Coding Horror: Is UI still in the stone age?

September 14, 2005

Is UI still in the stone age?

The Top 8 reasons user interface design is in the stone age is more of a rant than a reasoned argument, but it's still worth reading. If UI design is in the stone age, why are there at least two sites which document known UI patterns?

UI Patterns and Techniques (soon to be a book)
Web/Gui/Mobile Design patterns

I think we've come a long way from the stone age-- particularly after sitting through some very impressive demos of the Windows Vista and Office 12 UIs at PDC 2005 today. But it's true that there's still much to be done.

I was struck by how aggressively Microsoft has folded web metaphors into Vista and Office-- things like the forward and back buttons, focusing on a single task per page, and the ubiquitous search box. I've talked about this before, and I'm glad to see Microsoft leading the way.

Speaking of Vista, Flowstate is a great UI blog from an ex-UI architect for Windows Vista. Prior to Vista, he worked on Money-- one of the first inductive user interfaces. Subscribed!

Posted by Jeff Atwood View blog reactions

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Comments

Great that MS leads the way with the ubiquitous search boxes, never seen those before. Also, I heard that Vista has a vector oriented graphics engine! What a time we will live in sometime in the next few years!

Good sir, pray tell have you ever heard of that fabled "Mac OS X" platform?

Bernd Haug on September 14, 2005 05:18 AM

> leads the way with the ubiquitous search boxes, never seen those before

Well, there was always start, find files, but like AltaVista found out from Google, the devil is in the details..

> Vista has a vector oriented graphics engine

Well, the difference is that it's REALLY vector to the core. The OSX engine is far short of this.. more info here:

http://www.interact-sw.co.uk/iangblog/2005/05/20/tigerresolution

Jef f Atwood on September 14, 2005 06:47 PM

FYI, a few years ago, my colleagues and I published a fairly popular book on web design patterns, with 90 patterns ranging from overall site architecture to individual page designs.

<a href="http://designofsites.com/">http://designofsites.com/</a>;

JasonHong on September 16, 2005 04:26 PM

I did not dig deep into vector based engines, but back and forward buttons and search boxes - MS surely cannot lead the way in this - I have it right now on my notebook not next year.

Rimantas on September 17, 2005 07:57 AM