UI : Java Glossary

UI (User Interface). How a program looks to the end user, how its controls work.

Rules of Thumb for Writing You Own Programs

• The most important rules is the screen should change every time the user clicks something or types a key. The user needs constant reassurance his actions took. If the result will take some time, you must still immediately change the screen, to let the user know his action was noticed.
• If you are doing a website that deals with money, crucial health information or anything else important, do not use JavaScript. PayPal lards is pages with fancy-pants JavaScript. The consequence is you can’t buy anything using the Chrome browser. Guaranteed your pages will fail to work on some browser.
• Toggles are confusing. Let’s say there is a toggle labeled fish. Does that mean you have selected fish or that you have selected meat and clicking it will select fish? One unambiguous way of handling this is showing both fish and meat with a tick beside the one currently selected.
• Double clicks are hard to perform. If they are too fast or too slow they get treated as one or two single clicks. Try to design your UI so that there is always an alternative to double clicking.
• When prompting someone for a birthdate, don’t include the current year or any of the last 12 years in the list of possibilities.
• When displaying or entering dates, use ISO (International Standards Organisation) format YYYY-MM-DD. This will be the least confusing.
• There are all kinds of ways of formatting a phone number with added punctuation. When entering dates, just ignore all punctuation and insert it the way you like. Consider than every country has its own standard. Unless you are prepared to deal with that, just leave it alone, or convert it to all numeric.
• Anything that is intended to be clicked should look clickable.
• The current fad is to have the user type an entire page of data then click submit. This is user hostile. Even worse is when the error message does not point out which field contains the error or why it is wrong. The user should be told about his error on the very keystroke, and failing that the very field he made it. This is the way Abundance worked back in 1985. We have gone backwards.

Suggested Windows Improvements

Here are some changes I think should be made to the Windows user interface:

• When you right click an icon, you randomly get one of two menus. The problem is, if you move the mouse the tiniest bit as you click, this is considered a drag not a right click. A UI should not require supernatural motor control to use it consistently.
• When copying files, there should be a default source and target directory. Currently the source and target are always presumed to be the same.
• When you got to click a button in a nest of tiny controls, the region should expand to make it easier to hit the right one.
• There should always be a right-click alternative to double clicking.
• Every time you double click, the system should be automatically recalibrating what it counts as a double click.
• When you try home in on something with the mouse, as you start moving the mouse slower, the mouse should smoothly shift into ever lower gear so you have to move the mouse further on the desktop to move the cursor on the screen.
• You should be a be able to set up keystroke macros that work, by default, in all programs.
• When viewing any document, you should be able to shrink or grow the font size of that region for viewing. It would not change the actual font size.