Ask Slashdot: Best Management Interface On an IT Appliance? 114
tippen writes "The management user interface on most networking and storage appliances are, shall we say, not up to the snuff compared to modern websites or consumer products. What are the best examples of good UX design on an IT appliance that you've managed? What was it that made you love it? What should companies (or designers) developing new products look to as best-in-class that they should be striving for?"
Focus upon usability, not looks ... (Score:4, Insightful)
For usability, you need to look at your target market. This means that you should be asking the people who will buy your product, rather than the people on Slashdot. (If we are your target market, at least let us know what you are developing so that we can provide meaningful input.)
Re:And the answer is... (Score:4, Insightful)
I would agree. The best appliances have good CLIs and REST interfaces. Otherwise they are just a mess of crap. Have you ever seen a SAN interface? Or Vmware? Or Microsoft System Center? (if anyone can figure out what the hell is going on in that interface I would love to know.)
The best of the crappy interfaces is probably something like Qnap, they have great IOS interfaces, and the regular web interface is decent.
Re:Not enough Flash (Score:4, Insightful)
For example, take a classic list ordering GUI with up/down buttons. Works fine without javascript. Add javascript to make it also do drag&drop. It works better with javascript, but still works just fine without.
Web interfaces can gracefully degrade down to a very low level.
Yes they can, but not for free.
This sort of idea makes us geeks feel warm and fuzzy inside, but the reality is that you're talking about implementing two completely different versions of that UI feature. Doing so takes time and money, and you’d be spending that time and money purely to support a use case that probably represents a negligible number of users (people who want to run these UIs but have JS disabled).
Of course portability and compatibility are important for user interfaces, but this is a cost/benefit question. There is a line beyond which the results do not justify the effort, and any resources you’re spending past that line aren’t being spent on implementing other features or improving the usability elsewhere in your UI.