Re: [Usability] user levels, etc.

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 12Nov2001 05:29PM (-0500), Luis Villa wrote:
> 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.

Having too many preferences in the UI has a usability cost, and this
is borne out by user testing. It becomes more difficult for most users
to find the settings they really care about. 

At some point, the cost to the majority of users of adding an extra
setting outweights the benefit to the minority who want it.

Ignoring even the UI issues, extra preferences, even hidden ones, have
a cost in code complexity and make testing more difficult, since the
number of possible configurations grows exponentially.

I think GNOME should focus primarily on making the 90%-of-users feature
set work as well as possible, even if that means removing some of the
.1%-of-users features entirely.

> /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>

I think more UI problems in GNOME are caused by too many preferences
rather than too few.

Your rant above is an example of the classical Unix/free-software
attitude that tends to end up with that result (the idea that lots of
preferences == easy to use).

Regards,

Maciej