This article originally appeared in TidBITS on 1999-11-08 at 12:00 p.m.
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Poll Results: QuickTime & Sherlock Interfaces

by Adam C. Engst

Poll Results: QuickTime & Sherlock Interfaces -- It's always off-putting when a politician wins a small majority of the vote and crows about a mandate from the people. However, the results of our most recent poll, where we asked if you thought Apple and other developers should make future user interfaces more like the "stylish" QuickTime Player and Sherlock 2, had us thinking about mandates from the people. To put it bluntly, people hate the design trend, with a full 95 percent of respondents answering that they don't want to see such interfaces used in the future.

Of course, these polls are not scientific, and this one merely records the opinions of about 950 TidBITS readers who had the time and interest to visit our home page and vote on this topic. But 95 percent? We can't tell Apple what to do (well, we can, but they won't listen), but it seems that a significant percentage of savvy Macintosh users feel strongly that this design trend should not point to the interfaces of the future. The message is perhaps better directed at the Macintosh developer community then, who can take home the message that interface innovation must be done with care and that you won't go wrong with following Apple's traditional human interface conventions. [ACE]