On 01/13/2013 12:52 PM, Rich Pieri wrote:
On Sat, 12 Jan 2013 14:55:26 -0500
Mark Woodward <[email protected]> wrote:
Problems with computers are mostly over at this point. It isn't about
computers at all. It is about the tasks the users want to accomplish.
You can't make them easier without changing the nature of the task.
I recently wrote, in another thread, that consumers don't want choice.
They don't want to have to make choices. They don't want to have to
make decisions. They just want it -- whatever "it" happens to be -- to
work without them having to think about it.
Joe Consumer doesn't care about the relative merits of various audio
formats and compression ratios. He just wants to play his music on his
generic-just-like-his-neighbor's shiny thing. You can make it easier
for Joe: remove choices.
I don't think that's quite right. It's not that people don't want
choices, it's that they don't want to make choices where they don't
understand the options, and there is a high learning curve (esp. when
options interact with each other in non-trivial ways).
Take video encoding for instance. Check the man page for
mencoder/mplayer. Mine is 6908 lines long. That's a lot of information
for a single tool. Most users (admittedly I'm extrapolating 'me' as
'most people') don't want to /have/ to know all that stuff. Most users
would love it if there were a handful of pre-sets: min-file size, max
quality, a few in between. I think a lot of people would love to have
those options. Most people who have at least some technical competence
are able to understand file-size, and why they may want to minimize it.
Music is somewhat easier, in that the formats available either work or
they don't on a given device; it isn't like video where the format
itself is supported but has a lot of jitter in playback depending on
some of the options used in the encoding and/or playback utility.
Matt
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