Thursday, November 5, 2009

Brief UI Post

I installed TweetDeck today just to check it out:




Oh. My. God. Why. This is easily the worst UI design I've seen in a while. What do all those little icons do? I have no idea until I hover over them with the mouse. Why so much noise? I can't even tell what I'm freaking looking at.

And don't get me started on the Growl integration:



Yeah, that's attractive...takes up a ton of screen real estate, makes an annoying sound, and doesn't conform to my Growl theme (quick toaster pop-up along the bottom).

I hate, hate, hate cluttered UI designs that take up more space than they deserve. If you can fit all your content into a thin column, you make the application the size of said column. If you need more of these content windows, there's this concept call tabs. Nothing that only takes 140 characters to display should EVER take up my entire desktop real estate.

To be fair, I'm a stickler for clean desktops. As should be obvious:



So I'm definitely biased. But I have trouble viewing something like that as usable. Need to do more research on this topic :)

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