Options and choises rant

[Dennis Leeuw]

Hi all,

I just came back from a day with my dad, and it opened my eyes to 
something. My dad is 61 years old and started using computers about 5 or 
6 years ago. He learned fast, but is still capable of creating a mess of 
his iBook running Mac OS X. He is often confused about what is working 
and what is not and he just acts without understanding what is going on. 
You could say he is a "real user".

Coming back home I discussed this with my girlfriend who is an 
industrial designer and we came to the conclusion that options and 
choises are the biggest hurdle in modern age technology (which is not a 
surprise).

Working on documents for both GNUMail and GWorkspace and using GNUstep 
applications on a more or less daily basis I think I can say most 
applications are aimed at a technical audience. There are a lot of 
buttons so all features are there. It seems like people are trying to 
make everybody happy.

The "make everybody happy" paradigm might be part of the open source 
community, since it helps to get more developers, but to me it sounds 
like a wrong design approach for the end user. The more options to 
choose from the less people feel comfortable with a certain piece of 
software.

Look at the remote control. The less buttons the easier people can work 
with it. The more buttons, the more people feel initimidated and the 
sooner people have the feeling that they must be doing something wrong, 
because they don't know what all the buttons do.

If I want to sell GNUstep as an environment to my dad, I think we need 
applications with less options. To give an example:

What do you expect of an e-mail client? You want to send e-mail, reply 
to an e-mail, forward e-mail and archive mail you received. To put it 
simple that's all an average user wants to do. Now have a look at the 
Message menu of GNUMail. I can imagine people are intimidated by all the 
options to choose from (I just picked GNUMail because I know it so 
well). But I have seen this with some of the applications on the Mac too.

Maybe the less is more idea should be more often used. Maybe the idea 
should be that a menu should be not longer then 10 entries, next to 
being not deeper then 3 menus. How do others on this list view this? 
Have other people experiences with users and how programs are percieved?

Greetings,

Dennis Leeuw

--
"It is not necessary to change.
 After all, survival is not mandatory."
        Dr. W. Edwards Deming