Re: [Usability]Re: Toolbar editor

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Wed, 2003-03-26 at 17:09, Arnaud Charlet wrote:

> And again, I disagree.
> First this kind of gathering can be very costly. By forcing developers to
> make such study, you basically kills most of the software developed for fun
> by hobbyist, plus lots of software were time and budget are constrained
> (which means basically the rest :-)

Sure, we all know hacking is the most fun part of software engineering,
unless you enjoy drawing lots of boxes :)  That's where this great
community of ours comes in though... you can hack on the fun parts while
other, slightly sadder individuals worry about what the default toolbar
should look like :)

> You study in particular simply can't handle properly experienced users of
> your software, since by your definition, the software won't be released
> until the study is done...

Well, that depends on the application.  What you say may have some truth
if the application is completely new, with features that nobody has seen
before, and is meant to do a task that nobody has done any other way
before.  But few applications fall into that category.  Testing with
users who are experienced with similar applications, or who are just
familiar with doing the task your application is meant to support, will
usually give you lots of useful information about what the most common
interactions with your application will be.

Of course the open source philosophy is to release early and often, and
that's fine... nobody's saying you have to get it right first time. 
There's nothing to stop your releasing version 0.x while you're still
testing it with users... in fact that's probably one of the best ways to
do so.

> > -  it might turn up in applications that shouldn't need one "just
> > because it's cool", thus adding complexity that needn't exist
> 
> Why do you really want to make this decision instead of the user ?
> This is really the wrong attitude.

I'm not suggesting making that decision "instead" of the user, I'm
suggesting making it as a result of understanding how users interact
with your application.  For example, if you put a toolbar editor in your
prototypes and nobody used it, why would you want it to take up
resources and menu space in your final product?  Or if your application
only has 8 possible toolbar buttons, why would you provide an editor
rather than just showing all the buttons all the time?  Those are the
sorts of situations where I wouldn't want to see a toolbar editor
turning up.

> For instance keeping your requirements in mind, Sun would never have
> developed Java and the Java API, which is clearly a badly designed API,
> at least parts of it :-)

Well I'm no Java programmer, but I do know Sun is actively working to
make the API more usable for the majority of users out-of-the-box,
rather than expecting all users to sort it out for themselves with some
sort of API editor :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems