On Wed, 2002-05-08 at 01:02, Linas Vepstas wrote: > > I have to confess I find this situation a little too forced to be > > believable when it comes from people who know best... > Now I understand how flame wars start. I could not be more honest than > I was in the paragraph above. The example is *not* forced, it is > a very very real example for myself. I am actually rather insulted by > this reply. I never doubpted of you. Maybe you just didn't know those applications better! No need to feel offeded... <<maybe you should change your sigil to a Hedgehog>> (this is from a book I'm reading :) ) > If you're so smart, why don't you be honest with yourself? Get out a stop > watch, really, don't just pretend ... and time yourself on how long it > takes for *you* to find the auto-hide configuration on gnome panel. on gnome1: right mouse button click, Panel->Properties->Hiding Policy -> Auto Hide... about 4 seconds (and I took an approach of actually trying to look for the option). Now take in account the number of options you have there. > Or the click-to-focus thingy, say, on sawmill. If you write back, and > tell me that you were able to accomplish these tasks in under 2 minutes, > I'll accuse you of lying or faking your results! On a default RedHat 7.3 login: Hey, nifty there's a Start Here Icon (5s) Double click and time for a new nautilus window, (3s) hey nifty, Preferences.... (4s) /* Now... here starts the trouble... do I have to have a basic idea of what a window manager is or not? I can't pretend I don't have, and I will grant you it may take some time for a user who wouldn't know, HOWEVER, if the user knows what is click-to-focus, sloppy-focus or focus-follows-mouse, he probably knows what a window manager is... so... */ hey, sawfish window manager, maybe it's there... (7s since I forced myself to take one second to read each icon name) Focus behaviour, that's it! (under two seconds since it was the second entry, from left to right, top to bottom) Under 1s, I notice there's a pull down menu that has click selected, and a label saying "When does the mouse pointer affect the input focus" The message could be better, but it gives a strong enough clue, so +2s to give it a total of 3s to find out I was on click to focus already. If I wanted to change to sloppy focus or focus follows mouse, I could have some trouble if I didn't understand the behaviour they did since the items on the pull down menu aren't the best of labels, however, they explain what happens with focus, so I understood it well, 5s I select enter only and notice that [ Apply ] became active (1s) I click active (1s) Setting changed. The total sum for this second example is: 29 seconds. Now ask yourself a question: are we considering a very slow reader, a person without any knowledge of what a desktop usually works like, person with english interpretation problems, a normal person, a smart person, a dumb person, or any given set of these kinds of persons into one? Shouldn't we aim to have good defaults that don't need changes 99% of the time and let those inconformists (like me and others) be able to conviniently change at will (and easily) on the other 1%? Some options are just workarounds to real problems, but most options I've seen (and that's specially true for xchat) are for real different behaviours that many like in many different ways. I only see no need to alienate anyone when you can have everyone :) > I just spent 2 minutes looking for auto-hide enable. After finding > 'panel' on 'desktop' (not the first place I looked) I clicked on it. jeez, I thought context menus were pretty common nowadays, I'm sorry! ;) > > But maybe that can be because when I install a new program I explore > > it... I see all options in the setting dialog and try them out, to see > > whether they'll make my experience with the app better or not. > I don't have time for this. If you're picking xchat (which, to be honest with oneself is not an usually deemed productive app), you probaly already have some time to check on the options. You really don't need to do that anyway to get connected and chat... just select the irc host and double click on it. > I've got more important things to do, like > having a life. Great! I almost thought none of us had a life :) > Either the program is easy to use without investing this > kind of learning, or its crap. I beleive the vast majority of users > are not going to spend any time at all axploring a new program. Likewise, the vast majority of users doesn't care for those options... they're there because of the many users that like other settings than the default ones, who will then, anyway, take a peek to make the app act like they want it to act (not as someone deemed it act). > The only times that I've taken the effort to do this was (1) at trade > shows, scoping out products from the competition, and (2) when I > couldn't figure out immediately how to do something I had to do, and > had to spend an afternoon trying each and every menu item in a desperate > struggle to find the feature I was needing.... Well, that's because you where using an application you weren't very familiar with, otherwise, that would certainly be harder to happen. In the case that Jeff forwarded us, the problem to reach a fast solution in that system was more a problem of a real swamp AND that there was no one around who knew enough of that particular application (X) so it would work out nicely along with the camera... That wouldn't be solved by good defaults... only by a preferences dialong that would interactively change the refresh rate untill the camera worked. Of course, for that they would first have to know what the problem was, but that is way beyond the scope of X windows, but of how monitors (the hardware) work. > > > Maybe searchable, hyper-linked help that will take you instantly to > > > that configuration item? A 'search engine' for things that can be > > > configured? > > I think this is a little too hard... > Too hard to implement? Yes and no. It takes longer to implement than the time that usually takes to search for information in a well sctructured display, and the only benefit it would bring would impact on dozens of options completely unstructured (a long list requires a find feature, a structured list requires you to use a tiny fraction of your brains to imagine where the option may be... now if the structure is bad and/or misleading, that is another problem!). > It's easy, I think, tedious, maybe. You have > to list everything a user might want to do, index it, make it > searchable, and link it to the right panel in control-center. The > technology to do this is easy; the hard part is writing down everything > that someone might want to do, and making sure it links to the right > thing. Yes, that's usually the biggest problem :( Cheers, -- + No matter how much you do, you never do enough -- unknown + Whatever you do will be insignificant, | but it is very important that you do it -- Gandhi + So let's do it...?
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