Tor UI Contest
by havoc
I’m pretty sure this UI
contest is 100% broken by design. My entry to the contest would be
this mockup (hey, maybe I’d do it in Glade instead of ASCII art if
entering for real):
[ ] Enable anonymous Internet
I could flesh out the spec and show the other state the UI has:
[x] Enable anonymous Internet
There might be some discussion about the exact phrasing of the big
toggle, but that’s about how much UI this thing should have. The
contest is to put a UI on stuff people won’t want to understand, can’t
understand if they wanted to, and shouldn’t have to understand; having
GUI controls rather than text files doesn’t magically make “which
servers I am connected to and how many connections they have”
interesting information. DO NOT CARE. It’s downhill from there in the
list of example features on the contest page.
Reminds me of all the time people have wasted putting UI on SSL and
certificates. If you have to ask the user anything about security, you
have lost. Go back to square one; do not collect $200. Imagine your
dialog has a “don’t care, pick something” button, just do what that
button would do, and lose the silly dialog.
(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2005-09.html#12)