Re: [Usability] "Three Traps" (from Cooper Interaction Design newsletter)

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Tue, 2001-11-13 at 21:20, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> Alex Barnes <alex barnes sympatico ca> writes: 
> > So, I'm wondering if it is even remotely possible to meet all of
> > everyone's needs?  (would specific needs-based distributions solve this,
> > such as a RedHat Business User Edition, HomeUser Edition, etc? somehow I
> > doubt it...) or is his theory crap?
> 
> I think he has a good point, at the same time he's assuming fixed
> resources that can all be aimed at one problem, while in open source
> we have a ton of resources that are most easily aimed at lots of
> little parallel problems.

Maybe so, but I think there are some problems / ideas we could
definitely implement if there was a consensus that "this is something we
want to do". An example might be "log in to your home desktop from any
GNOME system connected to the internet". Things like that require
collaboration across many areas of the desktop, and those (maybe not
this one specifically, but some set of ones like it) are the sort of
conveniences that can make people actually want to use GNOME, not
because we are BonoboEnabled(TM) (though perhaps Bonobo would be an
important piece in implementing many of these visions).

-Seth