Re: [desktop] Some comment on the tenets
On Thu, 2002-10-24 at 08:52, Joanne Hunter wrote:
> ....okay, only one comment. Tenet #2 dictates that there are "only two
> classes of users: the novice, and the expert". This IMHO is a mistake.
>
> There is a third class of user that I run into all the time - for lack of a
> better term, I usually call them the "intermediate". These are the sorts of
> people who like to tweak little bits of settings, but aren't entirely diving
> into the deep details.
I know they exist. But relative to the other two, they are not
important. I've added this to the web page.
> The sorts of people who, under Windows, have eleventy
> billion little "tweak" utilities for customization, and the sorts of people
> under Linux who find Sawfish lisp snippets grabbed off the 'net to be great
> fun. Folks who consider gconf-editor to be the most useful thing they have.
Yes, they like to break their system. That's great, but it is far more
important to support the users who have no idea what Linux, Sawfish,
GConf, etc even are.
> They're not "experts"; they wouldn't know how to configure X or switch to a
> different default shell. But they're not novices, either; they know what a
> web browser is, and may even switch between different types of the same
> program.
That's fine. If they're at that level of skill, they can always read
documentation, spend a little bit of time on it, and figure it out. Or
they can just fall back to the standard novice settings, which will just
*work*.
> I'd suggest that it's extremely important that, even if this project doesn't
> explicitly support such people, it shouldn't alienate them in the process.
We will of course try not to alienate them.
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