[Usability] Re: [Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME

[Till Kamppeter <till kamppeter gmx net>]

Kurt Pfeifle wrote:
> On Tuesday 13 December 2005 01:33, Till Kamppeter wrote:
> 
> 
>>Frederic told that the options from the PPD file are intentionally mot
>>listed in the printing dialog, the usability team of GNOME was against
>>listing these options. They clutter the dialog and can be more confusing
>>than useful to the user.
> 
> 
> This is not a wise decision.
> 
> Because it means there is no usability at all for many features: you
> can not *use* them, they are not there at all, they are forbidden to
> the user by some higher usability being.
> 
> Usubility for a given feature starts to become debate-able only where 
> the feature is already present, where something can be done *at all*.
> Before, there is the land of un-usability.
> 
> What type of printers do you think users in many enterprise environ-
> ments are used to? It is the 60 pages per minute model, that can do
> duplex and stapling and punching and cover-sheets-on-cardbox-paper
> and watermark and foo and bar and morestuff... 
> 
> I was one of the guys who pushed for adding all features (which the
> underlying CUPS provided) into the user interface of KDEPrint.
> 
> And I know for a fact that KDE's power in printing matters (given to
> it by CUPS) was the one feature that determined a pro-KDE decision
> in Linux desktop rollouts in Europe. 
> 
> I also know that the printing dialog of KDE can be improved a *lot*
> from where it is now. However, this is much more difficult than
> just removing most features and declare their un-usability to be
> the new religion of usability.
> 
> We'll work on that for KDE 4, but without removing any feature (we
> will rather be adding some more, because the wonderful CUPS 1.2
> gives them to us for free).

Kurt, you did great work, but now please do the same thing with
Thunderbird, Firefox, and GNOME (all at once or in given order).

   Till