Most stupid GUI design ever (On a Mac...what else)

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From: Mark Fowler
Subject: Most stupid GUI design ever (On a Mac...what else)
Date: 13:19 on 23 Apr 2004
Since no-one else has posted it, here's one that bit us the other day.

Find someone who's not used a Mac before.  Give them Apple Mail, let them
open preferences and then get them to accidentially click on the lozenge
as it's where the close button would be on a Windows laptop (and it, like
other mac window controls are, are not labeled.)  This will close the
toolbar.  However in preferences dialogs the toolbar isn't extra helpful
buttons - it's the *only* way to access the other preference panes.  And
the dialogs are stateful.  Meaning if you quit Mail and re-open it again
then you'll get the same dialog back without the toolbar.

Unless the user was paying a lot of attention they'll probably never be
able to get at the other preferences.  You'll be lucky if the user even
*knows* there's other panes there - you've certainly lost any visual
indication that they even exist from the screen.  It took me a good number
of months to work out that the lozenge opens and closes toolbars or that
opening and closing toolbars was even possible (essentially that's a
notion that doesn't translate from X11 window managers at all.)

Having the *only* way to access controls to be able to be optionally
disabled and hidden is truely insane.  And it's not just that preferences
pane - it's all of them all over the whole OS.  That's just nuts!

Mark.

-- 
#!/usr/bin/perl -T
use strict;
use warnings;
print q{Mark Fowler, mark@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx.xxx, http://twoshortplanks.com/};

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