Here is another UI issue that is almost as old as the Mac itself. Windows of the same ilk are so visually consistent to each other that when they are strewn across the desktop it’s difficult to find which one you are looking for.
There is no immediate visual cue that lets you scan for the project folder you want; you have to click through each and see its title and what’s in it. The problem is exacerbated with today’s huge monitors, because you can have so many more windows open at once. Exposé kindly splays them out for examination, but it’s still work to go through them.
This is an example of when consistency can go wrong (and why consistency does not equal usability). In this case, too much consistency among Finder windows has suppressed important information, namely what is what.
The solution is pretty clear: find a user-definable way to customize the look of a window as it appears in the Finder. There are many possible ways to do this. One (fairly boring) way is to let the user change the color of the striping.
In the above example, the two greenish windows are really for the same project. (You probably did not notice this in the first screenshot.) The front most is another, and the purple one sticking out the side is another.
Readers, what other methods of distinguishing a bunch of Finder windows might work? Change the chrome color? Apple already lets you set background images to folders, but only in icon mode (and when is icon mode used, except for software installers?). Might a big, scalable background image work?
A goal I’d add to this is to minimize or ideally eliminate any active action by the user. If the user is required to take action before this feature is useful, as is the case in color-coding, then it will only be useful to an order of magnitude less users.
You could auto-color the windows; however the heuristics for doing this aren’t obvious and the results may then just appear as random noise.
I’m a big fan of watermark text. How about for blurred windows, place watermarked text over the entire window with the type & title of the window (folder name, search criteria, app & file name…).
I have the same problem. The visual hint for window-that-has-focus is not good enough. This became very noticeable when I switched to OSX Mac; years ago on Windows I used to set radically different frame colors for active vs. non-active, but more sophisticated design there eventually prevented it. A drop shadow and slight luminance difference is insufficient without plenty of saccades. Aging eyes don’t help either.
Going back further in history, X11 customization was insanely non-standard. The practice was each application had a completely different set of custom settings and rarely had a difference between active/inactive. Earlier window systems did not support any customization of app appearance.
I have seen one hack related to rollup windows on OSX that would blur the inactive windows. Cool idea, but somewhat risky.
Slightly related to this, somebody please steal this idea, I would like to see focus stealing be impossible: You’re typing away, and an unrelated window pops up an takes your focus, keystrokes go there instead and the return key maps to “Yes”, the popup disappears in a flash and you wonder “what did I just approve?” It might only happen twice a year, but one time is too many.