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September 08, 2007
Interfaces fit the audience
Interfaces fit the audience: Bit of a ramble here, while waiting for a comment at Chuck Freedman's to come out of the moderation queue. The above link goes to a short essay from last October about the Paint.net project, where I made the point that the UI from desktop Adobe Photoshop is not the UI needed by the casual photographer. I think it's also true that the UI's approach & level-of-detail is usually greater in a dedicated desktop app than inside a browser -- people who commit to a download are usually seeking more features than what can be offered by strangers to the world at large. That screenshot from John Nack got me thinking about audience needs driving interface approach... "Photoshop Express" has very simple declarative menus like "Auto Correct" where you choose among variations... less controllable but more accessible than the procedural-style menus of desktop Photoshop. This Flex-based app, like Flex itself, has both declarative and procedural elements -- worth a look if you haven't checked the UI already. I had pulled up that Express screenshot after commenting at Chuck Freedman, who was talking about whether Adobe making an in-browser image-editor meant that no one else could find useful things to do in the field. That Paint.Net interface came back to me, where coders tried to emulate the classic Photoshop interface even though the people using their new tool would not have the same level of commitment as those who purchased and installed the Creative Suite. Anyway, when my comment goes live the above paragraph may become more lucid... right now it's just a collection of back-up links to the idea of how there are many audiences now with in-browser imaging needs, so fitting the code to the need means that many projects can be successful... pretty much the same thing I wrote Wednesday.
Posted by JohnDowdell at September 8, 2007 09:56 AM
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