Any plans or revamping the UI?

casiopea

I'm a designer and a computer power user. And while I feel that, functionally, jv16 Power Tools 2006 reigns supreme; it somehow lacks a touch of friendliness, usability and intuitiveness.

So, any plans to redesign the UI? My plan is to somehow categorize the many icons into manageable groups, or simply making the icon more descriptive of the tools by revamping its color scheme. I'll also propose the basic UI to comply with Windows native standard (no transparencies, standard window/menu size and so on) so it feels professional and integrated with other applications

Here's a great resource that I use all the time:

http://www.usernomics.com/news/user-interface-design-news.html

http://www.user-interface.org/

And the Windows XP Icon Guidelines, if you're ever interested in (explore around the site to find the general UI design guidelines.:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnwxp/html/winxpicons.asp

jv16

Well, if you put ten usability/user interface experts to a same room you will get twelve opinions how a good user interface should work and what it should look like.

Some like the old Windows look (i.e. Win2000), some like the new Windows look (i.e. XP) and some neither.

One main design goals of Macecraft's products has always been the concept of no bells and whistles. If you want XP-like candy interface (read: applications whose installation file is over 50 MB) you can use the products of our competitors.

Based on our recent user survey (http://www.macecraft.com/news/106/) most of our users are happy with this approach. The direction the majority of our users whishes us to go is to add more informational elements to the interface - exactly what is currently being done with PT 2006.

But I'll check out the links, it's always interested to read more on this subject.

casiopea

Firstly, forgive me for mixing the concept of usability with the eye-candies.

What I propose was mainly to organize the many icons and make them more logical -- yes for the benefit of both power users and novices alike. I'm especially convinced of this when I saw that the icon descriptions already contain some prefixes like "Registry" and "Files".

So, in my humble opinion, a good practice would be to organize them into groups named Registry, Files, Directory, History/Privacy, and Automation -- or something like that.

A little bit of visual distinction to differentiate between, say, Registry Compact and Registry Information would just be the frosting on the cake; because with a logical item groupings, I don't think that should be the top priority.

tullik

In a way, part of the organization you suggest is already there , user configurable, via the Show menu on the main window.

Instead of icons as the next priority, I would prefer user configurable sets in the Show menu (perhaps named and defined in Settings). For instance I often use File Finder, Registry Finder, and Directory Finder together to ensure certain items shown in Registry Cleaner are really safe to remove or change.

More distinctive icons might then be advisable with such a mix, but probably the tool names would still be adequate.