For the past week I've been thinking about the fundamental user interface of windows, and it got me thinking. The taskbar is nothing new, it's been around since Win 95, and before that in Apple Macs for many years. In those days, monitors were at best 4:3 17" CRTs, and typically ran at low resolutions. This combination mean that screen real estate was crucial to the UI design. Nowadays, the emergence of LCD technologies has done away with the old CRT's, and we typically see systems coming standard at 4:3 19" to feel the void waiting for 16:9 aspects to become the norm.
How widescreens are used are completely different to the traditional letterbox aspects. It's no longer practical to have an application such as word taking up the entire width of the screen, as you either have entire paragraphs stretched onto one line, or only utilize 50% of your screen to get a realistic wrapped text view of your document. So what's a better way to use widescreen and higher resolution screens, and how does it relate to the taskbar?
The taskbar is a very strange control. It's one of the very few list elements that flow horizontally, rather than eg menus, listboxes, drop down lists, start program menu etc that all flow vertically. For lists, it's only sensible to flow vertically. We know the text height beforehand, hence we can factor in a set height for each element. As such we can easily display 20 items down the page in a neat, ordered and useable sense, whereby using a horizontal flow would make it look confusing and require a fair bit of effor to navigate.
To paint a picture:
Both of the above taskbars have 30 items in it. Both have grouping turned off. The more items you push into the horizontal bar, the smaller and more unreadable each item gets, until it eventually puts a vertical scroll on the entire list. The vertical one continues to be readable, and would put on a vertical scroll if the list grows too big - it won't sacrifice the size, readability or useability of the items.
In widescreens, pixels on your x-axis aren't as valuable as those on the y, so having the taskbar taking up more horizontal rather than vertical space is a pretty reasonable choice. So why haven't more people done it?
I've been using the traditional horizontal taskbar since Win 95, and moving to the vertical approach is neither comfortable or natural for me. Getting used to that big ugly sucker down the bottom was both predictable and comfortable, which incites a new point - even if a UI element is poorly designed, users get used to it and eventually fuse with it in a subconscious manner. This then breeds more problems as other UI elements are designed with the original in mind, or worse still - create a new breed of work arounds (eg "Group similar taskbar buttons").
Proper interface design is paramount in any system and can not be underestimated in any manner. Users will go with what they're used to and what they're comfortable with, which helps them get used to new systems more easily. So where does the line between a system's actual usability, and the user's "feel" of the system really stand? It's a curly question, but I feel that the trend towards better UIs will increase as the IT practice develops, and we slowly move away from antiquated methodologies.