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Re: Options and choises rant
From: |
Richard Frith-Macdonald |
Subject: |
Re: Options and choises rant |
Date: |
Sun, 15 Jan 2006 12:07:26 +0000 |
On 15 Jan 2006, at 10:28, Dennis Leeuw wrote:
The "make everybody happy" paradigm might be part of the open
source community, since it helps to get more developers, but to me
it sounds like a wrong design approach for the end user. The more
options to choose from the less people feel comfortable with a
certain piece of software.
Look at the remote control. The less buttons the easier people can
work with it. The more buttons, the more people feel initimidated
and the sooner people have the feeling that they must be doing
something wrong, because they don't know what all the buttons do.
If I want to sell GNUstep as an environment to my dad, I think we
need applications with less options. To give an example:
What do you expect of an e-mail client? You want to send e-mail,
reply to an e-mail, forward e-mail and archive mail you received.
To put it simple that's all an average user wants to do. Now have a
look at the Message menu of GNUMail. I can imagine people are
intimidated by all the options to choose from (I just picked
GNUMail because I know it so well). But I have seen this with some
of the applications on the Mac too.
Maybe the less is more idea should be more often used. Maybe the
idea should be that a menu should be not longer then 10 entries,
next to being not deeper then 3 menus. How do others on this list
view this? Have other people experiences with users and how
programs are percieved?
I agree that we want fewer options in basic user interface.
I guess we should probably always have a way to 'drill down' to
obscure and infrequently used settings ... but perhaps that sort of
thing is best realised by having loadable modules with their own
separate documentation and configuration/options panels.
My wife and I have recently been discussing one of the many faults
with politics in this country (the UK) ... the rhetoric of the
current government and the main opposition party concentrates on
offering people 'choice'. Choices of schools, choices of hospitals
etc. Their theory being that when people can choose, the best
schools, hospitals or whatever will prosper through popularity.
While there may be an element of truth in that free-market theory, I
don't think it's what we want. We are among the most educated/
intelligent part of the population, and we can't spend time
evaluating each school or hospital (or other service) to decide which
is best for us, as we cannot become experts in all these areas. If
we can't do it, then I'm sure that the vast majority of the
population can't do it either ... which means that the choice we are
given is illusory. What we actually need is expertise and research
applied by people who know what they are doing ... to provide us with
a small choice of the best options, not an ever widening choice of
more varied options we can't evaluate in any reasonable timeframe.
Anyway, while software is generally much less complex than social
institutions, I think the same thing applies ... the best options in
software are products which do their jobs really well and simply and
don't have lots of irrelevant options tacked on. They have concise
and consistent user interfaces and operating principles and have
functionality chosen to be powerful and intuitive.
Apparently even microsoft have partially recognised this ... I
recently followed a link to a news item about their latest release of
'office' in which it was said they did lot's of market research to
find out what new features people would like ... and found that over
90% of the requested features were already in the software.
The conclusion they drew from this was that they needed a new,
context sensitive, user interface design to allow people to find
features more easily. I think they only got that partially right ...
things like ms-office (and now open-office) are horribly bloated and
need to be broken up and modularised, improving the gui is a good
step, but it's not enough. A lot of stuff should be completely
removed from core applications and some sort of 'howto' tool should
be devised to use AI principles to help people find the right tool
for the job. Having a context sensitive gui within a single tool is
a mistake ... we are much better at handling consistent interfaces
rather than dynamically changing user interfaces, so if we are going
to have to switch to handle a new task we want a radical ui change so
we *know* we are handling a new task, and while we are operating
within one tool we do not want the user interface changing.
PS.
I've read that research suggests 7 items as a maximum that people (in
general) can readily keep in mind, so even a menu with ten items is
probably longer than desirable.