Designing for Complexity: New Approaches to System Administration UIs

The closing panel of the conference included senior interface architects and designers from several major hardware and software vendors. The panelists briefly outlined recent interface challenges facing their companies and products, including those related to large-scale computer deployments. Lively audience discussion followed the panelists’ presentation, which focused on the trade-offs between command-line and graphical tool designs, the need to design tools that can adapt to changing conditions, and designing future tools in light of the fact that contemporary system administration more often focuses on managing system behavior than on maintaining some specific system state.