Re: Draining the Swamp: A Technical User's Experience

[linas linas org (Linas Vepstas)]

On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 02:07:54PM -0600, Richard Stallman was heard to remark:
>     Here you seem to argue for providing convenient graphical preferences
>     for anything a user may wish to configure. Elsewhere you have stated
>     that you would like GNOME to strive to have as good a user interface
>     as the Macintosh. Unfortunately, those two goals are in conflict.
> 
> Practically speaking, there is not much conflict between these goals.
> Adding additional features to the GNOME configuration tool will not
> make GNOME as a whole much harder to use.
> 
>     Methods 1 and 2 above do not add any additional freedom - they merely
>     add convenience for some users. At the same time, they take away
>     convenience from other users, by making it harder for them to find the
>     preferences they truly care about. User testing under controlled
>     conditions bears this out.
> 
> This is a very surprising statement; could you tell us precisely
> what was tested in those studies, so we can see precisely what
> conclusions we can draw?

This shouldn't be a surprising statement; iits a common conundrum for
application developers.  The basic statement, put in different
words, is that "the larger a menu tree is, the harder it is to find
any given leaf in that tree" (at least for a human).

Occasionally, I want to tweak some parameter or another in my window
manager (such as 'focus-follows-mouse' or 'click-to-focus') and it
can take quite a while to figure out where this is hidden.   I'm never
quite sure which path through the menu tree will get me to this option,
thus, exploring the menus leads to a lot of dead ends before I find it.

Similarly: making the gnome panel auto-hide.  I know its configurable,
somewhere.  But I configure this so infrequently, I forget where it is. 
Every user has some infrequent (bi-annual) configuration that they do,
and those of us who are memory-crippled can't remember how, and must 
search. 

The "MacIntosh" solution is "make nothing configurable".  That makes
configuration real easy: you can't, and you don't.   Unfortunately,
this philosphy is contradicted by the common knowledge of application
developers: its the sum total of obscure, rarely used features that
make  an application popular.   That is, if you remove 1% of the
features, you loose 10% of the users.  It doesn't take much to loose all
of your users. 

-----
Unfortuantely, I do not know how to strike the right balance between
making more things configurable and making any given configuration item
easier to locate.  

Maybe  searchable, hyper-linked help that will take you instantly to
that configuration item?  A 'search engine' for things that can be
configured?

--linas

-- 
pub  1024D/01045933 2001-02-01 Linas Vepstas (Labas!) <linas linas org>
PGP Key fingerprint = 8305 2521 6000 0B5E 8984  3F54 64A9 9A82 0104 5933