Daniel A. Koepke wrote: > On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Leonardo Herrera wrote: > > In combat, an hp bar can be useful, too: > > The problem with this is that they're harder to read when there's lots of > bars displayed on the screen at the same time. The principal advantage of > a meter is that you can interpret it at a glance. Consider your car's [snip] Daniel is right. Design of interfaces is an art, and usability is a science, studied by professional designers. It isn't just "put something fancy on the screen" without back thoughts. You have to take into account psychology of human perception, at least. Simplicity is often a winning approach over complex interfaces: say, many MUD-s re-write the beloved SCORE output to heavy something- don't-know-what-it-is. Primary priority of an informative command is to give information in the easiest way for understanding by human, it doesn't matter how many ASCII pictures and colours you put there. Another horrible example is when most of game's items are painted worse than a Christmas tree in decoration. Agreeing that it might look pretty, it's absolutely not effective in way of quick analyse of your screen. It can be formulated as general rule: anything which is over-used loses its value. Or: text for people, not people for text. :) -- Yura Ushakhow <yura@sunet.ru> Moscow, Russia -- +---------------------------------------------------------------+ | FAQ: http://qsilver.queensu.ca/~fletchra/Circle/list-faq.html | | Archives: http://post.queensu.ca/listserv/wwwarch/circle.html | | Newbie List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/circle-newbies/ | +---------------------------------------------------------------+
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