On Saturday 20 January 2007 11:51, Josselin Mouette wrote: > Le samedi 20 janvier 2007 à 04:30 -0500, Greg Folkert a écrit : > > I would assert they are not listening to their former BIGGEST fans and > > users. You can easily find droves rants/discussions of current GNOME > > users very disgruntled with the REMOVAL of features that previously > > were there. Some users are now FORMER GNOME users due to these > > removals. > > Features. Features, features, features. Do you only want features, > without even knowing whether they are useful? Sorry, usability is not > about features. Wikipedia defines usability as : Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal. ISO 9241-11 (1998) Guidance on Usability, defines usability as: The extent to which a product can be used by specified users to achieve specified goals with effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction in a specified context of use. By taking out features you decrease the number of goals you can use the software for. If you can't use the software for a certain goal at all then it's less usable for that goal then a package with an interface from hell that does let you addres that goal. => by definition taking out (lots of) features decreases the maximum usability of the software. > I, for one, thank those usability engineers for removing these tons of > useless features that clutter menus, desktop, applications, and dialog > boxes. IMHO that just means those usability engineers took the easy way out of a scaling problem: instead of adressing the actual problem, they just made sure they didn't have to deal with it. Yes, organizing lots of features so all them are easy to use is a very hard problem. BUT those fabled usabillity engineers not only turned tail and ran, they mobbed everyone who dared to point they did. As far as I'm conserned the emperor isn't waring any clothes. > You can gain much productivity by removing them, and that doesn't > only account for newbie users. Every one of those features came to be because it scratched someones itch, judging by the amount of rants and complaints I've seen about those removed features those itches still need scratching. Thus Gnome has actively stopped a whole slew of users from scratching their itches the way they did before. IMHO that's monementally stupid. -- Cheers, cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis)
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