Interfaces: a complaint about clutter.

Maybe we've been blitzed by too many kitchen-sink demos. But we do notice a troublesome trend: A lot of new GUI products have become really, really hard to figure out. We keep seeing screens buried in layer upon layer of dialog boxes and windows, cluttered with randomly placed icons, file directories, pick lists, radio buttons, data entry fields, and other graphical furniture. Perhaps these screens are the ultimate expression of the messy desktop metaphor, but somehow we thought GUI interfaces were supposed to be a bit more intuitive.

In a sense, though, desktop clutter shouldn't come as a surprise. The industry's basic graphical model, the Macintosh interface, was never intended for feature-rich applications. Steve Jobs' design goal was a toaster-like "information appliance"--minimal memory, no hard disk, no hierarchical file system, single level menus. Not surprisingly, Apple's Macintosh interface guidelines offered almost no useful hints about how to help users navigate through powerful applications, and Microsoft compounded the problem with Windows by grafting poorly-implemented Macintosh conventions on top of the DOS file system.

To be sure, there has been some progress in the war against clutter. Perhaps the most important invention--which neither Apple nor Microsoft originated--is the toolbar, a device that helps organize and display conunonly-used functions in a fixed format on the screen. To us, toolbars (as well as ribbons, rulers, palettes, and the like) are a vastly better way of handling complexity than just scattering isolated icons on the desktop.

But when we look for other toolbar-like concepts, not much comes to mind. What application designers seem to be missing (in our amateur view) is a sense of how to create clusters of functions. The dashboard on a car has more than a hundred discrete controls and indicators, but they're not confusing because drivers perceive these elements as part of groups of controls--heater, radio, lights, etc.--that are logically related to each other by position, shape, and size. Is it a dumb question to ask why control panels aren't a better design metaphor than the classical messy desktop?

Unfortunately, we expect that messy desktops will continue to be the screen metaphor of choice for lots of GUI developers, if only because burying the screen in stacks of dialog boxes and icons takes less effort than designing a good control panel or toolbar. But we're convinced that users eventually will notice that well-crafted interfaces are a sign of fundamental design integrity--so perhaps the marketplace will impose its own standards of clarity on future GUI applications.