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

[Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>]

    If you find this statement surprising, I recommend reading some books
    about usability and human interface design.

I'm sorry, I did not realize you meant only to cite general principle
that there is some amount of trade off between number of features and
ease of using them.  I don't think anyone denies that general
principle, but since it doesn't tell us how much cost comes with any
given extension, it isn't conclusive.

When I read these words,

>     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.

I thought you were making a much more specific claim about this
particular issue.  The idea that studies show this specific change
would cause a major inconvenience is what I found surprising.  And I
still do.  Finding an object on a desktop is not the same situation,
and studies about that don't have much concrete implications here.

Basically, how easy it is to find a particular configuration option is
not such a crucial point.  If one has to look a few panels and see
which one really does a certain job, that is inconvenient, but not
disastrous.  A typical user doesn't make many configuration changes
per day.  If it takes a minute to look thru a hierarchical list of
configuration panels (like what GNOME configuration has now) and try
two or three of them, that is a small cost.

Being able to do the configuration changes you need is well worth the
cost of having to look for the one you need.