<story><title>Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs </title><url>http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/12/15/10-useful-techniques-to-improve-your-user-interface-designs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>derefr</author><text>But almost no one really follows this advice to its core. Imagine an operating system designed this way: you could quit Photoshop, then &quot;undo&quot; the quit, and all your windows would reopen without anything have to re-load from disk (because it wasn&apos;t really unloaded yet to begin with.) You could &quot;rm -rf /&quot; and then press Ctrl-Z in your shell. You could send an email, and then pull it back from the server (or all the way from the other person&apos;s inbox), as long as they both had the same system installed.&lt;p&gt;If the entire world worked this way, you could even wire $5000 to a Nigerian scammer, then pull it back out, &lt;i&gt;undoing the purchase of anything they spent it on in the process&lt;/i&gt;. Of course, cash would have to be replaced with a reversible commodity (credit chips that really just referenced a row in a central, though distributed, table) so money could flow back into your pocket without anyone having to hand you anything.&lt;p&gt;Taken even further, to the point where you can take out a hit on someone and then press undo &lt;i&gt;after the person is dead&lt;/i&gt;, this begins to sound like the start of a good Science Fiction. &quot;The Reversible Society&quot;, perhaps.</text></item><item><author>edw519</author><text>Nice little writeup that skims the surface of &quot;User Interface Designs&quot;.&lt;p&gt;Problem is that when you decouple interface design from system design, that&apos;s all you can do: skim the surface.&lt;p&gt;#10 provides the perfect example: how to label your dialog boxes.&lt;p&gt;Once you take a larger, more organic view, you reach a much simpler conclusion: don&apos;t have dialog boxes.  Just do it and provide an Undo, and leave the user alone.  Millions will thank you.&lt;p&gt;An outcome you can only reach by looking at the &lt;i&gt;whole&lt;/i&gt; system, not just the way it looks.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>daleharvey</author><text>it isnt about &quot;to the core&quot;, there are obviously non associative things that should be warned as such, but seeing as you use photoshop as an example&lt;p&gt;edit a photoshop file, quit, it will warn you to save changes blah blah, it is annoying, but also stops you deleting stuff, load it again, history is lost&lt;p&gt;Use lightroom, another adobe product for editing photos, edit a photo, quit, no dialog, its already saved, open the file again, and the history is preserved&lt;p&gt;its a much nicer experience in a lot of situations</text></comment>
<story><title>Techniques To Improve Your User Interface Designs </title><url>http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/12/15/10-useful-techniques-to-improve-your-user-interface-designs/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>derefr</author><text>But almost no one really follows this advice to its core. Imagine an operating system designed this way: you could quit Photoshop, then &quot;undo&quot; the quit, and all your windows would reopen without anything have to re-load from disk (because it wasn&apos;t really unloaded yet to begin with.) You could &quot;rm -rf /&quot; and then press Ctrl-Z in your shell. You could send an email, and then pull it back from the server (or all the way from the other person&apos;s inbox), as long as they both had the same system installed.&lt;p&gt;If the entire world worked this way, you could even wire $5000 to a Nigerian scammer, then pull it back out, &lt;i&gt;undoing the purchase of anything they spent it on in the process&lt;/i&gt;. Of course, cash would have to be replaced with a reversible commodity (credit chips that really just referenced a row in a central, though distributed, table) so money could flow back into your pocket without anyone having to hand you anything.&lt;p&gt;Taken even further, to the point where you can take out a hit on someone and then press undo &lt;i&gt;after the person is dead&lt;/i&gt;, this begins to sound like the start of a good Science Fiction. &quot;The Reversible Society&quot;, perhaps.</text></item><item><author>edw519</author><text>Nice little writeup that skims the surface of &quot;User Interface Designs&quot;.&lt;p&gt;Problem is that when you decouple interface design from system design, that&apos;s all you can do: skim the surface.&lt;p&gt;#10 provides the perfect example: how to label your dialog boxes.&lt;p&gt;Once you take a larger, more organic view, you reach a much simpler conclusion: don&apos;t have dialog boxes.  Just do it and provide an Undo, and leave the user alone.  Millions will thank you.&lt;p&gt;An outcome you can only reach by looking at the &lt;i&gt;whole&lt;/i&gt; system, not just the way it looks.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Jasber</author><text>I often wish I had an undo button in the terminal. Obviously not everything can have an undo. But most things (anything you can undo in Windows) you should be able to undo on the Web.&lt;p&gt;This is what people will expect from web applications or they won&apos;t use them.</text></comment>