Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvin Hlavac More buttons would not be an issue on a PC, but this software is designed for PNDs first. That's where the main market for the developer is. |
Another problem with software designers ... they aren't always trained properly in human interface design. Actually, they almost never are.
Buttons are nice but they are not necessary, nor even the best solution in many cases. That button-filled box you are refering to is one of the best examples of bad interface design. It's not the least bit obvious what the whole window is designed for. It takes a lot of reading and a lot of thinking to figure out what is intended. There is no visual grouping of things (at minimum, some grid lines in the window to cause a visual grouping would help, but not solve the problem).
In the end, I had to resort to poking buttons to see what resulted before I was able to understand the designer's intent. I
HATE it when that's the only way to figure something out because you never know what you are likely to screw up in the process.
That screen real estate could have been put to so much better use by a judicious combination of text and radio buttons instead of that single window with a big jumble of buttons in it. A decent design would have allowed them to have more settings in the same space.
...ken...