On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 10:03 AM, Valorie Zimmerman <valorie.zimmer...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 10:38 PM, Mark Kretschmann <kretschm...@kde.org> > wrote: >> Bottom line: If we don't want Amarok to be a complete nerd tool, it >> might make sense to go back to our original goal with Amarok 2, which >> was "making powerful features easy to use". We used to say: "Amarok 2 >> should be able to pass the Mom-Test: If our Mom's can't use it, we did >> not do it well enough." > > The choice is not between "uber-complicated and arcane" and > "dumbed-down."
I would prefer not to speak of "dumb interfaces". It is possible, albeit very hard, to create UIs that manage to make complex and powerful things simple to use. Certain things that are impossible to make simple might just be too complex overall. Does a music player need a feature that lets you create specific playlists with any number of properties and biases that one can imagine? Maybe. Or maybe it's overkill? These are difficult questions to answer. Doing that should be the focus of any good designer, and achieving that goal separates the good ones from the not-so-good-ones. Of course this also needs coordination with backend/middleware, and ideally input from usability experts. But if we want to be better than our competition, then we should strife towards these goals, I think :) -- Mark Kretschmann Amarok Developer, Senior Software Engineer at Nokia Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe http://amarok.kde.org - http://fsfe.org - http://nokia.com _______________________________________________ Amarok-devel mailing list Amarok-devel@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/amarok-devel
