Inductive User Interface?

Speaking of user experience (see below), what do you think of this article on Microsoft's "inductive" user interface guidelines? Essentially, it argues that a good UI helps the user answer two fundamental questions when looking at a screen: "What am I supposed to do now?" and, "Where do I go from here to accomplish my next task?" The UI helps answer these questions by focusing each screen on a single task, and by providing clear links in consistent locations to secondary tasks.

I've tried to apply these guidelines in the design of my current project (a browser-based content management system), but I wonder if the principles apply primarily to infrequently-used apps? Will frequent/experienced users become annoyed at the "one screen per task" hand-holding approach of the inductive user interface? Joel Spolsky makes an interesting point about the difference between learnability and usability. I'm having a difficult time finding the right balance between the two.

 22 Nov 02 2:23 PM · Comments (0) · Tags: ASP.NET, Usability

A Tale of Tabbed Pages

In my ASP.NET content management system, I wanted to use a tab control to allow an author to edit individual pages of an article. I quickly discovered, however, that changes to the text box weren't being saved when I switched to a different tab... [Read more]

 20 Nov 02 11:23 AM · Tags: ASP.NET