[MUD-Dev] Usability and interface and who the hell is suppo

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On Friday, September 19, 1997 4:42 AM, Jon A. Lambert 
[SMTP:jlsysinc at ix.netcom.com] wrote:
> On 18 Sep 97 at 19:10, Caliban Tiresias Darklock wrote:
> >
> > Yes, I *am* talking about
> > the user interface, and have been from the start:
>
> My mud is TEXT-only. It has a graphical user interface. I have no
> plans to support telnet clients.

If your mud is text-only, the support of a telnet client is trivial; the 
utility of a graphic interface is questionable; and you certainly appear to 
be changing it for no good reason except to be argumentative. What exactly 
does your graphic interface offer that you can't do in text? I mean, any 
decent game client will allow you to easily define buttons and menu items, 
so why a non-telnet client? Just to make people use your home-grown 
protocol and software? I mean, if it's all text, where exactly does telnet 
fall down in the first place? Telnet is a perfectly robust and efficient 
protocol for text transmission in real time, and takes next to nothing in 
the way of bandwidth and protocol overhead.

Before you get into complaints about how telnet has no features, consider 
that the web is built on HTTP which is a telnet protocol extension.

> > Graphic interfaces are inherently limiting in expression, which I think 
> > we all agree is Bad on MUDs.
>
> No. Graphical muds may impose these limitations, GUIs do not.
> I've just used one to compose this post.

Excuse me, but you have hopefully used a keyboard to compose this post, 
which most definitely is not a graphic interface. (I suppose voice 
recognition is possible, but that's not graphic either.) While your mail 
reader may have a graphic interface, its main editing functions are by 
necessity text-oriented. If you actually used button-pressing or 
drag-and-drop to compose this message, you are in serious need of 
professional help and are quite likely a danger to yourself and others.

The interface, you see, is what you manipulate to get your input into the 
computer. I would expect you pressed a button to reply, then typed the 
message, then pressed a button to send. Your post was initiated and 
completed in a graphic interface, but the interface used to compose it was 
a keyboard. And it is for that very reason that a graphic interface is 
restrictive; you cannot compose original material from a graphic interface 
without a lot of annoying acrobatics. A keyboard is vastly superior. Adobe 
has discovered repeatedly in usability testing procedures that one of the 
single largest barriers to productivity and creativity is having to 'switch 
gears' between a visual (graphic) interface and a linguistic (text) 
interface.

It's worth noting that interface design is one of my major fields of study, 
so if you really want to argue this issue I suggest you read a book or two 
on the subject. Alan Cooper has written an excellent one called 'About 
Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design'. The design of an interface 
goes FAR beyond graphic/text, and it sure looks like you're rebelling for 
the sake of rebellion here.