Re: Draining the Swamp: A Technical User's Experience
- From: Richard Stallman <rms gnu org>
- To: mjs noisehavoc org
- Cc: mjs noisehavoc org, hadess hadess net, jdub perkypants org, foundation-list gnome org
- Subject: Re: Draining the Swamp: A Technical User's Experience
- Date: Wed, 8 May 2002 20:45:29 -0600 (MDT)
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.
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