I have to agree with Jeff B. on this one. It jogged my memory of some
concepts I read in a fascinating little book a *long* time ago called
"Programming as if People Mattered" by Nathaniel S. Borenstein.
The first one of these comments is covered in Chapter 11: Don't Neglect
the Experts. Chiefly, the first paragraph of the chapter starts with
this sentence:
"We have seen that user-interface software must be tailored to
have simple defaults for novices, but should have sufficient
power and flexibility to meet the needs of users as their
expertise and sophistication grows."
This feature is what separates average programs which people find
constraining from those truly excellent programs that can allow the user
to grow into their full functionality. This is the same type of
approach that Jeff B. is mentioning and is what the early Nautilus
builds tried to do.
However, the most relevant point to Jeffrey's comment below comes from
the book's Epilogue and is something that those of us who write code of
any part of an application would do well to think about from time to
time. Again, let's start with the beginning of the chapter:
"If you build user interfaces and your intuition is good, you'll
be lucky to get things right about a quarter of the time, and
you won't necessarily know which times you were right.
If you build user interfaces and your intuition is bad, you'll
get things right even less than a quarter of the time, but
you'll probably think you're doing much better than that."
It goes on a bit referencing other topics discussed in the book and how
it can make you better at what you do and then states, quite flatly,
that the one thing that anyone in this business needs more than anything
else to do the best job they can is humility:
"You will need humility to recognize that the users are always
the final and most appropriate judges of your work. Even though
your'e the expert in interpreting your users' comments and
meeting their needs, their judgements of your work are final and
without appeal."
All of us are wrong from time to time. I'm not saying that you're
specifically wrong in this case--that's not the point. The point is
that at the end of the day, all of us who contribute to producing
software can do what we like, but we're likely to get it wrong more than
we get it right. It might work. It might be better than it was before,
but it might not be "right".
The above sentiments were from one source, but other sources on user
interface design, both old and new, realize that there are as many
different types of users as there are people. The best software can
accommodate the largest number without providing a negative user
experience to any of the other ones.
Yes, software with more options is more complicated, but if the software
is well designed, the users won't go looking for them until they need
them. Then they'll change what they want and be quite happy until
they've grown out of these. However, poorly implemented software with
an overwhelming number of options the user has to configure before they
can even do what they built/downloaded/installed/bought the software to
do *is* bad. I feel that there are ways you can "have your cake and eat
it too" which don't neglect any level of user. It's just more work to
get it right.
ast
On Sun, 2004-12-05 at 16:50, Jeff Barlow wrote:
Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com> wrote:this indeed would be a great ui, no need for options because the defaults were chosen properly :)Even with the smiley this sounds extremely arrogant.
-- Andrew S. Townley <atownley eircom net> http://te-code.sourceforge.net
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