Zikula Blog

I just finished reading Jef Raskin's "The Humane Interface" and learned a lot about why I prefer certain ways of doing interfaces over others and I would like to pass some of this knowledge on to your in form of a series of short blog posts on usability.

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Jef Raskin is one of the guys who are responsible for the development of the Macintosh computer. Thus his main focus is on the system level. In "The Humane Interface" he explains how an ideal computer would work like. Of course not everything applies to web applications like Zikula - we are still dependent on how the user's operating system works and which features his browser offers. These are the things we cannot influence. But there are a lot of principles that can be applied to web applications as well.


Rule #1
The most important one of his principles is derivated from Asimov:

You hear it all the time: Developer's work time is the most expensive part of the project and must be reduced with cool productivity tools that generate code, automatically test and so on. But when it comes to the user many software developers are willing to waste the most valuable aspect of his software: The user's work.

We all know that in Zikula: "Your authkey is wrong, you must have pushed the back-button on your browser, so I deleted all your work as I assume it's spam anyway." I bet it's only true in 5% of the cases that really someone pushed the back buttons and thus had an outdated authkey. There's currently a discussion going on about the value of authkeys and the harm they do to user's input.

Storage space and server time are relatively easy to increase but you can't make a person work faster and faster. Thus you have to be careful with everything she does.

One important way of achiving security for user input is offering Undo/Redo in all places. Of course this is not as easy as in desktop applications as we are restriced to the abilities of the browser. But we could offer a revision system. Pagesetter has had a revision system for a long time and I use Pagesetter on many sites - I almost never really had to fetch an old revision - but the fact, that everything a user does is stored somewhere and can be restored in case of an error makes users more confident. They work in my experience more effectively with Pagesetter than with modules where they know, their work might get lost - or worse: other people's work!

There was only one time, that Pagesetter failed me: And that was when a user accidently deleted a publication type and with it a hundered articles. There was no undo button for that....