Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Intuitive UIs

A program is only as good as what people can do with it, so having an intuitive user interface is very important. I recently started using Adobe Premier Pro for some video editing (I have never done any video editing before), and it was very hard to get off the ground. I did not find the simple things to be intuitive. You have to drag and drop a lot of things, and the copy paste mechanism was not straight-forward. I had to learn these things from youtube and randomly messing around.
Sure they have a help section, but finding what you want without any knowledge of video terminology is pretty impossible. I wanted to look for something like "paste in another video", and that wasn't going to get me anywhere. I'm still not sure if there is a copy-section function that I was unable to find, I just copied the entire video, and cropped that.
So my point is this, all programs require intuitive user interfaces, because without them, they are useless until you dedicate a lot of time to learning them, at which point you should already be done with whatever you needed the program for.

No comments:

Post a Comment