Re: [Usability]Attempt at constructive criticism - "Why Gnome 2 sucks for me"

[Alastair Scott <alastair scott gmx net>]

On Thu, 2002-08-29 at 11:16, Aleksander Adamowski wrote:

> Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> >The thing is, most desktop users will like or be indifferent to all of
> >those things, with the possible exception of button order. People
> >don't want to customize things that should just work;
> >
> But they do want to customize things which are a matter of taste, not 
> "work" xor "not work".
> And they want to customize things for which an agreement cannot be made 
> about what does work and what doesn't.
> 
> > they don't know
> >what a window manager or registry is and would be angry if you made
> >them learn; they like OS X's appearance.
> >  
> >
> That's why in M$'s software you have plenty of places that say "Advanced 
> settings".
> The people you talk about, casual users, just see the words "Advanced" 
> on a tab in a dialog box and think to themselves "ok, I'm not advanced, 
> no need to look there and get confused. I'll just ignore that tab.".
> And everybody is happy - power users can tweak those things that bother 
> them, casual users just ignore all things that have the word "Advanced" 
> painted on them.

On the other hand, in Open Source, many settings tend to be _way_ beyond
what Microsoft or Apple would put in 'advanced settings' or similar. A
case in point is fine detail of window and keyboard behaviour in the KDE
control panel; some of this is so arcane I suspect a tiny fraction of
users will even understand what many of the options mean*. Gnome is a
_vast_ improvement on this.

I rather like Mozilla's approach where, in the main, sensible decisions
have been taken about what can be presented in the Preferences dialogue
and the rest of the adjustable parameters, as well as those made
available from that dialogue, are in a text file (prefs.js) so can still
be accessed.

But, in the end, I use my machine to do work; tinkering with preferences
is an easy way to fritter away minutes and hours for little relative
gain ;)

Alastair

* I don't have KDE installed now so can't check, but I remember there
are controls whose labels refer to X parameters ...