On 5/29/12 1:18 PM, Werner Koch wrote: > Frontends should handle this problem.
The problem is that most people developing front ends are making them pretty darn user-hostile. A few years ago while taking some HCI courses, I did a usability study on the most common certificate interface -- the tabular widget. It turned out to be just beyond-Godawful. <rant follows> Tabular data is the Right Thing To Do in two major use cases. The first is when you have a noninteractive display of identical field(s) for multiple pieces of data. Consider a printed almanac: if it wants to convey a list of countries and populations, the best way to do it is with a table. Different records (countries), identical fields (population), and since the paper is noninteractive, the table is a win. Now consider if instead of an almanac you have Wolfram Alpha. Typing "population of Switzerland" immediately yields *just* the data you want, and you don't get confused by your eye accidentally jumping a row and reading the population of Sweden instead. A table widget is more prone to misreadings. The second Big Win for tables is when data must be contextualized by other data. Consider a spreadsheet showing profits and losses for different divisions of a business: if all you know is that a given division made $X, you don't know if that's your most profitable division, your least profitable division, or what-have-you. The other data is necessary to put the data you're interested in into a larger context. Now consider the tabular widget as used in PGPkeys, GPA, the Enigmail key manager, etcetera. The certificates don't need to be contextualized: all the data necessary to evaluate a certificate is present in the same record as the certificate. And since it's a graphical application the interface can be interactive, which means the other major use-case isn't applicable here. Enigmail tries to have its cake and eat it too by prominently featuring a large search box at the top of the window. But this isn't a very good solution. In terms of screen real estate, about five-sixths of the screen is taken up by the tabular widget. The search box takes up a relatively small portion. The human eye tends to view large things as more important than small things -- so the center of attention is naturally drawn to the tabular widget, not the search box. Further, the human eye tends to view complex things as more important than simple things -- so the eye is drawn to the tabular widget again, not the search box. I'm grateful Enigmail has a search box in the certificate manager, but I doubt if new users even notice it. According to Google's HCI guys [2], 90% of the U.S. internet-using population doesn't know how to use Control-F to find a word in a document or a page. That's the level of skill most people have with user interfaces -- awful. And if you count up the number of widgets on the screen in your average certificate manager, you'll find that there's more visual complexity there than in Microsoft Word. </rant over> Anyway. If people are interested in what I found out about effective user-interface design with respect to certificate managers, say the word. Otherwise I'll crawl back under my rock and leave the subject alone for another couple of years. :) _______________________________________________ Gnupg-users mailing list Gnupg-users@gnupg.org http://lists.gnupg.org/mailman/listinfo/gnupg-users
