Innovative Interfaces
Google vs. Yahoo Mail ...
"One of the main points in User Interface Design For Programmers or any other book on user interface design is that you should design interfaces based on user expectations. I agree with this for the most part, but it makes me sad. It makes me sad because it means that innovative interfaces are likely to fail even though they’re “better.” For example, there are plenty of studies that show that pie menus are superior to traditional linear menus, but they’ll never take the place of context menus. Why not? Because they’re too different from what people have come to expect when they right click.
I see this happen a lot with Gmail. Walt Mossberg recently had an article in the Wall Street Journal comparing Yahoo mail (beta) to Gmail. He concluded that Yahoo mail was better because it more closely replicated the desktop experience (i.e., Outlook). He complains that Gmail doesn’t provide folders, which he has come to expect. It doesn’t matter that most people only have one level of folders [1] making them identical to labels. It breaks his expectations of how to organize email." continued ... (Via Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?)
"One of the main points in User Interface Design For Programmers or any other book on user interface design is that you should design interfaces based on user expectations. I agree with this for the most part, but it makes me sad. It makes me sad because it means that innovative interfaces are likely to fail even though they’re “better.” For example, there are plenty of studies that show that pie menus are superior to traditional linear menus, but they’ll never take the place of context menus. Why not? Because they’re too different from what people have come to expect when they right click.
I see this happen a lot with Gmail. Walt Mossberg recently had an article in the Wall Street Journal comparing Yahoo mail (beta) to Gmail. He concluded that Yahoo mail was better because it more closely replicated the desktop experience (i.e., Outlook). He complains that Gmail doesn’t provide folders, which he has come to expect. It doesn’t matter that most people only have one level of folders [1] making them identical to labels. It breaks his expectations of how to organize email." continued ... (Via Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?)
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