Tuesday, March 30, 2004

Human interface guidelines for the Internet. Apple, of course, wrote the book on human interface guidelines by visualizing and documenting a range of interaction scenarios in meticulous detail. Today we have a variety of platform-specific guidelines -- for Windows, for GNOME, for Flash MX. But we lack general guidelines for how Internet applications should behave on all platforms. E-mail programs don't agree on how threading, foldering, and filtering should work. Web browsers don't agree on how drop-down search boxes should work. RSS readers don't agree on how the orange XML icon should work. Media players don't agree on how playlists should work. We need HCI (human/computer interface) guidelines more than ever. And we need them not only for Windows, OS X, GNOME, and Flash, but for the uber-platform that subsumes them all. We need human interface guidelines for the Internet. [Full story at InfoWorld.com] The impetus for this column came from this posting on S/MIME signatures, which argued that confusion about whether or how to trust a signature is a problem of UI, not cryptography. Robb Beal violently agreed. He wrote: Yes! Every technical spec that has user-facing implications should have a corresponding functional spec. See my functional annotation of Mark Pilgrim's HTTP tests for an example. ... [Jon's Radio] 9:06:24 AM      Google It!.