What is Digg?142 Comments
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -3/+81eheh, nice. I wonder how that looks like if i switch to "pro-mode"
- AZTriGuy, on 10/12/2007, -14/+85DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS!!!!
- evilTak, on 10/12/2007, -21/+69This isn't an example of bad UI design. This app wasn't designed to be an easy way to download things. This app WAS designed to GUIly expose (nearly) every functionality of the command-line tool wget, which is extremely powerful and has roughly a jillion options. For working within those constraints, I'd say the UI layout is pretty damned good.
- isewise, on 10/12/2007, -2/+36This one is much worse, its linked from the article:
http://thedailywtf.com/images/2/o_filematrix.png - drfloyd5, on 10/12/2007, -2/+24@2tomato - "Pro Mode" would look like this...
2tomato@localhost:~$ wget - Homunculiheaded, on 10/12/2007, -1/+23I think that the tech audience of digg doesn't see the problem with this GUI is exactly what the problem is. It's very hard to forget what you know about whats going on underneath any application, so you will always see the GUI as merely a representation of its inner working, but the average user does not look at software this way. People, in general, think very differently from the way computers operate. Tech people are good at what they do because they understand, and think closer to how computers process information. The best UI doesn't simply translate 1 to 1 but makes it such that the user can interact with a computer in ways that are intuitive to a user but may be counter to the machine logic.
- Winters, on 10/12/2007, -6/+25I think the reason why the UI is going to be widely considered a bad one is becuase most of those options belong on an "options" or "preferences" screen instead of all up in your face.
- thescimitar, on 10/12/2007, -5/+24It's what happen when M&Ms melt in your hand and not in your mouth.
- loconet, on 10/12/2007, -4/+20The generalization that developers cannot create a GUI pisses me off. Some of us developers actually have an art background (CS grad with liking for the arts). Add to that our native and aquired logic/technical skills and the GUI that we create is proven to be pleasant to the eye as well as usable and userfriendly.
Although most developers will most likely destroy a GUI, not all of us do it! - humblepatience, on 10/12/2007, -3/+18apparently this is also a good example of what happens when you let a developer choose your playlist - backstreet boys, celine deon, and britney spears - puke...
- samsite, on 10/12/2007, -6/+16what GUI problem?
- jgreene777, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9there are plenty of DESIGNERS that shouldn't be allowed to design anything, so it's not limited only to programmers...
- Hamsterpotpies, on 10/12/2007, -2/+10hehe:
If you dont understand this look here http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4021619954876872282 - trghpy, on 10/12/2007, -5/+13Wow, looks like something I'd make...
You've herd of SDLC, RAD...
This is called MAD, Manic Application Development where features drive the GUI. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Having to cleanup/completely recode HTML files created by web designers is probably the least fun thing that I get to do on a weekly basis.
- KayinNasaki, on 10/12/2007, -5/+11I agree. I mean. It could be better, but it's still not to bad. I wouldn't say it's a "good" UI, but it's not much of a bad one either. There are far better UI horrors out there. This one doesn't meter an article, let alone being posted on Digg.
- merreborn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7I think in GUI design, like writing, you have to design for your audience.
WGet is *exclusively* for a very technical audience. You can't possibly use it effectively unless you have a deep understanding of URIs and the intricate details of HTTP.
A web browser, on the other hand, is designed to be used by anyone. So, when you first bring up a browser, there are only a half dozen buttons and a text box for inputing URIs. It couldn't get any simpler.
Making a UI too simple for technical users is almost as bad as making a UI too complex for non-technical users. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Is it because of people like the article writer that I can't manually select a monitor/HDTV resolution for my iMac?
Sometimes menus/dialogs/controls need to be complicated. - scabbers, on 10/12/2007, -5/+10Looks fine to me. Wget has a lot of options and for a good reason.
- fantasticFlan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4No, this is what happens when you create a GUI for a command line app with tons of options that very few people not familiar with a CLI should ever need to use, so there's no motivation to make the damn thing usable.
- Drizzle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3If you've got UI problems, I feel bad for you son.
I've got 99 problems, but design ain't one. - greyfade, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3since when does wget have a GUI?
- cresswga, on 10/12/2007, -15/+18I agree with davesphone00. I would rather have everything I need on a single panel if needed rather than having to wade through umpteen menus and sub menus.
Extra credit if it can all be navigated with the keyboard without using the mouse.
It might look like someone puked on your computer screen but once you learn it it becomes very efficient. - Aleks, on 10/12/2007, -12/+15Exactly. Look how Aero turned out :)
- slundal, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS DESIGNERS!!!!!!!
- wonboodoo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Yes, but it probably works better than if we reversed the roles and let the designer do the programming ;-)
- wicketr, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Don't forget the folder on the left called "SexualEducation". I can only imagine what they've got in there.
- deadbaby, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6What's wrong with this UI? Not every program is designed for your Grandma. Wget is a complex program -- this gives you all those options on a UI. What's the problem? If you just want to download a file try using your web browser. You only need wgetUI if you're doing ADVANCED things so the program offers ADVANCED options. Get it?
- elroy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3At least Gentoo file manager makes sense. It's based off Norton Commander, an old two-pane file manager for DOS. It's been cloned several times in the open source world, as well as by FTP clients.
- SweetsGreen, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3For anyone who thinks this is a bad UI....Show me how you'd make it better.
How about having a little cartoon dog pop up and ask the user the 150 questions required....Or maybe a cartoon wizard. - obediah, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4There is already a perfectly good wget interface for grandma.
