Re: Different, Original user level proposal. Was: Proposal for default panel layout w/ some modifications to thepanel

[Liam Quin <liam holoweb net>]

Alan Cooper, in his About Face book, suggests that most people are in
fact "perpetual intermediates".  Consider a secretary who, once per
week, uses a spread-sheet program to add up the coffee expenses, who
uses a word processor two or three times a day to send letters and once
a month to write a longer report, and who plays Patience at lunch time.
The secretary here isn't a beginner, has been using the computer for
over a year.

Gather a few dozen use cases like this.

You will probably find that most people don't use the same program all
day every day; even if they do, not everyone is interested in the
technology: many car drivers do not become qualified mechanics, and
few television users can tell you the exact frequency of the channel
they're watching in GHz or the length of the frame blanking interval.

Intermediate users might be interested in  ore advanced features but
probably don't remember how to find them.

Panels that hide make their life harder.  Panels that slide away but leave
a small tab or button visible might do better, I don't know.

Some dialogue boxes have an "advanced" or "details" button that makes
the panel larger; the older Windows design of an Advanced button that
brings up another dialogue box is very confusing, whereas making an
existing panel have more contros on it helps the user keep context.
(I know when I was at SoftQUad, we logged more support calls to do with
the pop-up type of interface than for the expanding type).

> You can, however, change the user level for a particular window temporarily
> by pressing and holding down a keyboard combination.
The difficulty I see here is with the lack of affordance -- that is, there
is nothing visible to show that you can do this.

Lee

-- 
Liam Quin - Barefoot in Toronto - liam holoweb net - http://www.holoweb.net/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net www.valinor.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Author, Open Source XML Database Toolkit, Wiley August 2000
Co-author: The XML Specification Guide, Wiley 1999; Mastering XML, Sybex 2001