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Re: [udig-devel] Good books on usability

The reviews on Amazon agree. But sadly, Tufte is unavailable!

On Wednesday, August 4, 2004, at 02:20 PM, Jonathan Aquino wrote:

I'd like to share the following titles of excellent books on usability:

* Envisioning Information [Edward Tufte]. A beautiful book (with pop-ups!)

* About Face [Alan Cooper]. Mostly about what's wrong with Windows,
but there are some gems.

On Fri,  4 Jun 2004 20:28:22 -0400, cholmes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<cholmes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Quoting Jonathan Aquino <jonathan.aquino@xxxxxxxxx>:

"uDig ... will ... make viewing, editing, and printing data ...
simple
for ordinary computer users." [uDig Requirements]


Call me a dreamer, but wouldn't it be great if the uDig GUI were as
polished and friendly as PhotoShop? Editing data could be ... fun!
(http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/overview.html)

May its user interface not become like the very user unfriendly GIMP
(aptly named) (http://www.wpdfd.com/editorial/wpd0504review.htm)

I think if that's a serious goal then you really need to hire a
full-time user interface designer from the start.  My friend is a UI
designer at Adobe, he was lead UI on Album and he's moving to co-lead
UI on Photoshop right now.  Photoshop employs 4 people full time just
to _think_ about the UI, and a large engineering team that's committed
to implemented exactly what they come up with.

There's a decent blog on open source problems with user interface
design:
http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability

He basically says that open source UI suffers because for the most part it's an after thought, to be really good it needs to be designed for at
the start, indeed it needs to drive development.

Chris

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User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig)
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     Paul Ramsey
     Refractions Research
     Email: pramsey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
     Phone: (250) 885-0632



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