eNilsson

eNilsson pursues the non-violent overthrow of bad user interface design

About a year and a half ago, Bill Higgins wrote a very interesting article about user interface design. In short, he says that products/programs should be developed to look like the platform in which they run on. So, says Bill, “a Windows application should look and feel like a Windows application, a Mac application should look and feel like a Mac application, and a web application should look and feel like a web application.” For Bill, if you don’t heed this warning then you will confuse your users because the application won’t feel natural.

Bill, this is me disagreeing with you:

Your average user has come a long way and is not made so easily uncomfortable by differing UIs anymore. Exhibit A: iTunes for Windows. Launched back in 2003, iTunes for the Windows platform maintains the same exact look, feel, and functionality as native OSX programs. In fact, it has become Apple’s flagship program (with the help of the iPod) and has been exciting young people with the Apple UI since its launch.

And it doesn’t stop there. Exhibits B, C, and D: Fluid, Adobe Air, and Mozilla Prism. Fluid uses Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) to make web applications look like desktop applications. And Adobe Air is a cross-platform runtime environment for web applications, allowing developers (and sometimes the user) to bring a consistent UI to web applications regardless of the operating system. Mozilla Prism is yet another program bridging the divide between the Internet and the desktop in that it "focuses on how web apps can integrate into the desktop experience... also working to increase the capabilities of those apps by adding functionality to the Web itself, such as providing support for offline data storage and access to 3D graphics hardware." Plus Prism has the benefit of being built on our beloved Firefox - yes, that means support for HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and <canvas> on ANY operating system.

And then there’s ElephantTrakker. eNilsson built ElephantTrakker in Flex to look and feel like a desktop application regardless of the environment. It has the rich feature set of a desktop application, and speed to match from its cloud data service, so the look and feel is a great complement. But is it confusing or uncomfortable? Quite the opposite. When it was first deployed to volunteer fundraisers for the Romney campaign it was embraced by all levels of computer users whom soon couldn't live without the program.  Perhaps eNilsson has taken advantage of working in an area where few standards have been established, so users have little to no expectations regarding UI.

Whatever the explanation might be, it seems that the UI divide that Bill speaks of is shrinking despite his warnings. As more programs migrate to the cloud (announced today is that iWork is even moving to the cloud with iWork.com - in beta at the moment) and other programs focus on syncing data and functionality across multiple platforms (see the success of Evernote), users seem not only open to changing the way they interact with their information, they are relishing it.

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