Re: [Nautilus-list] Re: [Galeon-devel] native scrollbars (again)

[Abe Fettig <abe fettig net>]

On Wed, 2001-10-24 at 10:45, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> When someone asks to customize something, it's usually just a
> polite way of saying they think it's broken. e.g. "can I turn off the
> following obnoxious behavior." But then adding a preference is WRONG,
> the right thing to do is just change it.

> Anyhow, anytime you think you want a preference, you should instead
> consider whether the current behavior is simply _wrong_, and should
> simply be _fixed_.

OK, this point is well taken.  It does seem like many customization
features are there just because the developers thought it would be cool,
and not because anybody asked for it.  For example, how many people put
their menu bar any place other than the top of the window?  Does
_anybody_? [Bracing for hundreds of well-i-do responses] But the ability
to customize is there - you can happily drag your menu bar to the other
side of the desktop if you want.

> Moreover, if I'm Advanced, I still want to find the 10 prefs I care
> about on the Advanced tab; I don't want to sort through 300 useless
> prefs. i.e. the same UI concern that makes you limit prefs on the
> Beginner tab also applies to the Advanced tab. Advanced users should
> still get a good UI, maybe just one with more technical jargon.

Again, a very good point.  The other day I spent 20 minutes trying to
tell Sawfish to not raise windows when I click in them, before giving up
in frustration.  Is the preference in there?  I still don't know, but I
couldn't find it.

> I know I don't care how my desktop works, I just
> want it to do the right thing.

But sometimes, the "right thing" is dependent on usage habits, past
experience, or just plain personal taste.

According to Joel Spolsky's article/book on UI design
(http://joelonsoftware.com/stories/storyReader$51), the cardinal axiom
of all user interface design is that "A user interface is well-designed
when the program behaves exactly how the user thought it would."

If users expect different behaviors, even a minority of users, a config
option makes sense and can save a lot of frustration.

Abe