Re: Options and choises rant

[Sašo Kiselkov]

I totally agree that non-technical users (i.e. most of humanity) are certainly
very confused by lots of buttons and choices. I also agree with the general
reduction of clutter on windows - it's often unnecessary in apps not targeted
for the technical audience.

However, I'd like to discurage from removing features for the sake of simplicity
- that's not the right way to do it. Look at how NeXT did it instead. The
features were present and their presence on screen was configurable, but only
when the user requested them would they be moved into the user's visiblity
field, i.e. they were not enabled by default. Say, for example, the Workspace
Manager didn't display any hidden files in your system by default (e.g. stuff
like /usr, /tmp, .dotfiles etc.), but making it so is just a few clicks away -
bring up Preferences, choose 'UNIX Expert' preferences and turn on 'Expert File
System'.

In cases when something has to be configured (e.g. a mail account), I propose to
keep the present functionality, but also provide 'helpers' which try to do most
of the troublesome work automatically. Something like wizards might be helpful
(I've been considering for quite some time now to write a general wizard
framework).

That's my view of the situation.

--
Saso