Re: [Usability]Re: Toolbar editor

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Wed, 2003-03-26 at 14:46, Arnaud Charlet wrote:

> As already said before, for any reasonably sized application, you can't
> guess in advance which features will be used more often, in particular
> if your user base is large, so I don't see how the position you're taking
> can scale, even with a smiley :-)

It scales because you're not supposed to "guess" in the first place,
you're supposed to gather sufficient user requirements that you "know"
:)

I'm not disputing that a toolbar editor is probably a very useful thing
to design well and standardize on.  I guess I'm just worried that:

-  it might turn up in applications that shouldn't need one "just
because it's cool", thus adding complexity that needn't exist

- developers might use it as an excuse not to design their toolbars
properly in the first place because they think the user will fix it to
suit themselves... whereas past experience would indicate that they
mostly won't bother, so they'll just be left with a poorly-designed app
on their hands instead.

But I guess we have enough people who will scream if either of those
things happen that my fears should be unfounded :)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems