[Original] Software User Interface Design

The quality of the interface directly affects the company's image, I guess some people will compare "good interface" with "gorgeous interface", "Bad interface" with "simple interface. Whether the interface is good or bad depends on whether it is gorgeous to a certain extent, but it is not absolute, but targeted. For example, for a personal user-oriented music player, whether it is a traditional Winamp, Windows Media Player, the boss of Microsoft, or the "alien-made" sonique, their interface development direction is as gorgeous as possible, however, another group of people developed foobar 2000. They thought that the music player should focus on playing music (and implementing peripheral functions). Other aspects are not worth the effort, they also won quite a few followers. This is for individual users, and for commercial users, the situation is quite different. For example, why does the Office series completely change the appearance of windows like some software? The user will deal with these software for a long time, and nothing unexpected should appear on its interface. It is said that in Office XP, When you hover the mouse over a menu or toolbar, the image will float and add a shadow, which proves to be invisible, therefore, this function is canceled (unconfirmed) in Office 2003 ). For example, for higher-end commercial software, especially software involving cross-platform operations, whether the interface is gorgeous is considered as a secondary factor in the interface design. For example, in 3DS MAX, I even felt uncomfortable when I first came into contact with its interface. For example, in Pro/E, its interface is also very common. In some software developed using Java, these problems are more obvious, such as Borland JBuilder (I am not sure whether it is developed by Java, but it is one of the common tools for Java Development ).
An important factor in determining whether the interface is good is the ease of use of the interface. The interface is a tool for users to deal with program algorithms: the interface is not easy to use, and the algorithm is subtle and meaningless. In terms of ease of use, the layout of the interface should be considered first. Unlike the design process before painting, the design interface cannot be composed in the traditional way :), but this does not mean that the control is piled up randomly. Take word 2003 as an example. click Settings | options on the menu. Although the pop-up window contains complicated content, its layout is well organized, options for different functions are put into 13 tabs (data may change depending on the installed components), and options for similar functions are also subdivided. Whether the interface meets the user's habits is also a matter of attention. For example, the attribute/setting window that users often see is like a large majority of setting windows in the control panel. a window with a width smaller than the height has a tab in the middle (even if this tab has only one page ), the following is to confirm the cancellation (there may be applications ). Taking the word example above for example, its setting window is largely in line with the user's habits, and even to ensure that the window size is as consistent as possible, in the setting interface, it abandons the frame control and uses another method to group options (group name is added with a concave line ). However, I think this layout is too compact, which puts some visual pressure on users.
Some other small aspects of the interface will also affect the user's evaluation of the interface, such as font. In Windows, the font of Chinese software is 9 9, and tahoma 8 is more suitable for English software. If the font size is too large, the appearance of the software will be affected, because the font displayed in Windows is only that level, unlike the font anti-aliasing supported in MacOSX, although this function is added to WINXP, it is still unsatisfactory ). On the contrary, if you set the Chinese font to tahoma 8, the Chinese font display will be very small in the Win9x/me environment, making users feel uncomfortable. For example, the button size. The Unit is expressed with the commonly used length in VB, and the optimum height of the button should be 300.
For more information about the new interface engine of Windows Longhorn, Longhorn will use the engine called "mygame" to draw the user interface. "mygame" is actually DirectX 10. I think this kind of reform will be very good for some users. I used the Longhorn version leaked by Microsoft earlier, and its interface is indeed very gorgeous, but it runs slowly on my machine. Maybe when you talk about the release of Longhorn in MS, the configuration of the machine will be high so that your current machine will sweat, but now, this may not be the case. My current machine is Pentium M 715/512 MB ddr333, but I still think it is very slow when running XP on the standard interface of XP, and it is now released in year 34 from XP. I hope that the operating system will occupy as low as possible resources. If it is not necessary to provide some functional features, I would even like to go back and use Windows 95, in this way, I can allow my computer to do more with limited resources. Windows is becoming more and more gorgeous, but Microsoft has never solved the problem of a significant slowdown in Windows usage for a period of time. I usually reinstall the system once a week, even if I am using Windows 2000, which is famous for its stability.
Windows has become gorgeous, which is still for individual users. For example, for Windows 2003 of enterprise users, the theme service is disabled by default.
I have tried to use images, Flash, and HTML for application software interfaces. I think I have gained a lot in these processes. The above are some of my experiences, please advise if you have any mistakes.