Re: Why GNOME Hackers Should Care about Usability

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Drazen Kacar <dave arsdigita com> writes: 
> 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.

The "Details" button in Nautilus is a nice solution for this, gives
everyone what they want.

But in general I'm perfectly capable of translating "this floppy disk
is full" into "no space left on device" ;-)

> 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.

Assuming the misconfiguration is interesting to anyone, I think it's
appropriate to always display it - maybe with a simple sentence at
first, and a "Details" button - the right solution for nontechnical
users is to be sure they can't misconfigure the system, not to simply
delete the dialog... 

I have a hard time thinking of a misconfiguration that I care about
that a nontechnical user could just ignore. If they can ignore it, I
want to ignore it too.

Havoc