On Tue, 05 Apr 2005 08:21:30 -0400 "Eric S. Johansson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | Now if developers can get off of their ego trips and listen to | usability experts who have been telling them for the past 30 years | how to make software more user-friendly, we might end up with | computers (and MUA's) that people use because they want to not | because they have to.
Having listened to said usability experts and found that all the
software that I like completely breaks at least five of their seven
heuristics, I wouldn't be inclined to take them too seriously... Their
main premise seems to be that "learning is bad".
I think I understand. The usability experts were using a language not common to geeks.
if you listen to them with the ears of taxi drivers, insurance agents, doctors, salesman (i.e. 99.99 percent of the world), you'll hear them say that you should not surprise users. Behavior should be consistent, don't hide interface elements, let there be multiple ways of finding the same operation (open file versus get file). There is a whole list of things to do and not do. The Macintosh does a phenomenal job at being a good user interface most of the time. Unfortunately their errors are quite glaring and persistent.
much of computer literacy is simply acquiring enough scar tissue so that the interface doesn't hurt so much anymore. You have obviously built up a significant onto scar tissue and are no longer sensitive to interface problems.
If you want to see how bad things are, try telling a naive user to type what you want them to type. Corrections only come after they have completed typing what you just said. Welcome to my world.
And if you don't want to learn, you're using the wrong distribution...
like I said there is learning and there is scar tissue. Learning serves a purpose, scar tissue is just hazing. so, is gentoo about hazing or being useful?
---eric
-- http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/view.html?pg=5
The result of the duopoly that currently defines "competition" is that prices and service suck. We're the world's leader in Internet technology - except that we're not. -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
