Ionrock Dot Org

Sunday was day three for my little experiment and since I have a project due, that was my last day. While I can't say that I made any amazing discoveries, it was an interesting little experiment. The one obvious detail that came from my experience is the role of learning. I have done a bit of research on how learning plays a part in usability and my experience has confirmed this for me (on a personal level, btw). More specifically, the idea that learning a UI is not only about finding a comfortable work flow, but trying to avoid any major changes in the UI. In my situation, I found that trying to program in an editor that doesn't have the same key bindings as Emacs made me have to relearn my work flow. Today, when I started using Emacs again, I found that I wanted to hit the back button the browser with my mouse instead of using Alt-back arrow. This is a very small change but, I am positive it is a relic from my short time staying away from the keyboard.

What I think we can take from this is the more we can make applications consistent across the board, the better chance we have of making new applications usable. We already see this kind of thing in graphics applications such as in the Adobe Suite. All the applications emphasis the same basic organization of the work environment, which in turn makes all of them more usable by reducing the need to relearn or learn a different interface. This all may seem rather obvious but it clearly is not the trend. We do not stray toward using the same basic interfaces for similar applications. I would project this is due to the fact that free software is full of creative minds that don't want to stick an app's UI into a mold. I this is fine by the way.

I think there are ways we can start addressing this inconsistency in hopes of letting users rarely have to change their workflow. I will try to write my thoughts on this later. For now, I will disconnect my mouse and get back to Alt-tabbing and Ctrl-Page Up/Down lifestyle. On a positive note, I did find a bug in Firefox (1.07 that ships with Suse 10). When you click close the edge of the back button on any edge (top, bottom, right), the back button history drops down. I did file a bug report. I am going to test the newer versions to see if this is fixed.