[Usability] 1st strategy to useability: find and learn, and therefor scale well

[solo turn <soloturn99 yahoo com>]

additional to "structured information" like menues, you should be able to search for things you
want to do. to make the find-algorithm more precise, something "adaptive" would be necessary.
something which learns out of users preferences or behaviour.

the best thing i saw in this respect up to now is http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/  (mac os
x innovators contest 2nd place). these guys deserve the oscar for novel application of well known
concepts.

its basically a "search" on the options/programs your system offers, and it remembers the choices
you made last time and rates it higher. and it is abbreviation driven.

this is a neat approach to forget about menus, discussions about where to put what. and, it is an
addition which can be improved just by changing algorithms.

alt-f2 is already doing some of this (see http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=66203), but no
search, no learning is included.

why this is important?

to find things there is 2 kinds of people:
- the ones who click through folder structures
- the ones who open a search&find window

the more information you have, the more "search" is important. www started of as structured thing
(links, etc), later it got so large, that by bookmarking and clicking you get no results. search
has become the most important thing to find things.

with such an approach you are prepared to:
- have 20 webbrowsers
  and the user chooses which one to use and not redhat
- 100.000 configuration options
- a big disk
- new filesystems which employ different techniques to store information
  new windws, new reiser
  where a file may have different attributes, where one
  is folder, multiple tasks it belongs to, etc.etc.

sorry for crossposting this to two useability lists, but i am convinced that the "find and learn"
thing is not trivial, and gives value to every system.

-solo.


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