Re: Options and choises rant

[Stefan Urbanek]

Hi,

On 15.1.2006, at 11:28, Dennis Leeuw wrote:

> 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?

I have seen several Atari ST applications with very simple solution  
for this problem: have "menu level picker" either as standalone  
dialog or in general preferences panel where one was able to select  
menu from a list, such as:"Basic", "Advanced" or "Expert". Some  
applications had editable menu structure and one was able to replace  
or save the menu.

Wrong example: MS Office apps got it wrong. They have editable menu -  
but that is a mess. There is no way how one can transfer his  
"knowledge of experience" to someone else, that is, there is no way  
to save and load the menu layout. Moreover, the office apps have that  
"hide not used items" functionality, which is very annoying and  
contra-intuitive. Moreover, it is just a "patch" for the  
functionality that would be achieved with choice of one of predefined  
menu structures.

Objective is to satisfy beginners, but do not ignore experts and vice  
versa - satisfy all.

- Add "Menu selection" preference to the application
- Create  menu selection API: [NSApplication setMenuLayout:@"Default"];

Optional:
- Create "menu editing" panel, similar to toolbar editing panel.
- Make menu layout saveable
- provide several menu layouts by default: Basic, Advanced, Expert
and one more thing that I would suggest to include is:
- menu editing should allow only making menu items visible/hidden,  
there should not be such thing as reordering or very custom menu  
building (anyway, is there any reason for having that?)

With this, "wise developer" would provide complete application menu  
with all possible commands. This can be called "Expert" menu layout.  
Then developer who thinks of beginners will take the full structure  
and hide unnecessary menu items. An now you have two menu structures:  
Expert and Basic.

Imagine sharing menu structure in a group of users ... By level, the  
division is obvious. But with this, one can do more. Imagine photo  
retouching application: you can have menu layouts for people who do  
lots of resizing and cropping mainly, another menu layout for people  
who do color adjustments mainly... Each group can have their  
preferred, easy to use menu structure.

No need for more .nib files, just a mechanism of hiding menu items  
according to the menu preference.

What do you think?

Stefan Urbanek
--
http://stefan.agentfarms.net

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you,  
then you win.
- Mahatma Gandhi