I was poking around on the Web today (trying to figure out how to clean up some of the gunk that is filling up my C: partition without reinstalling WinXP) and found this article entitled When good interfaces go crufty.
I'm not sure that I completely agree with the article I disagree with almost all his examples (is the concept of a Start menu really so bad?), but I think his general point about cruft is right. As computers develop and certain work-arounds become obsolete, we should abolish the work-arounds rather than incorporating them into The Way Things Are Done. This applies to all sorts of interfaces: graphical desktops, word processors, integrated library systems, OPACs...
The problem is that once an interface widget has been designed a certain way, people get used to it, and it's hard to retrain them. I include myself in that generalization; look at how much I hated the shiny new look of Windows XP! (I still hate the default blue, but after a few months I switched to the XP-style green theme.) Actually I'm on the progressive side of the spectrum; I know a lot of people (my mother, for example) who would be terrified by sudden changes in the computer's interface. She's smart, but the interface is the only thing she knows about computers. Change the interface, and she's lost.
I'm also thinking about Dorothea's arguments about dumb OPAC interfaces, most of which still incorporate cruft from previous decades. (Heck, MARC itself is cruft from 40 years ago, but that's another issue.) I'm all for eliminating cruft, but we have to innovate in a way that still allows our patrons to use the catalog in a way that's comfortable for them. It doesn't matter that the new widgets are so much more powerful and need fewer mouse-clicks, if patrons won't use it.
No, I don't know how to do it, of course. I just want to be one of the people working on a solution.
Senji says:
Yes, the Start Menu is cruft. Not just for the reasons suggested, but because it's a pile of special-case software where general-purpose software would be better.
Also, it has a UI misfeature -- it doesn't touch the corner of the screen. (Apple's UI designers note there are 5 easiest places to get to: "Here" and the four corners of the screen).
I could come up with a lot more similar examples too. For instance he mentions MacOS file dragging. What he doesn't mention is that if you drag from one physical disc to another then it copies rather than moving (which I find completely unobvious).
Irritatingly many of these UI problems were fixed years ago, but in systems no