pdemul

This post from Marco Arment is already old, but it stayed in my head as the best description of the criteria for a good UI: no UI.

As a user, I hate buttons and toolbars and sliders and panels and drawers and splash screens and instructional screens and settings screens. In short, I hate UI. I want to notice it as little as possible.[..]

But I look at Apple’s iPhone apps, and [..] all of their apps are the same way. They’re content-focused, with minimal UI. Think about it: what’s the UI to the Photos app? Messages? There’s almost nothing there. Even Safari is just two toolbars and a bookmarks list.

Ever since this post I have started to notice this: the applications with the most annoying user interface tend to be the ones with overly complicated ones. This is the reason why I switched from Firefox to Chrome, why I prefer to use the Microsoft Office apps with minimized ribbon (right click next to the ribbon headers and select “Minimize the ribbon”), why I dislike the Start menu configuration of Windows with the always present application bar (unfortunately the alternative of auto-hiding is even worse: an animated useless bar) and why I prefer Outlook web access most of the time instead of Outlook.

If I don’t need it, don’t show it, or better: don’t even offer it. This includes all the crap in my clock area (if I want to configure my virus scanner then I can do so in the control panel, right?), all those uninstallers in my start menu (necessitating a subfolder just for the program icon and the uninstaller), too many submenus (example: the tools menu in Acrobat reader. Three items, two of which are submenu’s. Those 11 items total can easily fit without submenu’s, which creates a much better overview of the options. This is what the separator line is for!) and much, much more.

I use my computer for the content, not for the interface to get to that content. Too often the interface gets between me and the content. This is what Apple is doing very well, and what many others still need to learn.