Every once in a while, someone does
something nice for you and its very confusing. What is their real
motivation? Why are they doing something nice?
Anyway, for some reason my friend Audri
Phillips, a pioneer of computer animation, and a veteran of Robert
Abel & Associates, who is among other things, an artist and a
writer for corporate giant Intel, interviewed me on the subject of
user interfaces. I am very opinionated on user interfaces, having
been victimized by them most of my life.
User interface design and
implementation is an easy target, because they are so badly done most
of the time. Abomoniably and inexcusably done. Unfortunately,
there are many plausible reasons why this can happen, most of them
variations on a generic "constraints on the project that we know
nothing about and aren't apparent from using the device but were very
important during development", such as "you have to use
this software package" or "this company is going to do
this, we only get to do that", that sort of thing.
Once you have the device in hand, and
without any knowledge of what happened behind the scenes, it is easy
and even somewhat emotionally satisfying to strike back at being
victimized by the bad result, we can only judge what we see.
Nevertheless, it seems that only Apple can do a product with a good
user interface (a slight exaggeration).
Here is Audri's article on the Intel
blog, please click on it to give her page hits which no doubt her management tracks.
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