1. The cluttered and chaotic main screen of BiaB can be made to look fairly decent using the customization that's available now. The result is not terribly trendy, but I suspect there'd be fewer complaints mentioning Windows 95 if the layout looked more like this by default:



The keyboards and gimmicks should (at a minimum) be made addable by option, rather than forcing users to hide the goofier stuff by themselves. Little-used features shouldn't have an icon showing.



2. IMO, the worst problem about the GUI is not immediate visual impression but the disorganization of the menus. Correcting this is probably a big job, because the system "jus' growed" over decades without care for consistency. As the program grew more complex, menus got even worse.

Menus should at least execute in a consistent manner (mouse and Enter key). The scroll wheel must be made to work in all menus, including those programmed 15 years ago. Otherwise you give the impression of a carelessly constructed program that doesn't know what it's doing.

Some good, powerful features are actually crippled by deplorable menus. The leadsheet printing feature -- once you study up for a couple of years -- can yield fine results; but some quite smart users don't think that's worthwhile, because print attributes are arbitrarily distributed over 3 wildly complicated menus (one of them quite effectively hidden behind one of the others).

Another example is the endings, codas, and repeats menu, so messy and hard to interpret that it causes never-ending puzzlement on the forums. A thing which confuses MOST people can't be willed into acceptability by claiming user error and failure to read the directions.

Last edited by allis; 11/15/12 08:09 AM.
Larry
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