Thoughts on Designing Administrative User Experience

re: Thoughts on Designing Administrative User Experience

Andrey Skvortsov — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 07:56:00 GMT

Entirely agree with you thoughts as developer and admin;-)

re: Thoughts on Designing Administrative User Experience

Ivan Towlson — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 13:33:00 GMT

Some thoughts on the need for dual GUI-CLI tools, ways to minimise the cost of developing two UIs and ease of use for CLI tools at http://hestia.typepad.com/flatlander/2004/09/it_administrati.html. (It was meant to send a trackback, but that doesn't seem to have worked for some reason.)

Thoughts on Designing Administrative User Interface Experience

TrackBack — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 17:42:00 GMT

re: Thoughts on Designing Administrative User Experience

petal — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 20:07:00 GMT

GUI is good for individual, infrequent, complex jobs where there are many parameters to remember, or many attributes to alter. A scriptable GUI is even better, especially when you can create macros - this will win friends.

CLI has most value when multiple CLI are combined into a virtual process, and when used in batch jobs - design a GUI that will take an input file of e.g. userIDs and perform an operation on each one, and this will also win friends.

CLI has value when there is too much output information to display in GUI, and where the (textual) output needs to be further parsed. Again, a scriptable GUI would address this (but only if it could call CLI tools!)

From a Windows SysAdmin perspective, I'd like a GUI based around MOF (which no-one seems to blog about) - OK I know this is MSDN, but there isn't an MSON (MS Operations Network) equivalent and MSF always seems to get the lions share of the attention :(

This would incorporate structured, extensible best-practice and common tasks (which could be centrally delegated) in a scriptable GUI, and be self-documenting for common backoffice services.

Hey, maybe I should write it :)

re: Thoughts on Designing Administrative User Experience

Jenni Merrifield — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 21:43:00 GMT

Ivan:

You add some very good points to the discussion in the comments at your blog:

"One of the things CLI wizards tend to value is terseness, even at the expense of readability to the uninitiated. [...] Most CLIs nowadays seem to support both verbose and terse ways of expressing parameters or verbs e.g. Subversion's "svn checkout" or "svn co", which is a nice approach."

Providing terse alternatives for particularly verbose (but meaninful) command line parameters is an excellent way to keep both the "cryptic loving alpha geeks" and the "I just want to remember how to do this the next time" types happy.

"Personally, I think the best way to achieve ease of use in an admin-oriented CLI is to standardise common options and parameters the way GUIs standardise menu names and locations -- that way Admin B can begin to transfer his expertise with CLI Tool B over to CLI Tool A and is not burdened with remembering two sets of cryptic parameters."

And I absolutely have to agree with this - developing a set of standardized CLI parameter names in exactly this way would go a long, long way to improving the overall user experience for IT Pros and Developers.