Depends whether the app is a big part of your work/interest or just
incidental. If a big part you need to have an indepth understanding and
it's worth spending time developing that. If not, to be productive you
need the quickest most moronic solution to the problem without caring
how/why it works. An analogy is cars - you put the petrol in the hole at
the back right side and the car goes. A professional driver would be
interested in the whole fuel flow system in case it stopped working.
In this case I had to change an email address, and I very seldom do
graphics, and have no interest in them. The .png should have taken 5
minutes to replace. Kolourpaint met this requirement, there's a single
screen with a big fat Transparency button on the bottom left, so I
pressed it.
Perhaps apps with heavy-duty functionality need 2 uis - One for "moron
mode" with perhaps a reduced feature set ("what type of background would
you like today ?"), but geared towards "push this button to...", and
another for the serious user who can justify the time investment to
fully utilize the app.
You can't keep blaming the user for being too lazy to learn an app, this
argument was lost years ago.
cheers
Rod
On Wed, 2004-12-01 at 08:00 +1100, Jeff Allison wrote:
> Dave Airlie wrote:
> > well it's a fairly basic reaction at work,
> >
> > the first time you learn how to do something you don't know how to do
> > already then it is interesting, now switching to another app and trying to
> > do the same things just doesn't seem like the same sort of learning as you
> > already know how to do that so it must be app that is getting in your
> > way... so you blame the app... I've also heard that gimp becomes a lot
> > more obvious if you use a touchpad/stylus thing...
> >
> > Dave.
>
> I find people don't learn how to do things they learn what button to
> push, so that any change from application version to OS annoys them. If
> they learn t how and why then they might have more chance and not need
> to as about the next button
>
> Jeff
>
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