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"most sailboats have two primary operating modes" I have a better example for your argument, using sails. Reach port sail config or reach starboard sail confi

by VLM 12y ago

"most sailboats have two primary operating modes" I have a better example for your argument, using sails. Reach port sail config or reach starboard sail config. Its been 20+ yrs since I've sailed but for the landlubbers that means the sails are hanging off one side of the ship or hanging off the other side of the ship. Tacking between them is quite hazardous you can get whacked in the head and knocked out and swept overboard or if lines are not handled correctly you could tangle a foot and get tossed overboard etc etc, and thats before operator dangers like improper line handling hurting you or rope burns or who knows how else you can get hurt while mode switching. I suppose if you screw up the guying of the mast you could shatter it while tacking and that just isn't good. So yeah, to a landlubber, a sailboat that can only deploy sails to starboard is obviously a huge UI win because its modeless. Of course that makes the boat uncontrollable and useless most of the time. This is how sailboats would be designed if landlubber UI professionals designed sailboats. If you'd like an EE analogy of modes, look at multimeters. You're not going to get away with selling dedicated ammeters or dedicated hardware voltmeters other than specialized apps (clamp on current meters, safety inspection high voltage voltmeters, thats about it). People would rather switch modes than pay twice as much. Of course its worse and many meters do semiconductor forward voltage drop, and continuity, and resistance, and frequency, and capacitance, so next thing you know you have 50 meters on your desk or one multimeter.

dredmorbius 12y ago
Interesting example, though in this case the challenge isn't distinguishing modes but in surviving switching between them. But you also neatly capture the reason for modes: they provide more capabilities and make a tool more useful. Again the main UI/UX problem isn't that there are modes -- we deal with modes all the time: inadequate vs outside voice, kitchen vs. bathroom activities, behavior with your BFFs vs. your boss or a customer, stadium vs. museum. It's just that these are so totally and fully integrated into our experiences that we don't often think of them as modes. But they are. And the behaviours are learned. The trick in UI is to make the distinctions so obvious that the user responds like this. Behavior in a given mode is obvious, using the wrong behaviour a glaring error.

by VLM 12y ago

dredmorbius 12y ago

Interesting example, though in this case the challenge isn't distinguishing modes but in surviving switching between them. But you also neatly capture the reason for modes: they provide more capabilities and make a tool more useful. Again the main UI/UX problem isn't that there are modes -- we deal with modes all the time: inadequate vs outside voice, kitchen vs. bathroom activities, behavior with your BFFs vs. your boss or a customer, stadium vs. museum. It's just that these are so totally and fully integrated into our experiences that we don't often think of them as modes. But they are. And the behaviours are learned. The trick in UI is to make the distinctions so obvious that the user responds like this. Behavior in a given mode is obvious, using the wrong behaviour a glaring error.