User friendly program
I was given an assignment where I had to change a program to make it user friendly. I just want a couple of pointers on how to make user friendly programs. Any pointers will help. Thank you
Hard to say, without having an idea about the program.
In general, user friendliness would deal with accepting input to the program (how easy is it? does it allow the user to correct bad input etc.) and presenting information (results and error messages) to the user in a clear and unambiguous way.
Many people (career teachers) naively believe that a program which has the temerity to address the user by his/her first name is user friendly. "Hey, Manchester, what is it that do you want to do?" etc.
In general, user friendliness would deal with accepting input to the program (how easy is it? does it allow the user to correct bad input etc.) and presenting information (results and error messages) to the user in a clear and unambiguous way.
Many people (career teachers) naively believe that a program which has the temerity to address the user by his/her first name is user friendly. "Hey, Manchester, what is it that do you want to do?" etc.
it depends on what the program DOES somewhat :)
a word processor for example is much more friendly in a GUI where you can see all the text easily, change fonts with a click of a button, save and load files with a menu, and so on. Compare this to VI, where you can't see much of the text, have to memorize complex keyboard commands to even modify a single word or save a file, and have no menus or mouse at all.
a program that opens a file, does something to it, and writes it back out is another story. For example, lets take my bzip2 compress and decompress 'programs' (they are really scripts but the point is irrelevant). I am quite happy to have those set up so that dropping a compressed file on the uncompress program does the work without input, all I want is that drag and drop and done. Any questions or interactions from such a program would be a hassle, not a benefit: I can now put it in my system folder and bam, its enabled as a right click operation anywhere I go on my computer, no fuss. If this were certain well know freeware compression tools, it would open a gui (slow), ask me questions I don't want to answer (where do you want to decompress the files to, do you want to overwrite, do you know what you are doing?!) which is decidedly *unfriendly*. Sometimes no (or next to no) interface is more friendly than anything else you can do!
There are formats that people expect from having had them similar for 3 decades or so now. Going too far away from those is not friendly.
Beyond that, there is a 'if I were using this program' mentality you need to get into when testing it. When you use it, what is awkward, annoying, or counter-intuitive? Fix those.
a word processor for example is much more friendly in a GUI where you can see all the text easily, change fonts with a click of a button, save and load files with a menu, and so on. Compare this to VI, where you can't see much of the text, have to memorize complex keyboard commands to even modify a single word or save a file, and have no menus or mouse at all.
a program that opens a file, does something to it, and writes it back out is another story. For example, lets take my bzip2 compress and decompress 'programs' (they are really scripts but the point is irrelevant). I am quite happy to have those set up so that dropping a compressed file on the uncompress program does the work without input, all I want is that drag and drop and done. Any questions or interactions from such a program would be a hassle, not a benefit: I can now put it in my system folder and bam, its enabled as a right click operation anywhere I go on my computer, no fuss. If this were certain well know freeware compression tools, it would open a gui (slow), ask me questions I don't want to answer (where do you want to decompress the files to, do you want to overwrite, do you know what you are doing?!) which is decidedly *unfriendly*. Sometimes no (or next to no) interface is more friendly than anything else you can do!
There are formats that people expect from having had them similar for 3 decades or so now. Going too far away from those is not friendly.
Beyond that, there is a 'if I were using this program' mentality you need to get into when testing it. When you use it, what is awkward, annoying, or counter-intuitive? Fix those.
Thank you both for the pointers. It really helped,and I believe I have made the program more user friendly.
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