Interfacing and Home Geek Out

Completed an important upgrade of IBM's OnDemand for Multiplatforms this weekend. But that's not what I wanted to talk about today.

There is much made of good interface design, but seemingly, nobody ever does it. There are entire books written about it, of which I have read a couple. The basic tenets of clean, solid, intuitive interfaces, are almost always ignored for a simple reason: they don't look cool.

I'll give you an example. I was on an irc chat with some members of the tech community at large, and a significant portion of the Microsoft Windows Shell development team. Questions were being fired at the MS team at the rate of about 4 to 6 questions per second. Then the MS team would wade through them, and answer what they could, or what they thought was relevant. Number of questions about intuitiveness or cleanliness of design? Maybe 20 or so (about 5 of which were mine...) Number of questions about potential bugs or issues? Maybe another 20 or so. Number of questions about looking cool? In the hundreds, definitely. The overall concern, once again, was how cool it looked, rather than how well it worked.

Maybe it's me. In Vista, I had a good deal of difficulty finding a few common features that I use quite a bit. Is it because the newer interface is less intuitive, or have I just grown accustomed to a poor interface, and do not recognize a good one when I see it? No, I don't think so. I work with new interfaces every time I install a new version of Linux. (Fluxbox, on Ubuntu would be cool...) So, new interfaces don't bug me. I can still find what I need fairly quickly.

Maybe, just maybe, it's more to do with a change in the way that people work. Perhaps I'm holding on to older work techniques and practices, and displaying an unwillingness to change, subconciously. Is that more likely than Microsoft designing a poor interface? I'm one to give credit where credit is due, and for all the issues with software and internal business practices, MS is pretty good at designing user interfaces, be they hardware or software.

I guess once again, the answer is: we shall see.

Spent some time being a home geek this weekend. In addition to the OnDemand upgrade at work, I upgraded the kitchen sink at home with a new faucet. This one features a soap dispenser and sprayer. This sprayer actually maintains some good water pressure, unlike the previous version. The spout is also higher and has a better reach than the previous spout, which should make for a better apple/grape juice making experience. A more cooperative sink is going to be a boon, given the amount of cooking I've been doing lately. The only issue was that I had forgotten about the nails I had put up under the sink, for hanging pot lids. I have two nice little gouges in the side of my head now. Should make shaving interesting later this week.

Another kitchen upgrade on the way: New dishwasher. So did we go with the basic model? Of course not! This is a geek house, and we needed to go with something appropriately geeky! The Bosch Integra 300 features an optical sensor system that will delete extra wash cycles if not needed, an auto-closing door, near silent operation (54db) due to a suspended motor, heavy insulation and flow-through water heater, hidden controls, and stainless steel, outside and inside. No, it wasn't cheap, but I was the lucky recipient of a little windfall last week, so I thought I should put it to use immediately.

Things are going well. Makes me nervous. :-)