Not many expert developers are expert designers. That is exactly why you should have a bunch of good designers in your company, however small your firm is. User Interfaces in your products should be tweaked to look good, feel good and help the seamless workflow. A user should never be persuaded to learn the new UI you present them in your application. If you try to push a brand new alien UI in your application, people resist using it. Customers almost always resist change. The end result: Your competition gets the customers. You lose.
Use of native IU styles are very very important.
Every application that works in a windows PC should look like one. If you develop an application for Mac, make sure that it looks like other applications in the Mac. Foreign UI is a problem I see with the Opera web browser. In the default skin, it does not quite look like a windows application. See the screenshot of Opera 9.50 beta:
Why use a blue background for the tab? Why use a white border for the tab? Why not stick to the native windows UI looks?
When I first used Opera, it took some time to get along with the UI. The controls are the same as in any other browser, but since the visual styles are a bit different, the user may not be able to use the software comfortably.
The above skin is called Opera standard. There is anther skin which comes with the Opera installation – Windows Native.
This is much better. Why not chose this as the default?
I truly think that the bad selection of skin (along with other factors) does affect the market adoption rate of Opera. The buttons and other visual styles are also different. It is good to have a difference and it is great to have enhancements in your software UI. But that doesn’t mean you should change the simple controls to look different. It actually confuses your users.
In the windows platform, only the Microsoft Internet Explorer uses the native look and feel. It looks great and feels simple.
It doesn’t even feel like that you are using a big application in your computer. It just feels like you are using the windows explorer. It feels as if you are using a part of the OS, not an additional program. Great.
Firefox also does not use the native UI controls exactly. Here is a screenshot of Firefox 3 Beta 3.
Apparently, it is better than Opera.
A Bit on the Loading Speed
Even though IE7 may crash if you have lots of tabs open, its startup time is very little. If you want to open just a webpage, use IE.
At the same time, Opera takes a lot of time to load. Once it is loaded, it works very fast. If you want to work online for a long time, Opera is the best choice, especially if you want to open a lot of tabs. Opera has many great features that will enhance your surfing experience, but the Opera team should work on the startup time. Loading speed is a problem with Firefox too.
It’s worth noting that FF’s skin is faked, so only fits Windows when using the default Windows XP theme. Opera’s native skin actually uses native controls, so will be skinned to fit whatever theme you’re using. Try switching Windows to the Classic theme, for example.
In a similar vein, even the Internet Explorer default skin uses tab designs that are different from the Windows default, and are actually more like the default Opera skin!
Opera have gone with a default skin that looks reasonably familiar on both Windows and Linux, and understandable on Mac – the new betas use a native, Safari-like skin by default on Mac, so perhaps the Windows version will go the same way?
I don’t understand how do you call IE 7 as native UI. From the screenshots you give every browser looks different!
[...] Niyaz finds the user interface design of Opera confusing and wishes they stick with the native UI styles. But don’t users like to play around with browsers themes? [...]
Johnnysaucepn,
I did not ive a hought on theme switching the OS. Actually I like to go with the defaults. Thanks for giving the insight.
Azlam,
It is ‘more’ native. And it acts like any other windows OS app. It has more predictable controls.
Dude get your stats right
check out this for example :http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html
opera is much faster to load than IE.As far as my machine is concerned atleast.
And as far as the UI is concerned Native UI sucks there are millions of applications that use their own UI and are famous.Example all Adobe Macromedia products.Google Talk etc.,
And if you are among the few who think IE 7 has better UI than others you can always apply themes in the other browsers but not IE.
Subbu,
Thanks for coming by.
As far as the stats are concerned, I think I am right here. Firstly note that I am talking about Opera 9.25 and Opera 9.50 beta. The page you have linked to here talkes about Opera 9.01 or less.
Opera is slow starting up in my experience. But as you pointed out, the stats may be biased. If you have any other details, please provide.
You’ll noticed that IE7 actually moves the “File” (and friends) menu below the back button. This is not at all like explorer (at least not on windows xp).
I think IE7 has also done ridiculous things, IIRC, with the file menu in the right hand area [I know WMP10 did this].
I totally agree about maintaining OS standards and looks and data flows/clicking flows, but IE7 and Vista/Office 2007 are a horrible example in usability and ‘matchingness’, IMHO.
Silky,
Microsoft does have a lot of usage stsistics of older versions of Office from which the may have designed the Office 2007 interface. I have heard good reviews of Ofiice 2007.
And thanks for adding me in your blogroll. You have a great site there.
Niyas,
Thanks for the constructive feedback. The UI is a very important aspect of the upcoming Opera 9.5 update. After releasing Opera 9.5 beta, we’ve done more changes to the UI. For example, we’ve added some native skin elements to both the default and native skins in the recent Opera 9.5 beta snapshots (read about it here).
Daniel
Opera Software
Thanks Niyaz
Daniel, Silky,
You are welcome.
[...] Native UI and Opera Read the article on the importance of using Native UI styles in your applications. The articles gives the example of major web browsers and how they manage the UI styles. The article: Native UI and Opera [...]
Some of my personal experiences..
I’m also stuck with that windows native skin, I’ve been trying dozens of skins and it’s the only one I like. Too bad they changed it somewhat with 9.5, while it is still aesthetically nice, now it’s really hard to tell which tab is the active one. Thankfully with Opera you can fix that since everything is easily customizable. I even removed navigation buttons from UI since navigation with mouse gestures is so much faster – those buttons just became totally useless!
Loading times are really not a problem for me since I always keep Opera running and it only rarely crashes
antti,
I never really tried the mouse gestures. I will check it out.
In my experience too, Opera never crashed.
[...] last time I wrote about it, the interface was much [...]
Hi.
I totally agree with your statement that if you try to push a brand new alien UI in your application, people resist using it.
But then I am baffled by your contradictory next statement that Internet Explorer has a native look and feel. You really couldn’t be more wrong!
You show a picture of IE7 (Internet Explorer 7), but the UI (User Interface) of IE7 is completely different from IE6. It is a complete break with all UI-elements one is used to in the previous versions. It is a good example of why lots of people resist IE7 because they do not want to learn a new UI. As of IE version 7 I will never use it again in my whole life. So get your facts straight, IE7 is an example of your 1st statement, a company pushing a new interface to users.
(Only about 0.1% of the IE users who have never used versions below IE7 and who happen to use Windows Vista as the first windows-version in their lives might think it looks like a native interface.
Bye.
I hate the IE7 (and IE8) interface. It is a change for the worse from what has been established through several versions of Internet Explorer. The worst thing is that there is no way to switch to the old interface, so I am stuck with using Firefox with the IE6 skin.