On 04 September 2005 11:41, Holly Bostick wrote: I've tried to stay away from this thread but can't resist any more. ;-)
[ snip a lot of Holly's rant I mostly agree with ] > This is why I can't deal with all the people I encounter who suggest > that 'it' should 'JustWork' without need for instruction of any sort > (whether that be a physical manual, man pages, READMEs, or Windows Help > files). > > Like humanity is sooooooo good at making stuff, and 'users' are sooooooo > brilliantly educated, that they should be able to look at a computing > device and immediately know what it all means (like looking at a screwhole, > a screw, and a screwdriver). > > It's not gonna happen any time soon, and it certainly hasn't happened > yet. Operating a computer safely, reliably, and with any degree of > competence whatsoever is a hard and complex task, and it's going to be > hard for some time to come. That is exactly the reason I feel I have to make sure I do not add further complexity to it for my users. My users, or actually my customers and their users, are mostly office workers, engineers and journalists or other workers at newspapers. So it's mostly about corporate computing rather than home users. They do not administrate their boxes, they use them. Or, to use Holly's example of driving, they are drivers rather than car mechanics. My POV is: The most important feature of a GUI is consistency. Before I'll argue that point, I have to put away a fairy tale of computing: The intuitive desktop. Such beast does not exist. Intuition is highly based on one's cultural background. Since cultures are pretty much diverse, desktops cannot be intuitive across different culture. Lemme give you some examples, all of them coming from KDE because that is what I know best. Let's have a look at the icon for "Email". That's a capital "E", an envelop leaning against it. Pretty intuitive, no? Alright, let's just assume I have grown up with a language that does not use the Latin script, and I do not speak English at all. In that case, the "E" is meaningless to me. Let's additionally assume my culture doesn't use envelops for mail but scrolls. The entire icon does not contain one single hint for me to guess what it means. Look at the icon for "Help". Let's say you have never been on a ship. Let's say you have never seen a ship - and yes, there are a lot of people like that. What does that red-and-white ring tell you? Next to nothing. Same for the "Home" icon. Unless your home looks somehow like that, you won't be able to associate the icon with "home" intuitively. A diagonal line from the bottom-left corner to the top-right one means "upwards", right? Well, yes, it does for most of us. The keyword here is "most". Most of us read from the left to the right. That gives us the sense of direction when we look at that line. Those who read from the right to the left perceive it as "downwards". And how about those who read from top to bottom? Actually, I have no idea how they may perceive that line. Alright, I have got into my favourite pasttime: Intercultural communications. I'll stop here as long as we can agree on "intuitive desktops" being a fairy tale that has never made it into real life. Let's forget about that concept and come back to my initial point: The most crucial property of any computer (G)UI is consistency. Inconsistencies make it damn much harder for users to learn their environment or, in Holly speak, to commit to it. To borrow from Holly's example of driving again: All cars have their accelerators on the right hand side, the clutch on the left hand side and the brake in between (alright, cars with automatic gearboxes omit the clutch). That makes it feasible to change to another car without learning driving from scratch. Same for computers and, especially, desktops. All "Open" dialogues *must* look and operate the same regardless which application one uses. The "Print" entry *must* be in the same menu regardless of the application. The same icon means the same in every application; a particular action is represented by the same icon in each and every application. Same for wording. "Dismiss", "Cancel", "Bail out" - that's simply confusing for someone who *tries* to commit themselves to something new like linux. That's the reason I strongly advise to go with a real Desktop Environment for users rather than choose a windows manager and all the apps at random. Throw KDE or GNOME at your users to make it easier for them commit themselves. Make it easier for them to "drive" their desktops by providing a consistent interface. </my rant> If you geeks want to use whatever you want, that is fine. For *you*. Don't even dream about converting the vast majority of computer *users* with that approach. Good night Uwe -- 95% of all programmers rate themselves among the top 5% of all software developers. - Linus Torvalds http://www.uwix.iway.na (last updated: 20.06.2004) -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
