The dialog box from the black lagoon

This is from the ArgoUML User Manual.
What exactly does this image mean?
This is pretty amazing stuff. Some of the screens in this app are more confusing than a David Lynch movie.
It might be the worst interaction design work I’ve ever seen. My favorite quote from the manual:
“As you go through this tutorial you will be told what to do, and when to do it, but how to do it will often be left to the User Interface Reference.”
Posted by Robert on May 26th, 2007
one comment

Ha ha. You couldn’t find an easier target to pick on than a 15+ year old design by a grad student with the implementation largely done by undergrad CS classes?
Here’s a more direct link to the documentation in question http://argouml-stats.tigris.org/documentation/manual-0.24/ch10s09.html#d0e7682 so that your readers can see the graphic in context.
(It’s also version frozen so it won’t change if the manual gets modified).
You’ll notice directly under the graphic the text, “ArgoUML provides a single design goal, Unspecified, with its slider set by default to priority 1. However it contains no critics and so has no effect.” In other words, this is a stub. Yes, users shouldn’t be exposed to a stub that adds on value, but there are a lot more important problems to fix.
The ArgoUML interface is sucky in a lot of ways, but the good thing is that it sucks less all the time. Fixing things like getting Undo to work will provide a much greater benefit to users than changing a goofy dialog box though…