Usability

[John Peter Tapsell]

On Tue, 24 Jul 2001, you wrote:
> Wim De Smet wrote:
> > 
> > John Peter Tapsell said:
> > > Just to troll....
...
> > I agree (almost) completely. We don't want to dumb it down to the point
> > where one doesn't see what the os is doing (i.e. Windows).
>
> I couldn't disagree more. The user interface should be as independent
> from the OS structure as possible. The aim of a UI is to be usable. It
> should help users of any skill level perform the tasks they need to
> perform.

Bingo! I think we have hit on what I mean.

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.

> That doesn't mean "dumbing down". What it means is structuring menu
> items and so on in a manner that corresponds to what is intuitive, not
> to what OS structure is the most efficient. Anythign else misses the
> whole point of modularity.

No, the user menu should not be abstracted!
What if something goes wrong and the user has to fix it?
Or they are just curious and want to switch to CLI, etc.
They want some quite a strong correlation.

The definition in some ppl's books of a luser, is a user that does not _want_
to know more.  A newbie is just someone who is clueless, but wants to learn.

You want to aim gnome at usable by a luser, i want to aim gnome at being usable
by newbies.  So what if the learning curve is steeper, if they are afraid of
learning, then don't use gnome.


> In much the same way as the kernel should be optimised to be as fast and
> stable as possible, the UI should be optimised to be as usable as
> possible. All the same functions should still be there, but it does no
> harm to move the more complex ones to an "advanced" tab and to arrange
> things logically (like having one unified font selection menu rather
> than three seperate ones).
I agree with this.
However from your previous points you are suggesting reordering and shuffling
all those tags so they no longer resemble any kind of structure the OS uses.


JohnFlux

> Lord John Flux

> Rick's World: http://www.altgeek.org/lord_inh/comic/index.html
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