Original Cin

After poking around a bit after my last post to determine the current state of alternate shells for Windows, I found SharpE and gave it a spin. I think it is a great example of how software that looks beautiful can still go terribly, terribly wrong in its UI. I’ve attached a screenshot so people know what I’m talking about:

Can you see what’s wrong with this picture? Large, beautiful desktop icons, a reasonable, if not great layout for UI elements…

Look at the bottom. That’s the taskbar and my Quick Launch bar. Ugh! It’s so small, it hurts my eyes! Either SharpE’s developers are running their system at a much lower resolution than I am, or they use a projector to place their desktop on a wall. It hurts my eyes to look at this, and clicking on anything in the area feels like threading a needle. This would be a forgetable and forgivable note if there were any way to change the size. Maybe there is, and I just didn’t find it with all that right clicking.

Why exactly is this a problem? First of all, I’m in my mid-20s. My vision isn’t great (I’m nearsighted in one eye, farsighed in the other, and have astigmatism to boot), but I generally don’t have trouble seeing things in detail. Like I said, SharpE literally hurt my eyes to look at it and use for a long period of time, even though it looks good. There is no way in hell the vast majority of people in 50s and older are going to be able to use those minicons on the bottom of the screen. The persistant may pull it off, but the benefits of SharpE seem too small to make such persistance worth-while.

Seth Godin recently said to avoid tiny print if possible. In the UI world, we have Fitts’ Law, (see also Coding Horror). Icons should not be that small relative to the screen. I don’t think there’s been an application where a 15px by 15px icon is a good idea for a very, very long time indeed.