What do those three dots do?

I have suppressed the urge to write an ‘is it just me?’ piece for some time now. However, what’s the point of having a barely-read blog if you can’t indulge yourself once in a while?

When did GUIs stop being practical portals to the functions you need and become abstruse hieroglyph-strewn gateways? Do GUI designers hark back to happy days playing D&D where a treasure or a trap could hide behind that forbidding door? ..But first to solve the delicious puzzle needed to open it.

You know what I mean, don’t you? Those GUIs which coquettishly tease you as to where the functionality you need is. Could it be behind those three little dots hiding in acres of white space? Is behind that plus symbol? Or that little circle on the right? Oh, no, that’s just a smudge on the screen. Sometimes, it’s a cog or an arrow. Whatever ideogram the GUI designer has selected from their obscure lexicon, it is invariably small, easily missed, and in a sea of monotones. Colour,? Labels? Words? Pictures – no thank you. Think how messy the screen would look. A menu? You really want a menu? This is 2024. Besides if you really want one you can enable it by clicking on those three dots just above the squiggle to the right and… well it’s there somewhere.

Give me a clunky GUI (usually called ‘classic’ – though we’re so many generations down this track it would probably have to be ‘neolithic’ now) where I can find what I need in three clicks. Make the functions I commonly use easily accessible… and give me a menu. Please give me a menu.

OK, so it no longer looks sexy. I don’t want sexy. Who wants an ice queen who won’t talk to you. I want a homely girl who will chat happily and tell me what I need to know (please adjust metaphor for gender/sexuality as appropriate). Maybe if I’d grown up with Elsa, I’d know which buttons to press but sometimes you just need to know where the traffic logs are without advanced knowledge of the gatekeeper.

Seriously, maybe we do need customized GUIs, not one size fits all. In video games you have difficulty levels so why not in GUIs… I’m not proud just give me ‘easy’ to start with… if I fancy a bit more of a challenge I can always adjust it. I found the NAT menu in under three seconds… hmmm… maybe I’m ready to bump it up a level.

I have found this trend in GUIs universal and so I suppose it was going to reach security devices. But there is a serious point to my rant: misconfiguration of security devices is always somewhere in the OWASP top ten of security risks so anything that makes this more difficult is a risk.

Once we have a GUI that a common-or-garden techie can sit down in front for the first time and discern how to do the ten most common things they need to without googling, swearing or clicking on more than three sets of abstruse symbols then we’re off to a good start.

Security devices are complex – I get it – but don’t make them more complex than they need to be. Make it easier to use the security features than not. I suspect this is harder than it sounds but it is probably quite important. In blogs past – I compared how various firewalls enforced application awareness. (A less lazy blogger would probably put links in here). Essentially, all modern firewalls can do it but with Palo Alto is harder not to do it, than to do it. And from observation, I can tell you that I have seen application awareness used on a lot more Palos than any other firewalls.

Rant over.