Zach Beauvais

Image by . SantiMB . (too busy) via Flickr

I grew up in a Mac family. My dad used to programme accounts recievable applications on an old, black and white Macintosh, and that was my first encounter with any sort of GUI. Since then, I’ve used both Mac’s and PC’s and have a MacBook for work and a poorly-running, but still brand-new Vista box in my home study. I’ve even dabbled with Linux several times.

However, I’m starting to realise something: an aweful lot of applications (on every platform) get aesthetics completely wrong.

There’s a balance between looking nice, feeling comfortable, and aiding use. I think that the appearance of an application is as important a part of the design as the application itself. It’s a part of the usability, it’s not ‘eye candy’ slapped on for gratuitous reasons.

This is something Mac’s understand, and their GUI is gorgeous. Vista’s pretty good-looking itself, but that’s it’s problem: that’s all it is. The operating system is huge, heavy, slow and unpredictible. It crashes, hangs, and takes minutes to load. I bought a brand new (though admittedly budget-conscious PC) from a manufacturer who shall remain nameless (cough! Dell! cough…) which barely runs just the OS. I’ve had to triple the RAM and will be re-installing this weekend.

So, what Can I do about it? I can switch Aero off… leaving me with a huge, heavy, unpredictable and slightly-less-slow OS which is now ugly. So there’s Vista, tipping in the balance with an “eye candy” approach at aesthetic design.

I see the visual layout, graphics, and overall presence of an application as part of it’s feature-set.

I read about sliderocket over on R/WW, and at ZDNet, today, and signed up for a Beta. While I’m waiting for them to send one out (I hope) I’d like to talk a little about why I love the idea of this product.

Firstly, I was recently tasked with conducting a 40-minute presentation. This is something I was quite excited to do, since it was about the Semantic Web, but I didn’t have any presentation software on my PC. I downloaded a copy of OpenOffice, which has a presentation application built in, and found it ironically bland for an app called ‘Impress’. I know, as a person of geekish persuasion (I’m only half-geek, on my father’s side) I shouldn’t give a toss about what an application looks like, but should focus entirely on what it does and how well. But this is a presentation–aesthetics is what the software was written for. I’m not crunching numbers or writing code, I’m standing up in front of people discussing an exciting topic, trying to put forward a well-polished talk. I want my slides to reflect that–they need to add to the talk, and they can’t do that if they’re boring.

Not only this, but I find OpenOffice’s Impress seemed to have loads of options in random places, and a difficult-to-follow system of preferences. It has dozens of background settings, but it’s like pulling teeth to get a gradient you like.

Eventually, I downloaded a trial of Microsoft’s Powerpoint 2007 and found it much, much better. It’s easy to use, simple-to-navigate, and aesthetically pleasing. It’s huge downside, however, is that it’s expensive.