Grader: Other GUI Thoughts

I listened to a very interesting inteview on ITConversations.com the other week. The interviewee was Bill Buxton, a principal researcher with Microsoft Research and author of Sketching User Experiences (now on my Amazon wish-list).

In the interview, Bill talks about using sketching, at the simplest level possible, to allow creative though and to get away from preconceived notions about what software has to look like. A very interesting non-software example he provided was that George Lucas intertwined scenes of the chariot race from Ben-Hur with NASCAR wreck footage, to sketch out the pod-racing scene in the The Phantom Menace. This technique allowed him to sense how the scene would play out with little expense or time commitment.

This interview struck a chord with me because I didn't really brainstorm too much on what the Grader GUI would look like. The grading data is tabular so I immediately envisioned an entry table and implemented it that way, not really considering any other options. Maybe a wizard-like entry system would have made for a better user experience (not likely :) ). But I didn't even give myself the option of brainstorming and allowing some bad ideas help spurn some ideas that might have worked better.

I'm also currently reading Tog On Software. This book was written in 1996 and predicts a user-interface revolution happening ten years out. Since the book is twelve years old, it's interesting to see how much of the book's predictions have yet to become reality. One of Tog's predictions was that computer systems would have seamless voice recognition systems by now, which got me thinking about how well Grader could work with such a user interface. A user speaking the words "2", "1", "2" "0", "Next Player", "0", "Next Play", etc... would likely be much easier than typing the scores and using the tab/arrow keys to move between cells. I think I might look for some open source voice recognition software and see what I can do with it. That sounds like a fun project and would probably be a good thing to learn for the future.

Anyway, I think these two sources have made me think harder about user interface design and the process involved. I especially took to heart Bill Buxton's interview as "sketching" is a general purpose technique that can be applied to all areas of creative thinking, not just UI design.