Hi everyone, We have a list of principles [1] for justifying our design decisions. However, not all of the principles have precise definitions, which could lead to trouble down the road.
Take a look at ux-control: "Users should always feel like they are in control of their software." While the intention is good, it opens the door to arguments like "I won't feel in control of LibreOffice if I can't change the toolbar background," which are very hard to argue against, since you can't disprove what the person's feeling. These arguments ultimately result in feature creep, so it's something we should avoid. Rather than basing the definition on any user's feelings, how about saying that the user doesn't feel in control when the software automates against his will. That's a bit more precise and weeds out the above feature creep, but still leaves the interpretation of the user's will open. We could go further and define "acting against the user's will" as something that a) hurts the user (e.g. sends personal/sensitive data online without asking) or b) prevents him from carrying out a task that fits under the scope of the software. (I originally added in "hurts his data", but that's covered under "error prevention".) ux-consistency: "Software should be internally consistent with itself and externally consistent with similar interfaces to leverage the user's existing knowledge." Again, it sounds good, but it can be used to justify copying usability mistakes of other software and thus can go against some of the other principles. Tacking on "unless this would be detrimental usability" remedies that, but it's a shortcut that doesn't really say much. How about saying that software should be consistent unless this breaks any of the other principle? An exception would be if an element that breaks one of our principles is used consistently throughout a desktop. For example, Windows 8's toolbars and sidebars go against ux-discoverability, but we can rely on the user knowing how to use these bars, because otherwise he wouldn't be able to use any of the core applications that come with Windows 8. How about we add a clause, then, for elements of a desktop that break our principles, but the knowledge of which is required for the usage of that desktop's core applications? What would be the best way to reword the principle? [1] http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Principles -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/design/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
