On 1/15/06, Richard Frith-Macdonald <richard@brainstorm.co.uk> wrote:
On 15 Jan 2006, at 10:28, Dennis Leeuw wrote:
> 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.
>
Actually I would appreciate a much simpler interface. I always use the command line in several terminal windows in X all the time. I tried a mouse heavy development system and really find it too slow and distracting for me. I already find the command line to be more automatic. I can actually do almost anything without concentrating too much. I am actually thinking of modifying an editor so it can access all my files at once and have to avoid moving and touching the mouse in order to go to another file.
> 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?
I agree that we want fewer options in basic user interface.
I guess we should probably always have a way to 'drill down' to
obscure and infrequently used settings ... but perhaps that sort of
thing is best realised by having loadable modules with their own
separate documentation and configuration/options panels.
Cant we just get rid of configuration options? Maybe just let the application figure things out? And maybe make the environment/system so that apps can easily figure things out for themselves? Even 'power users' appreciate that. Our company writes communication software for seamen and one of our most successful systems has no configuration required at all. Almost everything in my laptop requires minimum configuration already. I myself would replace anything that does not run properly the first time I try it. And i only try to fix it if i cant find a replacement.
[snipped..]
Apparently even microsoft have partially recognised this ... I
recently followed a link to a news item about their latest release of
'office' in which it was said they did lot's of market research to
find out what new features people would like ... and found that over
90% of the requested features were already in the software.
The conclusion they drew from this was that they needed a new,
context sensitive, user interface design to allow people to find
features more easily. I think they only got that partially right ...
things like ms-office (and now open-office) are horribly bloated and
need to be broken up and modularised, improving the gui is a good
step, but it's not enough. A lot of stuff should be completely
removed from core applications and some sort of 'howto' tool should
be devised to use AI principles to help people find the right tool
for the job. Having a context sensitive gui within a single tool is
a mistake ... we are much better at handling consistent interfaces
rather than dynamically changing user interfaces, so if we are going
to have to switch to handle a new task we want a radical ui change so
we *know* we are handling a new task, and while we are operating
within one tool we do not want the user interface changing.
Microsoft always does things that way. I always expect them to find the most complicated solution to any given problem.
Well if Microsoft stops doing that its not Microsoft anymore!
PS.
I've read that research suggests 7 items as a maximum that people (in
general) can readily keep in mind, so even a menu with ten items is
probably longer than desirable.
Im beginning to dislike menus myself but thats just me.
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