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Zeichick's Take: Remember CUA Compliance? Microsoft Doesn't


By Alan Zeichick
January 4, 2007 — 
Twenty years ago, when DOS ruled the desktop, IBM released a series of specifications called Common User Access. CUA defined principles of text-based user interfaces, and was key to making early PC applications friendly and consistent to use.

Unfortunately, I can't lay my hands on the original IBM CUA book, but it defined many critical aspects of user interface design, such as the use of the File and Edit menus at the top of the application screen, the behavior of radio buttons and check boxes, and the use of Tab and Alt-Tab to move within a window. Thanks to CUA, you could always quit an application by selecting the File menu with the pointing device or with Alt-F, for example, and then press X or click Exit. Or, you could use Alt-F4 to do the same thing.

Future revisions of the CUA guidelines were extended to cover advanced graphical user interfaces, like OS/2 Presentation Manager and Windows 3.1. One of the guiding rules of CUA was that the user should never see a blank screen; that's why Windows 95 brought out the famous Start button.

Many of the operating systems we use today, including Windows XP, Linux and Unix, are CUA-compliant. (Mac OS X follows a different metaphor; Apple's never been CUA-compliant.) Most non-Apple applications we use are also CUA-compliant: Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, Firefox and so on.

While many developers chafed under CUA's strict limitations, the guidelines had a purpose: They meant that a user could sit down at a strange computer, or a new application, and instantly know how to use its user interface. Perhaps users wouldn't know how to work the program logic, but they'd know that Alt-F4 would get 'em out of the application, F1 would call up help, and that if you selected one radio button in a clustered group, the other radio buttons would be deselected. That right there was a huge boon to usability and training, and reduced frustration and "code rage."

While some software developers chose to invent their own "better" user interface metaphors, customers generally voted for CUA-compliant apps. Save your creativity for the algorithms and logic, customers said, and don't mess with the GUI.

Microsoft, through its early partnership with IBM on Windows and OS/2, was an active participant in development and widespread adoption of CUA. For the most part, GUI-building tools like Visual Basic were CUA-compliant, and so were Microsoft's own applications. While Microsoft kept updating the look-and-feel of its GUI and standard widget sets, application user interfaces remained remarkably consistent.

Until now. The terrible Ribbon user interface in Microsoft Office 2007 is not CUA-compliant, not by any stretch of the imagination. While Microsoft insists that it's easier for new users to learn, my feeling is that, for the first time, Microsoft has broken the GUI model that has served it so successfully for two decades. This is a big mistake, and one that I believe will hit Microsoft in slower adoption and upgrades. It will also make the CUA-compliant alternatives, like OpenOffice, more attractive.

Microsoft says that the problem was that users couldn't find and use the more obscure features of Word, Excel and the other Office tools. No, that wasn't the problem. The problem was that there were too many features, those features were poorly designed, and the different Office applications implemented those features inconsistently. The applications were broken—not the user interface.

Alan Zeichick is editorial director of SD Times. Read his blog at ztrek.blogspot.com.


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