Re: Why GNOME Hackers Should Care about Usability

[Drazen Kacar <dave arsdigita com>]

Havoc Pennington wrote:

> What's an example of a conflict between "great for engineers" and
> "great for home users"?

Error messages, for example. I would prefer whatever strerror gives, but
"No space left on device" might not be the best choice for somebody who is
not familiar with programming.

If the application thinks that my system is misconfigured, I'd like to get
a message which says so in the terms which sysadmin or programmer could
understand, because I'd like to fix the system, if it really is
misconfigured. But that kind of message would be considered extremely
user-unfriendly if viewed by somebody who doesn't posses the technical
knowledge.

> I don't think there are very many, and the
> ones that exist are typically superficial, not fundamental aspects of
> the desktop.

-- 
 .-.   .-.    I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had
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     |        dave arsdigita com