i still get this feeling today when i work with uis, except now i think, ‘wouldn’t it be better if the design was like…’, or ‘i wish i could visualize the data like this…’ i think there is a ‘good practice’ but no best practice in ui design, because everyone wants information in a way they expect the system to handle and return it. part of this is clearly conditioning on things like win32 systems, or just an expectation that technology or machines can’t possibly handle task ‘X’ easily.

as others pointed out last time the wget example came up, that interface might not be as bad as it appears if you understand the underlying, already complex, wget command line tool. for a power wget user, it might actually work very well for them.

i wonder what makes a ui good, what properties have some sort of ubiquitous nature about them which forces them to reappear over and over? for example, in the real world the steering wheel & pedal interface of automobiles is the only interface i can think of for controlling a car. similar interfaces appear in planes , and tanks, but not in submarines or boats (or the powerranger’s megazord robot) . Is there a reason why this interface dominates over other interfaces frequently proposed in concept cars? does this contradict my theory that there are only ‘good ui practices’ not best ui practices?

but if a designer is tugged in one direction by win32 menu structure expectations, surely that same designer is tugged in the opposite direction by the principles of intuitive designs.

or perhaps design of interfaces suffers its own, more general “vocabulary problem“? that is, given a common task, there is utterly no convergence over what “the elegant” or “the best” way is?