Payam+Azadi+Interface+Like+and+dislike

=**Interface Like & Dislike**= September 11, 2011 by **Payam Azadi**

An insight into my user interface values by identifying, describing, and explaining one interface I enjoy using, and one I dislike using.

Wordpress


This is the home administrative page for the Wordpress Content Management Systems (CMS), used mainly for blogs but also used for full websites. There is a wealth of functionality and information available on the main page, called their dashboard, but there is a powerful organization to everything and thought put into what to display, considering there is so much to display.

Features I like:
 * Make a quick post straight from the home page
 * View all your recent comments
 * See all pertinent statistics as to how your blog is doing
 * Extremely intuitive and useful navigation always on the left hand side, collapsible, so you never need to click multiple times and wait on page loads to get to where you need to go
 * Change theme right from home page, which is great for occasions such as Christmas, St Patty's day, etc.
 * Ability to one-click upgrade your blog (not shown)

Mac.


This is the Mac GUI, featuring Finder, the analog of Windows Explorer on Windows machines.

Just a few of the countless things wrong with this interface:
 * Window management. Open 4 Firefox windows. Now try and switch between them quickly. You can't, other than to download an external app (which costs money, or you pirate it), or to move windows around. Or to do Command+F(something), and then choose your window from the list using arrow keys/tab (twice the key presses and twice the time. You may rebut that the Windows method of tabbing through will be less efficient when there are many windows open. This is solved by reordering of the window list when you alt+tab, to keep the most recently accessed windows first).
 * Can't maximize windows or make them extend the full screen.
 * Can't "cut" files, you have to copy, paste, and delete.
 * Pressing 'delete' won't delete a file, you have to do Command+Delete (which in some cases still doesn't work), or drag/drop to Recycle Bin (Trash)
 * The Trash button does not have a restore feature. WHAT?!?!
 * As a missing feature of the Mac keyboard, there is no simple hotkey to take screenshots. There are several screenshot sequences, but they're not intuitive, such as Command+Alt+3. I have to Google this for my friends who use Mac all the time, not to mention myself. And the answer doesn't come from an Apple website, it comes from MacRumors.com
 * Have to do a command in a terminal to show hidden files
 * Clicking on Applications seems to be the standard way to access all your programs not on the task bar. Now install 20 programs, on top of the 20 that come standard, and spend many seconds scrolling through an alphabetical list to find what you want. Just be careful not to delete anything from there in an attempt to make the list smaller, or you're uninstalling a program. And if you want utilities, such as the process/task manager, and you click Utilities, instead of staying in the interface, a new Finder window launches..
 * When you "minimize" something, you can't Alt+Tab back into it, it disappears from the list.
 * You can't "minimize" everything i.e. to show the desktop. You can do a hotkey to push all the windows the side, but as soon as you try and click back one window they all come back into view.

Some people may dismiss some of these as "trying to do the Windows way". But I don't think that really applies to anything here. These are basic, standard user actions that everybody needs.

I haven't seen anybody use a Mac who is a power user, who hasn't had to hack their Mac into oblivion with custom code and add-ons and apps and nonsense. They hit the mark on having a built-in PDF reader, something which Windows still doesn't have, but they don't have a built-in photo editor and you can't switch between windows without wasting several seconds. The book explains this as "your brain moves faster than the machine".