On Oct 11, 2005, at 1:30 PM, jbv wrote:
IMHO this is the kind of approach that works perfectly on paper, but not so well in real life...
Let's take the example of electronic music devices (synths, rhythm-boxes, etc). Since the mid 80's most of them come with numerous presets, but also with editors... I've been in touch with many musicians between the early 80's to the late 90's and I must say that very few of them took the time to learn how to program / edit / modify... Most of them seemed to be satisfied with presets, and used to sell the device and buy another (brand new) one once they got tired of the presets. It is true that UIs of this kind of gear were rather crappy (tiny LCDs), but anyway the vast creative possibility of some synths were really worth the effort of reading the manual and try to go beyond the presets (for example additive synthesis with the K5000).
You will always have a group of people who accept what is given them and will do what they can with it. Then there is the group of people who love to tinker and will learn all they can about something in order to get more use out of it. The musicians of the 80s and 90s who took the time to read the manuals and learn the beastly UIs (I'm thinking early Ensoniq here) came up with some cool stuff for the time.
Either way, templates/presets meet the needs of both. The average user has something that gets them through the day and the above average user has something which shows them what is possible.
I afraid that providing too many templates might lead to lazyness for users, and in the end every document / layout / etc might look the same, just like every piece of electronic music sounds the same these days...
Well, that depends on what studio they are coming out of and the quality of the sounds from their library :-) It also depends on whether the music produced was something that was paid for or something that the person was doing for fun. Now, if you are hiring someone to do work for you and they are providing work that closely resembles templates/presets from a popular app then you might want to find someone else.
In the end, the average user doesn't mind if their document looks the same as others. They just want something that looks nice. Templates/ presets provide that for them. My mom has no desire to learn how to tweak templates in Pages (and I don't want to teach her, there are bigger fish to fry when it comes to her and computers). She just wants a nice looking document. A document template gives her that.
I would say that the above average user usually likes to have something to start with. A template/preset gives them that as well.
-- Trevor DeVore Blue Mango Multimedia [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ use-revolution mailing list [email protected] Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences: http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
