Tomas,
On Wed, 23 Feb 2005 08:10:32 +0000, Tomas Frydrych
<tomasfrydrych@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> There is a certain tendency in GNOME to hide things from the user, to
> provide preferences without appropriate UI, and to make it difficult for
> the user to do things in a way that is different from what the usability
> people think is the right way.
That is an unfair characterization. You could also argue that
non-GNOME desktops have a tendency to expose things to the user that
are implementation details, or that are historically grown piles of
crud that haven't been thought through in context of common use cases.
The "preferences without appropriate UI" are there for people who have
grown used to certain (UNIX-)ways of doing things, like
middle-click-paste, that wouldn't make sense to unexperienced users.
People are putting UIs on top of those prefs, though: see
gtweakui.sf.net for instance. Lastly, the "usability people" (I will
count myself as one) have far less influence on the GNOME development
process as they would like (or you seem to think), because they often
aren't the ones writing the code.
> I am not keen to have that
> 'users do not know what is good for them' attitude imported into AW
> design, UI or otherwise.
Sure, but this is definately not the attitude the GNOME project has.
That attitude is more like "It should Just Workˇ.
> Usability is also about consistency; I find it not only irritating but
> also hindering my ability to use an application efficiently if when I
> update it the menus change, the shortcuts change, etc.
If you can't change, you can't innovate, it's as simple as that.
> the recent list, which simply meant Alt+F,F,Enter -- now I have scroll
> through the menu or use the mouse; but hey, we are HIG compliant!
I don't think the HIG forbids an accelerator key to access the most
recently used file.
> On a related note, I understand that M$ spends lots of money on
> usability research, so having the Word interface as a starting point for
> our own is not as a bad thing as some might seem to think;
The correlation between the amount of money MS spends on usability
research and the quaility of the Word interface has yet to be
established.
> but I would like any
> improvements to be driven by _real_ user feedback and some common sense.
I think we would all like real user feedback, but it tends to be
pretty difficult without the funds for large scale scientifically
sound surveys.
regards,
-- ReinoutReceived on Wed Feb 23 15:09:49 2005
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