Re: BE MORE SIMPLE!!!!
On Mon, 14 Jun 1999 09:54:01 -0500, "Keith G. Murphy"
<keithmur@mindspring.com> wrote:
>I would add that GUI does not equate to ease-of-use. Look at the
>oft-derided dselect: it's actually quite a good wizard (takes you
>through everything you need to do step by step). The bad parts of it
>are probably the slowness and (moreso) the unconventional keystroke
>bindings.
I agree that GUI does not automatically mean ease of use. In general,
though, when configuring an application, clicking a checkbox is a lot
easier than reading through an outdated manpage or (horror!) using info
to find out the exact syntax of a specific configuration file line. When
installing a Linux distribution there are so many applications to be
configured, so many man pages to be read, that a new user can easily and
justifiably feel intimidated. I've played with Linux (mostly Debian) for
a couple of years now, and still find myself putting things off because
it's so much work and so much reading. Whatever you think of W95, it has
a lot less of these problems.
Dselect is IMHO not a very good example of a good interface, because
it is difficult to understand. I _still_ get confused when to use the
Enter key and when to use the space bar, for example. I also find the
separation in categories like misc, optional, non-free etc. completely
arbitrary to me. I'd like to see all the networking-related packages
together; if you can configure dselect to do that, I haven't found how.
Of course, it is no longer practical to use dselect anyway, not with the
huge amount of packages Debian comes with nowadays... I think an
interface comparable with W95 explorer would work well for package
selection, although this is hard to implement in text mode.
>"The people who manage the creation of software-based products are
>typically
> either hostage to programmers because they are insufficiently
>technical, or they are
>all too sympathetic to programmers because they are programmers
>themselves."
That is one of the main points of the entire book: that programmers
are the ones that design the user interface of programs. Programmers
have a very different view of computing that arbitrary users. They
subconsciously tend to assume that users of their programs have the same
view as they themselves have. I hear that attitude in the oft-heard
phrase "teach a man to fish...". Though true in itself, many people are
either not interested in or don't have the capacity to configure large,
complicated applications; they just want to type their letters, and do
the other stuff their bosses tell them to do. Cooper points out that the
interaction design should be geared towards the people actually using
the program, instead of the people that program it. Self-evident as this
may seem, it appears that this is hardly ever the case.
>Personally, I think that explains a lot of "Y2K":
A .sig I read somewhere: "Trust programmers to abbreviate the
year-2000 problem to Y2K. It is this attitude that got us into this mess
in the first place!" ;-)
Gertjan (programmer, in case anyone was wondering ;-)
--
Gertjan Klein <gklein@xs4all.nl>
The Boot Control home page: http://www.xs4all.nl/~gklein/bcpage.html
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