“The inmates are running the asylum, you are the inmates.” With this assertion Alan Cooper started his keynote presentation in front of 2500 engineers at a programmer’s conference in 1999. Alan Cooper is the father of Visual Basic. For a long time, Mr. Cooper worked in Microsoft Corporation, and now he offers consulting services in area of human-computer interaction design. At the end, the keynote presentation was honored with a standing ovation.
A small bonus is waiting for you today. This article is “two-in-one”: we will give a review on Cooper’s book “The Inmates are running the Asylum,” and we will consider some basic user interface problems as well.
What is the difference between a netbook and a laptop? The main thing - a netbook is smaller. Therefore a netbook’s screen area is smaller too. But modern browsers arrange this area so wastefully. A striking example is the interface of Firefox with the default settings:
What we're seeing? The height of the desktop is 600 pixels only. This value is fairly standard for netbooks with 10” screen. But the page is placed only at 170 pixel from the top edge of the screen. More than a quarter of the usable area is occupied by the elements of the interface! What are these pixels spent for?
The 40 pixels are taken by the task bar of the operating system. It can be hidden, but a user will be deprived of such useful functions as progress bars in applications icons. Therefore, our solution is not so radical – we have just reduced this panel. To do so just right-click it and choose the "Properties" menu item. Select the “Use small icons” option in the “Properties” dialog:
As a result, we have additional 10 pixels of "living space":
So now we turn to the browser itself. This is the newest Firefox 3.6.6 at the moment:
I usually sort my bookmarks by directories directly in the "Bookmarks" menu, so there is no sense to lose the place for the special toolbar for them – disable it. Right-click the bookmarks toolbar or menubar, and uncheck the “Bookmarks Toolbar” option:
Then choose “Customize” in the same menu:
Here you can do the same as for the operating system taskbar - enable the use of small icons:
When the “Customize Toolbar” dialog is active it is possible to drag and drop interface elements. There are three toolbars in Firefox: menu bar, navigation toolbar and already disabled bookmark toolbar. Notice that the menu bar has elements only on the left side, and three-quarters of the space on the right are just empty. Drag into this free space all that you are using on the navigation toolbar, including the address bar:
As a result, you will have all you need at the menu bar. The rest rarely used buttons will be at the navigation bar:
Now we can disable the navigation toolbar too:
Look what we have:
Unfortunately, it is unable to drag menu items can’t as buttons, so the address bar may be too short. To get rid of the needless menus we can use “Stylish”. It is a famous add-on for Firefox. We will skip the installation – just go to the link (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2108/) and click “Add to Firefox”.
After installation, we click the "S" button in the lower right corner and select the “Manage styles” menu item:
Create a new style:
Specify the name of the created style and type the following text into the style body:
We specify the names of the unused menus:
Save it. Now the address bar is long enough
We can hide unused elements as well as make them thinner. It is no so usefull, but we save few pixels more. Just add the following code in our new style:
Now it’s a bit thinner:
Now, for clarity, let's see how it looked like and how it looks now:
It is possible to reduce the visible area of the interface elements almost by half! Now it can be compared with Google Chrome, which was developed much later and with considering the need to provide more space for a web page:
In general, the development team has engaged seriously into redesigning the browser’s interface in accordance with the latest trends. If we could easily get rid of the window title, the situation will be even better, but we are not able to do this yet without special add-ons. It remains only to regret that the nearest major update of Firefox, which will bring significant changes in the interface, is scheduled for autumn only...
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