Comment by lelandbatey

13 years ago

I'm a little surprised that these are all held up as "bad examples". For example, I looked at the picture of the Windows `wget` gui and thought "that doesn't look that bad." Sure there's a lot of dense information, but things are pretty well explained and it's pretty clear how it works. It is ugly, but it's also totally functional.

I guess ultimately, I really don't care how ugly something is if it's at least consistent and informative. However, I know I'm an outlier in this.

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lelandbatey

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Pxtl  13 years ago

Imagine it wasn't wget, but a tool you'd never used before and you didn't know what the arguments meant. All those options are poorly defined. Also, it's confusing how filetypes switch from checkboxes to a listbox.

Trying to cram everything into one panel has left us with nothing but the controls and very little space for information.

Also, even if you wanted that layout, the alignments are terrible and the use of frames is arbitrary and inconsistent.

  • lelandbatey  13 years ago

    If I were in that situation, and I find I often am, my choice is to go and read the manual. I think this comes from years of reading man pages for command line tools, but the first step I feel should always be to read the instructions.