Comment by achow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by achow | Hacker News Reader

Irony considering the author starts with her experience at OneNote. OneNote (desktop) possibly is the worst designed software in Microsoft Office suite.

I find the following quote from Chris Pratley (creator of OneNote) interesting "You know you have a good design when you show it to people and they say, “oh, yeah, of course,” like the solution was obvious.". No wonder OneNote is so heavily into literal metaphor of a notebook, which frankly does look and feel clumsy inspite they attempting to polish it up a bit off late (it used to look plain ugly till couple of years back).

From official Microsoft document: The user interface is specifically designed to look like a 3-ring binder, complete with tab dividers. Users can divide the notebook into multiple topics and subtopics for the various types of information they want to record and save. Workers have all the advantages of an old fashioned notebook binder with the additional advantages of being able to copy information from one section to another...

Document link: https://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web...

What about that OneNote design is bad? It may look ugly to you but I find it serves its purpose well. It's a metaphor the kind of people who use it will understand.

Well, not answering directly but following illustrates the point:

Apple's iOS7, Well, It Was Time For Skeuomorphism To Die

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/09/19/apples-io...

One of the bad example of Skeumorphism of Apple http://dun4nx4d6jyre.cloudfront.net/assets/findmyfriends.jpg. Note the 'hand stitched' detailing.

OneNote could have continued to do things well without using clumsy, awkward, out of place design language.

There's nothing wrong with a hand-stitching look. Making an app look interesting is not the problem.

The issues with skeuomorphism occur when the attempt at making a "real life" object imposes restrictions on functionality that would not have existed otherwise. For example:

- Making something look like a "book" causes designers to try too hard to shove things into a two-page view when computers are outstanding at being far more flexible than a book (e.g. multiple resizable columns, scrolling, and so on).

- Making something look like a "dial" just makes it unnecessarily hard to interact with when using a mouse or even a touch screen. Interface elements designed for use on computers are superior.

Thank you. I wish people wouldn't just equate skeuomorphic design and bad design to be trendy (particularly when they don't know what "skeuomorphic" actually means, as often seems to be the case). As you say, there is nothing wrong with having details or styling in a UI, particularly if they are cosmetically attractive, as long as form still follows function.

I think a lot of people on the flat design bandwagon try to create a false dichotomy with skeuomorphism and try to use this as an excuse. All too often, I suspect they really prefer flat design for other reasons, such as not being any good at more sophisticated styling but also not wanting to hire a digital artist onto a project team, or wanting to avoid anything where the implementation requires real graphics instead of whatever severely limited tools are available using nothing but CSS and the icon font from their favourite UI toolkit. I'm not saying no flat design has ever been done well, but all too often I think it's just lazy and/or unskilled design and the anti-skeuomorphism dogma gets wheeled out to try to justify it in some more flattering way.

I suspect the main driver for a "flat" appearance is that basic shapes are easy to implement across screen sizes (e.g. a colored rectangle scales pretty trivially; something like a fancy gradient may require a lot more effort to look reasonable on 14 different device sizes, especially if icon artwork is involved for all the corner and side pieces).

Also, clear icons are easier to construct with simple shapes than with detailed pictures, and symbolic icons may localize better. For example, a highly detailed picture of a mailbox varies between a lot of countries; a symbol of an envelope may not, and it's probably more obvious anyway.

Personally, I think a nice middle ground was the original iOS, where you could do cool things like define simple shapes for tab-view icons but have the OS stylize them for you (i.e. a plain white shape would end up with a cool blue gradient and look perfect in the black gradient tab bar, even though the original icon had no gradients or colors or rounded corners). And the UI elements, while sometimes a bit complex, managed to scale just fine between the screen sizes of the time.

>The issues with skeuomorphism occur when the attempt at making a "real life" object imposes restrictions on functionality that would not have existed otherwise.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. Before relaxing the restrictions on functionality and making everything resizable and customizable, you need to think about the cognitive load that is going to impose on your users. Books are actually a good example of this. I'm not sure I've ever actually wanted to resize or reflow the text in a book. Most books work rather well with the default settings. I can just pick it up and start reading. I don't need to mess with the column layout or scroll settings before I can start doing what I intended to do.

