Elegant UI

Posted on September 15, 2005
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 74 views |

I love this statement from Havoc Pennington on how to design a simplified UI:

Imagine your dialog has a “don’t care, pick something” button, just do what that button would do, and lose the silly dialog.

Amen.

Update: The more I read of Havoc’s stuff, the more I like, particularly this statement:

One of the hardest lessons of GUI programming is that hard coding behavior can be the Right Thing. Programmers are taught to make everything generic and infinitely flexible. The problem is that the more generic and infinitely flexible your UI is, the more similar it is to a programming language. Lisp is not a good user interface.

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