There are two main kinds of UI, following two different basic human cognitive models: recognize-and-point versus remember-and-verbalize. The underlying cognitive models follow human mental development: infants and young children recognize and point, while slightly older children up through adults acquire language and use that instead. If one is lucky enough to live that long, one may start to lose language in one's dotage and end up back at recognizing and pointing.
GUIs are all about recognize-and-point: you recognize the icon or button and you use the pointer to "shift focus" to the desired object. Text-based UIs, which we used to call simply "UIs" but which I will call here "TUIs," are all about remember-and-type: you remember the right command in this context and you type it.
GUIs should have an underlying metaphor: a physical desktop for operating systems, a physical piece of paper for word processors, a physical scroll of names for music players, etc.
GUIs are really great for two kinds of job:
- Software which one does not use often enough to memorize the commands
- Software which is aimed at people who do not use software well
- Software which one uses so often that typing is faster than pointing
- Software which is aimed at domain experts who want power over support
Of course, the GUI model is not purely graphical: there is a text-handling component to it because nearly every human/computer interaction, at some point, needs the possibility of text entry and text viewing.
If done well, as is the iTunes interface on an iDevice (iPod, iPad, iPhone), this text entry component is so natural that you don't think about it.
If done badly, as is the SQL window in MS-Access, this text entry component is jarring and much worse than a TUI would be.
Actual Rant
GUIs in general provide many options and lots of power. I have have a problem with most of the actual GUIs I encounter: they are hard to use. In fact, most of them suck.
While the world seems to have gone completely graphical, we also seem to have decided that terrible GUIs are just a fact of life. Dilbert feels my pain:
While graphical environment are rife with possibility and provide all kinds of pre-made widgets, they do not provide, inherently, any of the following:
- a clean, consistent layout
- a useful visual metaphor for your particular context
- guidelines for the scope or direction of the guts beneath them
As far as I can tell, many GUIs are designed by analogy: "let's do this the way Microsoft Office would do it, even if we are trying to identify patients who have a particular condition, and Microsoft Office is trying to automate tradition clerical work." Close enough, right? So let's say that the patients are files and their surgeries are documents and maybe their test results are also documents and soon the screen is a maze of tiny controls, all basically alike, leaving the user to remember what the current set of "documents" actually represents.
The fact that you can learn to navigate a bad metaphor doesn't change the fact that it is a bad metaphor.
And yet, the sad fact is that making all your bad GUIs look like Microsoft Word is better than making them bad in their own way. If your users expect a "File" menu bar at the top, whether or not they are dealing with "files," then finding one there is comforting. If you cannot provide a clean, consistent look-and-feel yourself, I suppose copying a popular one is better than creating a original, bad-but-novel UI.
Not all GUIs are terrible: I have watched die-hard Windows users interact with iTunes for Windows, which makes no effort to be Microsoft Office-like, and those die-hard Windows users find iTunes a delight.
So go ahead and create GUIs, if that is your job, but for God's sake do the graphical part, or get someone with graphical talent to do that part for you. Please. Your users will thank you--or at least, curse your name less.
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