It's called firefox. - lopolis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Here's perhaps the most famous UI designed by a developer:
http://www.google.com
This is covered in the Google Tech Talk, on "The Science and Art of User Experience" (skip to about 3:30):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6459171443654125383
Developer GUIs are not necessarily *bad* GUIs, they just serve a different purpose: the developer's. In the wGet case it's presenting all features at once (likely so the developer can use and test all features that they've built). In Sergey's case, the best UI for him was a single search field on the homepage to start querying the back-end right away.
Turns out users quite liked the simplicity too. - echobucket, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Here's a much better job at a frontend for wget.
http://www.hexcat.com/deepvacuum/
Compare that with the one in the article. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3I'm both a developer and a designer, and it seems to me that I'm in the minority. Most jobs at large companies seem to want one or the other, but not both. Too much bureaucracy, i suppose.
(I had to retype bureaucracy about 6 times before spell-check could figure out what I was trying to say!) - obediah, on 10/12/2007, -5/+7Winters:
If you looked before you spoke you would realize that 'options' are the only thing to wget. You pick your options, run it, and then wait for your files to download. Then it's done and you move on to other programs to interact with the files. Moving these choices to an option screen would only result in an additional click. - TomFoolery, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7I tend to agree. Wget is not a program joe schmoe would find very useful. We have browsers for those people. Anyone who has actually used wget would find this interface quite helpful.
- weiran, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This is why computer science degrees should have COMPULSARY UI design modules. One every year.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Hmm, this could explain why the Gimp sucks. Just a guess.
- lucid270, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2blender's great once you figure out how to use it, or atleast thats what I thought of it when I used it 3-4 years ago.
- expressodan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Sad thing is, he started with design... check out version 0.1 way back in 2001
"10/jun/01 0.1 Non-working version, User Interface mainly done"
http://www.jensroesner.de/wgetgui/#screen - dlsspy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@mitrovarr
dustintmb:~ 521% wget -h | grep -A1 clobber
-nc, --no-clobber skip downloads that would download to
existing files.
Are you sure it doesn't have a tooltip on hover? Of course, clobber is a pretty common word in shell scripting (both sh and csh have a noclobber option), so it made sense to me. - kmedlin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The worst UI I've ever seen for end users is the List Administration interface for Mailman. It's got these self-important jargon titles for everything. A few of my favorites are:
"Suffix for use when this list is an umbrella for other lists, according to setting of previous "umbrella_list" setting. "
and
"Should any existing Reply-To: header found in the original message be stripped? If so, this will be done regardless of whether an explict Reply-To: header is added by Mailman or not."
While these make sense to an end user with no knowledge of the inner workings of email systems it might as well be written in a language they don't understand.
Developers aren't always bad UI designers and designers aren't always bad developers. But when possible developers shouldn't do UI design and designers should not write code. It's a recipe for disaster. - Hamsterpotpies, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5@samsite
I'm thinking the same thing. Nothing looks bad. It's a windows WGET program. WGET never was easy to use correctly and this program is a short cut of it for windows users. - swizzcheez, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Hmmm.... wget is more a developer tool rather than a user application. Why again should the UI not be designed by developers?
OTOH, I have no idea why any self-respecting developer should need a GUI for wget. If your system doesn't have a decent man page for wget, then maybe you're developing on the wrong system. - GnuTzu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Honestly, this is a relative comparison.
Those who wrote the web-page and documentation for wgetgui should have been a little more up front about who their target audience is.
Wgetgui makes sense for those who already work with wget on command line, but it won't work for non-technical people.
For those who want to fully understand the command-line version of wget, you'll need to spend a few hours or even days with the documentation ( http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/manual/wget.html ).
However, I would not recommend this to anyone who isn't interested in dealing with the command-line features of wget.
Again, the developers should have been a bit more explicit about who they were designing for.
- Hemingrubbish, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2mushroom
- misterjangles, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@kmedlin truer words were never spoken. By today's standard the Mailman interface completely sucks. I personally find annoying the whole "moderator bit" thing because you think you're thinking someone is set as a moderator, but really you are configuring that "they need to be moderated!" It's totally ass-backwards.
But, then when you look at the history - when Mailman first came out it was thought to be totally awesome and simple because we had all been using listproc which required you to send commands to the server in an email message and get a reply back - or else edit text config files on the server. I remember being very impressed when i first saw Mailman because I hated sending all those stupid email commands.
I think the bar is just much higher in general now - it's not enough to just make it function anymore. - chaos386, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Why is ucbmckee being dugg down? What he says makes sense. The GUI shown isn't "bad", it's meant for a different audience than the author of the blog belongs to: people who don't like it when options are hidden away behind menus and other dialog boxes just to make the main window look clean.
Some people are frightened by complexity, and they feel overwhelmed by options unless they are metered out in small doses (such as tabs in a separate "options" menu), but some people (usually the more technical ones) are undaunted by complexity and can instead become frustrated when they're forced to click through hoops just to set the options they want. - noodlez, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4this is what happens when you have feature bloat and/or don't have anyone specifically (or have an idiot) checking for usability.
i'm a developer, took a class that dealt in part with UI, and i like to think i do a good job making a usable interface.
designers do well because thats what they're supposed concentrate more on (look and feel, as opposed to coding from the developers). but i've definitely seen my fair share of designers make something just as idiotic as whats in the article. - misterjangles, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Developer: Hey boss, I have that prototype working but it would be nice if we can get a designer to help me with the UI and do some usability testing as well
Boss: How much is that going to cost?
Developer: more than "nothing"
Boss: Sorry, not in the budget.
Developer: Cool. I've been wanting to learn AJAX anyway -
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