On Mon, 14 Jun 1999 09:54:01 -0500, "Keith G. Murphy" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>I would add that GUI does not equate to ease-of-use. Look at the >oft-derided dselect: it's actually quite a good wizard (takes you >through everything you need to do step by step). The bad parts of it >are probably the slowness and (moreso) the unconventional keystroke >bindings. I agree that GUI does not automatically mean ease of use. In general, though, when configuring an application, clicking a checkbox is a lot easier than reading through an outdated manpage or (horror!) using info to find out the exact syntax of a specific configuration file line. When installing a Linux distribution there are so many applications to be configured, so many man pages to be read, that a new user can easily and justifiably feel intimidated. I've played with Linux (mostly Debian) for a couple of years now, and still find myself putting things off because it's so much work and so much reading. Whatever you think of W95, it has a lot less of these problems. Dselect is IMHO not a very good example of a good interface, because it is difficult to understand. I _still_ get confused when to use the Enter key and when to use the space bar, for example. I also find the separation in categories like misc, optional, non-free etc. completely arbitrary to me. I'd like to see all the networking-related packages together; if you can configure dselect to do that, I haven't found how. Of course, it is no longer practical to use dselect anyway, not with the huge amount of packages Debian comes with nowadays... I think an interface comparable with W95 explorer would work well for package selection, although this is hard to implement in text mode. >"The people who manage the creation of software-based products are >typically > either hostage to programmers because they are insufficiently >technical, or they are >all too sympathetic to programmers because they are programmers >themselves." That is one of the main points of the entire book: that programmers are the ones that design the user interface of programs. Programmers have a very different view of computing that arbitrary users. They subconsciously tend to assume that users of their programs have the same view as they themselves have. I hear that attitude in the oft-heard phrase "teach a man to fish...". Though true in itself, many people are either not interested in or don't have the capacity to configure large, complicated applications; they just want to type their letters, and do the other stuff their bosses tell them to do. Cooper points out that the interaction design should be geared towards the people actually using the program, instead of the people that program it. Self-evident as this may seem, it appears that this is hardly ever the case. >Personally, I think that explains a lot of "Y2K": A .sig I read somewhere: "Trust programmers to abbreviate the year-2000 problem to Y2K. It is this attitude that got us into this mess in the first place!" ;-) Gertjan (programmer, in case anyone was wondering ;-) -- Gertjan Klein <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Boot Control home page: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gklein/bcpage.html
