February 11, 2008

David Pogue: Simplicity sells

I came across this talk by David Pogue, a popular technology journalist. I don't like his presentation style which is a bit too agressive for my taste, but anyway he has a few very good examples of good and bad ui design.
One very obvious case of bad ui design that I never noticed before is the Windows 2000 logoff dialog (is nearly the same in XP):
There are only a couple of choices (shutdown, restart, standby, etc.) but they are collapsed in a combo box. Even worse, before you get there from Ctrl-Alt-Del, you have to pass another dialog. Ever counted how many clicks you need to shut down a running Windows? At least four. Here's the logoff dialog of an Ubuntu Linux: one click to shutdown.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hello Ralf,

I agree with you - this is a great example of usability improvement. But if you count four interactions for Windows shutdown (including the Ctrl+Alt+Del), then it is not one for Ubuntu but two.