04 Sep 1997

Since then both PowerDesigner (now PowerDesigner) and the software world have changed. Microsoft has decreed a number of GUI standards, many of which have no virtue other than being standard. Yet because they are standards, they are familiar and therefore need less learning than interfaces which differ.

For example, today we expect not only context sensitive help at the window level (which PowerDesigner has) but also the "What's This" field-level help (which PowerDesigner doesn't have). The fact that competitors don't have it makes them worse but does not make PowerDesigner better - that's how human expectations work.

That's just one tiny example of new standards raising expectations. A much larger problem is that PowerDesigner windows and dialogs - once the most streamlined and intuitive in the market - have become encrusted over time with new options, tabs, buttons, lists, etc. seemingly without benefit of a general GUI design template or even internal consistency checking.

Why is the Preview button on the List of Triggers in the lower left but in the middle bar on the SQL Query Editor? (click on picture to the right) Why is the Rules button left-center on Entity Properties and left-bottom nested one level deeper under Check on the Table Properties? Why are some preferences on the File Model Options and Display Preferences menus and others still scattered in the product?

The answers are all the same: features were added without benefit of an overall design, a product architecture. While the competition is mostly worse (see Silverrun for a notably more consistent interface), that does not make PowerDesigner easier to use. And in some notable ways, PowerDesigner lags. ER/Studio, ERwin, and Silverrun all support some degree of drag and drop of attributes while PowerDesigner offers none.

It is still true that most new users will go from install to DDL in a day. And it is also true that all four of the PowerDesigner modeling modules look the same on the surface, minimizing cross-module training. But after that it gets harder every week to find, figure out, and make use of the more advanced features added in the last three years. "Sort of like a great first date but a difficult marriage" is how it has been reported to me.

The bar is rising in user presentation. Take a look at ER/Studio. Sybase had better look and then give some serious thought to a fresh visual design for V7 of PowerDesigner.

Back to

See also

© © 1997 Applied Information Science