The other advantage that skeuomorphism gives you is that you can piggyback on pre-existing user expectations. A dial may be a bit awkward to use with a mouse, but at least I can look at it and figure out what it does at a glance. The same applies to other skeuomorphic UI elements, like 3-d buttons, notebook-like pages, tabs, etc. I can, at a glance, look at all of those things and know what the expected behavior and interactions are.

Compare this to Apple's flat design or Google's material design. Sure, it looks great. But I don't know how to interact with it. Is this text a button, or is it just a label? Does this panel move when I swipe on it? Does swiping in from the edge do something? How about pinching to zoom? The fact that so many apps have a modal overlay tutorial on first run should tell us that our "flat" designs are unusable. Yes, having some kind of help that explains what each control does may be appropriate, but we shouldn't have to explain how to use the controls themselves.

I also don't find it very elegant but it's the first tool my team actually uses to create some kind of shared document repo.

There are a few shortcomings MS could easily solve but like most tools these days they just fiddle with the UI without adding functionality.

But overall I find it very useful.

I've used OneNote for years, but I definitely agree with the parent that it could be better. Here's a brief summary:

Good stuff:

1) Search is fairly fast and comprehensive

2) Supports lots of content types easily with paste, including images and other Office app content

3) Shortcuts for Table manipulation, todo checkbox items, and other icons are really helpful. I wish every editor had these.

4) Handwriting is well supported.

Bad stuff:

1) The organizational structure is overly complex and confusing as it has three categories of structure: Notebooks (top pulldown), Sections (tabs on top), and Pages (tabs on right). This makes it hard to know which to use and it's visually overwhelming.

Wikipedia is a good example of something better as its structure is much more uniform: everything is a page and all navigation uses links.

2) Synchronizing is very slow compared to google docs. This makes it fine for simple scenarios where people edit alone and share after it's mostly written, but makes it hard to work together on a document (no multiple cursors on the page)

My guess is (1) and (2) are an artifact of Notebooks being files instead of "in the cloud". This likely forces the organizational structure OneNote has, and slows down synchronizing because it's harder to sync at the file level rather than the text-run level.

3) Shared freeform content like this gets out of date fast. This should be built into the product so we can see which pages are important to the organization. Most people don't delete pages ever, so some way of showing which pages matter and which should be disregarded would be very helpful.

What's wrong with OneNote? I quite like it. The only thing that I'm not psyched about is the fact that I have at least three different Microsoft accounts, and all three have separate notebooks that aren't always easy to sync and switch between. But this is a common problem across everything that uses Microsoft account authentication.

We (a group of designers) have been evaluating one note for remote collaboration. Aside from it's egress architectural shortcomings it is non-intuitive in a number of aspects.

'Good design' is sooo much more than the world view laid out in the article. For an organisation like MS, 50% of the job is defending a proposal against 'design by committee' and navigating group politics.

Don't get me wrong, it's a good article but only half the battle, if that!

One note has promise but it's clear that a lot of the design intent got ambushed as the product made it's way out the door.

*egregious

Anyway "intuitive" is not a top priority if you're designing for power users.

But don't you think that even power users desire some system of quick learn-ability? Or do they simply enjoy reveling in their hard-to-come-by knowledge that would deter the average user? I'm hearkening back to Final Cut 7 days here.

Sure, it would probably help. But it's not that important - I mean the product isn't going to succeed or fail on the basis of its intuitiveness. For example, look at all the pinches and swipes that Apple products support. Those aren't intuitive. They made sure to run TV ads for months showing the pinch-to-zoom feature so that people would know how to use it.

If you consider command line as an interface, the number of people who just don't "get it" is huge. POSIX compliance and similar exist for a reason, and yet we have garbage utilities where help, --help, -help, ?, -?, "", info, --info, $1 help, help $1, etc all exist and do effectively the same thing. "Power" users need love, too.

Looking at you, systemd folk.

Yes, the interface has to actually be good even if it's tough to learn.

It is.

But when you're designing for power users, sometimes it's more worthwhile to trade intuitive design for deeper functionality.

But intuitive design should always be the top priority, IMO - making something less intuitive in order to achieve power-user goals should be the exception, not the rule.

Just my $0.02, and you're free to tell me why I'm wrong. I'm not a designer, I just like using well-designed tools; and more often than not, the best tools behave exactly as you'd expect them to, and communicate intent pretty clearly and intuitively.

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