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by jbstack
1188 days ago
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The "once a year" point goes both ways. If it's only going to be used once a year, then "juicing" (in the sense that the original article meant) is only going to give very negligible added value whichever way you look at it. The original example (mushrooms in Mario) is effective because of the frequency of the event which triggers it. If the player only heard the sound once per year, it would be irrelevant. On the other hand, if we're talking about parts of the UI which will see regular use then I agree with the other comments about usability reduction, while also acknowledging that there are other opinions out there. The best approach with these sorts of controversial features (i.e. those which some users love and others hate) is to offer a toggle in the options with a default aimed at the non-power user. |
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Meh. The animations juice, maybe. The slightly non-standard UI, though, is probably worth it if it avoids the nested-modal-dialog hell the stock Windows UI is prone to having. Installed mouse and audio drivers on NT 4 recently and, well, I’m glad I forgot how bad it was. Making settings non-awful is important even if you only visit them once.
What’s the upside for the user of a nested sequence of modal dialogs anyway? Though I understand the technical convenience given how limited the bare Win32 toolkit is. And there definitely is a downside for the user: I can’t say how many times I’ve seen relatively sophisticated users fruitlessly smash the OK button on the wrong (not top-level) dialog, because they all look the same. (This is perhaps salvageable by more prominently shading disabled windows—something Win95 admittedly could not afford on contemporary hardware—instead of blinking the title bar, but is it worth it?)