Re: [Usability] user levels, etc.

[Nils Pedersen <n p sun com>]

Adam Elman wrote:
> 
> On Monday, November 12, 2001, at 12:06 PM, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > An idea we've been tossing around at Red Hat and was also discussed
> > some at ALS: rather than user levels, let's just remove overly
> > advanced/confusing prefs from the UI entirely, and have a special
> > power user control panel that exposes the most common ones, and for
> > really wacky settings people can use a generic GConf editor app or
> > gconftool. Windows takes a similar approach, I'm told you can get a
> > power-tweaker application that lets you set the weird stuff.
> 
> I'd also put in a vote for removing user levels entirely for several
> reasons:
> 
> 1) Users do not fit nicely into categories of "Novice," "Intermediate,"
> and "Advanced."  Many people might be extremely comfortable with a
> couple of applications, but might have little understanding of the
> underlying system.  Others might have deep understandings of how
> low-level functionality works, but be totally unfamiliar with the GUI.
> (Alan Cooper has some other good examples of this in his book "The
> Inmates Are Running The Asylum," in which he calls this 3-level division
> the "Euphemism Pyramid.")
> 
> 2) Given that users don't fit nicely into these categories, it's
> impossible to fit preferences into these categories anyway, especially
> with 3 levels -- with 2, it's a bit easier.  I know there has been much
> confusion in the past about what preferences should be in
> "Intermediate" -- that's because the division is arbitrary.

well this might be off track a bit...

But we still have two levels, root and user.

Yes - I think that hard coded levels probably aren't that useful. Where it
does become more interesting is if you can control the presentation of a 
set of functionality based on whatever policy an administrator may have...

For example, lot of sites don't provide users with the root password to 
their machine. However, there are lots of root level tasks which an
administrator may want to place in control of the user, for example
mounting file systems and printer configuration.

If and when things like XST start getting in to core GNOME, it would 
be nice if an admin could set things up so that some or all
of the functionality of XST could be made available to the end user
without the need for root access. Technologies which do some or all
of this (that I know of) are: 

RBAC - http://www.sun.com/software/whitepapers/wp-rbac/ 
sudo - http://www.courtesan.com/sudo/

there are probably lots of others :)

> 3) Moreover, since the division of preferences is unclear and hence
> arbitrary, users have no idea how to get to that one preference that
> they really need to set, so users end up having to switch user levels
> and explore the control panels again and again to find the preference,
> negating the whole purpose of having the user levels in the first place.
> 
> I don't think that a "power user control panel" or "power-tweaker
> application" are the right approach either, though.  The right answer,
> unfortunately, is hard design work: Figure out what users are actually
> doing/going to do with your application, figure out the set of
> preferences which most users will likely want to customize to their own
> needs, and make those available.  Then figure out the set of preferences
> which _some_ users will need, and make those available -- not through an
> "Advanced Settings" or a disclosure triangle, ideally, but in a way that
> clearly denotes what preferences are going to be found.

So i don't think its just a design problem :) Its also dependent on what
authorization policies an admin may or may not have for his/her users


> 
> That's my 2 cents,

ditto

Nils