Microsoft Greeting Cards 99 is a children’s graphics application for constructing and printing greeting cards, posters, etc. While it has what might be characterized as a cartoon like interface, it does have a few interesting performance support features.

Plain Language Commands

In a standard GUI interface we use buttons and menu commands to open dialogs and perform actions. In Greeting Cards a user can open dialogs and perform actions by clicking a description of an available action. The actions are listed in the bubble shown in Figure 1. The bubble looks like the Microsoft Office Assistant (Figure 2), but instead of presenting directions for performing actions, clicking the descriptions in the Greeting Cards bubble performs actions in the interface.

Figure 1 Greeting Card	Figure 2 Microsoft Office Assistant

Error Messages

Figure 3 and 4 show a Greeting Card "error message" with several interesting features. Firstly the messages are positioned next to and point to the interface element that lead to the error or to the interface element a person can use to correct the problem. Secondly, these messages aren’t called error messages. Finally, a user does not need to click an OK button to close the message bubble. A user can close it by clicking anywhere on the screen or performing the suggested action.

Figure 3	Figure 4

While these bubble message are better way of informing users about an error condition, in this particular instance the message should not have been necessary. The interface has buttons for viewing the various pages of a greeting card. One can click the Zoom button to enlarge the view of a page, but the system does not support zooming for one of the page views. The message is necessary, because this cartoon interface style does not have an easily understood method for inactivating the Zoom button when this view is selected. A standard graphical user interface would dim (inactivate) the Zoom button to prevent the user from selecting the Zoom command. Since dimming would probably not be easily understood in the Greeting Card interface, the designers choose to handle the situation with an error message that is thinly disguised as a Helpful Hint. While this helpful hint button works well, it does illustrate one of the problems with using a nonstandard graphical user interface.