The Macintosh interface has been around, in one way or another, for 30 years. It has been the dominant computing interface for 15 years.
Jakob Nielsen (left), the King of Internet Usability (my title for him), says it is time for this to change.
The first attempt at that, he adds, will be in the next version of (wait for it) Microsoft Office.
The new interface displays galleries of possible end-states, each of which combine many formatting operations. From this gallery, you select the complete look of your target -- say an org chart or an entire document -- and watch it change shape as you mouse over the alternatives in the gallery. The interaction paradigm has been reversed; it's now What You Get Is What You See, or WYGIWYS.
I don't know how far this will get. We already have elementary versions of this interface in blogs. Blogs are based on templates, which specify typefaces, page design, and other elements before the writer starts to work. Here at Corante, these specifications are made centrally, and all Corante blogs look similar. That's also the way it works with such community network services as Drupal. Drupal calls such designs "themes," and the theme you choose for your community is the design every user gets -- reader, writer or administrator.
Earlier tools, like Blogger and Movable Type (on which Corante is based) give the individual more flexibility, but many writers choose one of the pre-written templates. This speaks to the fact there are many types of creative capability. Writing is just one. Design is something completely different. Programming is a third.
Microsoft's idea is to treat templates, which used to define whole documents rigidly, as creative elements, more like fonts and blockquotes.
This is fine, so far as it goes. But the Law of Unintended Consequences is bound to rear its ugly head, sooner rather than later. Just as people became slave to PowerPoint, and Desktop Publishing spawned a host of ugly reports, I am certain that automating design will not, automatically, result in truth and beauty.
But it is a step.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Dimitar Vesselinov on October 13, 2005 08:02 PM writes...
How usable is Jakob Nielsen?
"Jakob Nielsen is still very popular outside the usability community. Amongst his colleagues however, his popularity has been eroding steadily. Why? There are a couple of reasons for this."
http://blog.vanderbeeken.com/2005/10/how_usable_is_j.html
Permalink to Commenthttp://experiencedynamics.blogs.com/site_search_usability/2004/04/how_usable_is_j.html
2. Laura Scott on October 13, 2005 10:48 PM writes...
That's not exactly true. There are many ways to have different themes for different taxonomies, different blogs, different sections ... and the trend is for even more versatility, at least with Drupal.
Maybe it's really WYGIWYS...UYCOAL (what you get is what you see ... until you click on a link).
Permalink to Comment3. nathan digriz on October 14, 2005 02:54 AM writes...
Drupal is by far the worst example of theming and templating. It is more appropriatly an example of how not to do a themeing system. Hardcoded theme elements, lack of seperation of administration and frontend themeing and having to actually use other components to gain control over something that should be built in. Many would call that last one "flexiblity" I see it as a weakness.
A better example is Mambo where the system is actually granular and translatable.
Permalink to Comment4. Nick Lewis on October 14, 2005 03:13 AM writes...
Nathan, I call B#ll S##t on that. I mean SERIOUSLY. Mambo has a TERRIBLE templating system. Let's take a look at Drupal's templating system: VALID XHTML, CSS, total customizability, and optionally, Smarty. Let's take a look at Mambos: Uh.. table based, it can't produce valid page even if you spend hours trying, its SEO is terrible, there is no possible way to escape its table ridden, its headers are in TR tags for crying out loud!!! I mean, I can't even believe someone could say such a thing... That is, unless you don't know PHP or CSS ;-)
Permalink to Comment5. Jonathan Peterson on October 14, 2005 12:15 PM writes...
Too funny to be reading about user interface issues on Moore's Lore. I've looked at next gen office UI stuff and while much of it IS useful, it's NOT revolutionary.
1) Menus have been replaced by "contextual command tabs" - groups of controls that are modal (i.e. you use different commands while writing than while editing than while doing page layout). This is great, and with over 1,500 commands in Word something that is long past due. But the vi text editor that has been around for 25 years is a modal editor and most people will tell you than modal tools are more efficient.
2) The Galleries that Jakob is obsessing over are useful, but do you REALLY need to see your document formating change on the fly as you mouse over options? Besides, how many options are possible (the margins gallery used in demos shows 4 (yes four) possible combinations of margins.
Word has 1,500 commands, but no one uses more than maybe 200 with any regularity. I'd be fine with having a dozen document templates (assuming that I could customize those templates or hire someone to do so), and decrease the size and complexity of word. Instead of making a braindead Microsoft Works, how about making Word Lite that doesn't allow changes to templates but only costs $40? Then I could work on documents from the office (using a corporate template) without buying an overly complex, bloated hunk of software for my house?
A lot of the new features in the new office and in the new Microsoft OS smack of having too much free processing power laying around and GUI designers trying to find some excuse for getting buyers to upgrade.
I don't want a user interface to entertain me, I want it to get out of my way and let me work.
Permalink to Comment6. nathan digriz on October 14, 2005 12:47 PM writes...
Remember that you are speaking of a system not the result of poor use of the software. The system in Mambo is not responsible for bad HTML anymore than MVC is responsible for bad Ruby on Rails code. The makers of templates are more to blame than anything else.
In comparison of template/theming systems that allow the user to implement HTML in a easy and flexible manner there are two CMS systems that standout. Typo3, Midgard and Mambo/Joomla. The others tend to confuse front-end with backend and templates with hardcoded elements within the core. Thus making many parts of the CMS non-themable or themable only through hacking.
There are other easy theming systems like Textpatterns but they are not considered to be portal or community software.
Permalink to Comment7. bertboerland on October 14, 2005 03:38 PM writes...
Drupal calls such designs "themes," and the theme you choose for your community is the design every user gets -- reader, writer or administrator.
No. With a drupal site the admin can set the theme for all users or let the users specify their own theme. drupal's theme engine is in fact by far the most powerful of all these mambo's and phpnukes and alike. it is just that there are not many good implementations of themes that use all the flexability. with new new upcomming 4.7 release, theme creators can put "blocks" even anywhere, not just left or right as is the case in all other cms-es. Drupal will have a theme contest shortly and you will see that it /is/ very powerful.
Drupal as an integrated admin theme and very flexible rights for groups of admins. this admin theme is the same as the theme the user (or site) has, which is a strenght, not a weakness.
Permalink to Comment8. Jeff Eaton on October 14, 2005 09:34 PM writes...
Nathan, I'm a bit baffled by your comments on Drupal's theming system. Perhaps you're talking about the old XTemplate engine that previous versions used. The PHPTemplate code that's been popular for at least a year -- and is integrated into the core Drupal release in version 4.7 -- is quite a bit cleaner, and even easier to customize.
Hardcoded theme elements, lack of seperation of administration and frontend themeing and having to actually use other components to gain control over something that should be built in.
I'm not sure what the reference to hardcoded theme elements means, but for granularity and translatability it's hard to beat Drupal's PHPTemplate engine and built-in translation system for UI elements.
It's important to note the Drupal is better viewed as a framework for constructing a customized CMS, not a turnkey solution for multi-user blogging or corporate brochure-sites. As such, the core is kept slim while well-supported addon modules are used to fill functional gaps for particular niches.
In any case, this discussion drifts a bit away from the original article's point: that drupal typifies the 'create your content, choose your presentation' method of design, where many types of content are poured into a variety of themes to change appearance of the end product.
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