John Peter Tapsell wrote:
On Wed, 25 Jul 2001, you wrote:
On Tue, 24 Jul 2001, John wrote:
I feel the UI should _not_ be as independent from the OS structure as possible. I've taken UI classes etc, and heard these argument, but they are after maxing usability. We should be after raising the users awareness of how things work, and understanding it. I want the UI to be tied to the OS structure as much as possible. I don't want too much abstraction in the UI - this is what leads to clueless users.
No, that doesn't follow. A good UI will make it easy - by itself it will do no more, no less. Users will only remain ignorant of the workings if (a) they don't care about them, or (b) the workings have been obfuscated. Avoiding (b) is one of free software's main goals. But (a) is a personal choice that we shouldn't attempt to control. Computer science, quoth Dijkstra, is about computers in the way astronomy is about telescopes.
But again your users are just users - and I totally agree if that is the case. What I'm trying to say is that we should force the users into being more technical then users, and having to have some understanding of the underlying workings. Do you agree/disagree that if use the base assumption we want more technical users, then we can't abstract the UI too much, and we have to make the UI closely related to the inner workings?
I would say that, while the UI should try to show the inner workings of the OS as far as as it can, this should not be odne in a way that comprimises usability. Usability first, technical accuracy second.
Last time I checked, for example, the physical compoenents of my hard drive weren't structured as a heirarchy. However, the file system (on this box, FAT32 :( ), is heirachical. I find that it's a lot easier to use that way.
I agree with everyones points about abstracting etc for lusers, but we shouldn't aim to cater for them, instead aim for the more techinical user - the ones that will be interested in knowing how to fix simple problems by themselves, and not be afraid to use a terminal.
Nobody was talking about hiding the terminal or anything. Even the Sun report just suggested rneaming it to "command prompt" or somesuch. Nothing prevents us from catering for the non-technical user ("luser"- I don't like that term in this context, it's condescending) AND the technical user AND the hacker, all at the same time.