Categories of Commands

As I've been going on about over at S60, on the desktop the original intent of windowing systems was to segregate kinds of commands and functions. Taking a spreasheet application as a canonical example, commands that apply directly to the cells and their contents are often located within the worksheet window; commands that apply to the worksheet as a whole are located somewhat outside the window but nearby (in a menu bar, generally, top of the window in Windows; top of the display in MacOS). And commands that apply to the system on which the spreadsheet application runs are found in control panels, other windows, and things like that.

In the original versions of windowing systems (the Star, the Lisa, the original Mac) the array of available commands was vastly smaller than it is today. The computing and networking environment was vastly simpler than it is today. And this graphic-design-based system of reflecting typology (and mindset) was vastly clearer and more defensible than it is today.

I used to teach people how to use Macs -- people who had never used any computer before. It was pretty easy, because the system was relatively logical. Later, I taught people how to use Windows (starting with Windows 95). That was still pretty easy; it wasn't quite as logical, but was more attractive because it had color, and more fun because of Solitaire. Solitaire has always been an excellent tool for someone just learning things like how to use a mouse.

But today the whole thing is a mess. In MacOS there are applications, but there are also widgets. There's the desktop, but there's also Dashboard. The menus on the left side of the bar (starting with the Apple) start out making a little sense, but in virtually all applications the menus quickly devolve into semi-random lists. And the stuff on the right side of the menu bar might be useful, but you just have to remember icons, layouts, and positions; it doesn't make any inherent sense at all. Windows XP is even worse, and what's more, it's inconsistent from one version to another. And don't even get me started on Vista.

But I'm mostly interested in mobile application and system UI design, not desktop stuff. My point is simple: in doing mobile UI design we take desktop UI design as a model and we should stop it. Now. The desktop world of applications and whatnot is a bloody mess that only works because we're so used to it. And even then it doesn't work very well. We're replicating a lot of the same crap for mobile devices, and it's making them worse.

This mostly applies to Windows Mobile and S60 (Symbian) devices, but there are others that are nearly as bad. The only UI design I've seen that's moderately better -- and really it's only moderately better; there's still too much desktop cruft in it -- is the iPhone.

Nokia is in the best position to fix this, with 40% of the worldwide market. But that also puts it in the worst position; it's very, very difficult to argue to management that something that successful should be changed at all.