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From: | Han-Wen Nienhuys |
Subject: | Re: User Experience Engineering |
Date: | Thu, 05 Jan 2006 22:31:07 +0100 |
User-agent: | Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7-1.1.fc4 (X11/20050929) |
Linda Seltzer wrote:
Dear Friends, Having previously worked at AT&T Labs, where I was a member of the User Experience Forum, I would like to make a few comments as a relative outsider seeing the Lilypond project for the first time. This is a great endeavor and the software output is beautiful. I would greatly encourage the project to focus on the user interface and the user experience if this is to catch on in a large way. Having to install separate editors (and who knows what bugs that will bring and what other mailing lists one will have to subscribe to...) or get into the system with DOS commands, and to understand what is wrong if the flags are wrong, etc. does not constitute user interface engineering. A smooth user interface employing the standard already-debugged platforms, such as Notepad and Word on Windows, with everything bug free, is more important than more and more detailed features, which can be added later.
"everything bug free" is hardly a qualification that applies to Windows. We also cater for MacOS, Linux and we soon will for FreeBSD. Windows, far more than any other platform that we cater for, is plagued by gratitious bugs, inconsistencies and untraceable errors.
Every 10 minues spent system administrating and installing things is 10 minutes that real work doesn't get accomplished.
> User experience engineering is just as important as other areas of > software development.Keep in mind that every 10 minutes we save you on doing system administration, typically takes us 8 hours of debugging, fiddling with cross-compilers and testing. Add to that that Windows by far is our least favorite platform: I'll go on record saying that the entire development team actually loathes and despises Windows.
If you're concerned about user-experience, I recommend you to choose between any of the following options
- switch over to MacOS - sponsor the development team for Windows usability work - volunteer time to help engineer the Windows release Regards, -- Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen
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