far less of a headache trying to figure
out what it's trying to do, especially on those systems where you need
to send different things depending on what you got back.

Note: I will not even begin to tackle the question of what is 'natural'
or 'instinctive'.  I've spent many hours arguing over them, all I
ever get is a tired voice and a headache.  The only interface that I
may classify as instinctive is where one looks at an item on the
screen and the cursor moves to that item.  If you know of one, I'd
like to see it.

Kenneth Ng
TEIES Project
NJIT - CCCC