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I discovered an interesting example of poor UI design today whilst checking the wireless configuration on my father’s laptop. The machine runs a factory installation of Microsoft Windows XP Professional (along side Gentoo Linux/x86) , and came with a little network configuration utility called IP Operator.

IP Operator exhibits several interface abnormalities and issues. The main dialogue is pictured left (click to enlarge). Firstly, it’s full of geekspeak, with acronyms even an experienced user like myself would get confused by. Some of the tooltips and UI elements mention terms like SSID (which I understand is the network name), RSSI (what on earth is that? presumably signal strength…), Link speed: 11Mbps (Is that good?!)… Indeed, the very name of the application is geek-speak. IP? Is that Intellectual Property? My father thought it was… (and that’s someone who does have a strong IT background).

The layout of the dialogue isn’t bad per-se, although it’d be nice if it respected the user’s choice of colour sheme. That said — notice the two little arrows just above the Disconnect button? Guess what they do — change the colour of the dialogue. Totally pointless — Windows XP already provides a means of doing that in its Display control panel.

As for keyboard navigation, most applications stick to underlining the mnemonic letter to indicate keyboard shortcuts. I’ve seen examples of this under Linux/Unix (Motif, X/Athena, Qt, GTK+, WxGTK and numerous other UI toolkits), Microsoft Windows, IBM OS/2, Apple MacOS and Mac OS X, SGI Irix … even DOS applications often displayed the mnemonic character using a different colour. As an example, the Firefox web browser I’m using now, does this…

File Edit View History Bookmarks Tools Help

Now, for a user like myself, I know that hitting ALT+F will get me the File menu, or ALT+H will get me Help. It works the same in every other platform I’ve used. Clearly for LG, this isn’t good enough, instead they opted to explicitly show the mnemonic character separately.

The only time I’ve seen this done legitimately, is when the interface is in a language other than English — and even here, I’m not keen on the idea — I recognise that in that situation, it is done because the keyboards are often designed with English in mind, and thus don’t provide a convenient means of entering in foreign-language characters. OpenOffice 2.0 as factory-installed on a Lemote Loongson, shows its menus like this:

LG even do this in the context menu for the system tray icon, as seen below.

Now here, it’s completely pointless. The system tray is quite difficult to reach via the keyboard — at least for me anyway (there may be some other shortcut for it). The way I reach it, is to tap the Logo key (or CTRL+ESC) switch focus to the “Start” button, then hit tab a few times to reach the system tray where one can use the arrows to move around (or it may be TAB/Shift+TAB… not sure). Most users would just use the mouse — much less stuffing around.

Indeed, LG probably want to have a think about how they present things to the user. I’m happy that I don’t have to deal with it 90% of the time — since it isn’t my computer. I’d have uninstalled it by now if it was (in fact, I’d have completely reloaded the box myself — I don’t trust factory installs). These days I look back to the days when the Interface Hall of Shame was online (there’s an archive of it here) — they’d have a field day with applications like Office 2007 and OSes like Windows Vista (with it’s totally new and fresh UI) … and probably have a dig at us too. But perfection is a journey, not a destination, so this is to be expected.