Re: [Usability] user levels, etc.

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Mon, 2001-11-12 at 17:04, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > And if almost nobody will ever use a preference, then why have it at
> > all? 
> 
> Basically because the "almost nobody" is really loud and complains a
> lot. ;-)

<rant>
The other reason is that because developers who decide (to quote maciej)
that 'people really shouldn't need' some feature are displaying the
worst kind of inflexibility and (to be blunt) arrogance.
 
/Sometimes/ that decision is grounded in reality, and users really don't
need a specific function. The rest of the time (in my experience)
deciding a user 'doesn't need' something really means the developer has
never tried it or wanted it so has decided that because it isn't useful
to them, personally, it must not be useful to anyone anywhere. That kind
of attitude leads to broken, difficult to use software that makes the
user adapt to the application instead of the other way around. And
that's one of the worst types of UI failures.
</rant>
Luis