Re: Options and choises rant

[Dennis Leeuw]

Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> 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.

This sounds a lot like the KISS principle. Small apps that do one thing 
right, and other apps for other tasks.

But just to get my mind straight. Let's assume the famous Office 
discussion, and let us make it even more simpel and only use the 
document creation part. I think one thing that GNUstep handles right is 
color and font management. It opens a panel, which is a "standalone" 
object (or app if your prefer) that deals exclusively with the task it 
was designed for.
Do you mean this kind of design when you talk about bundles and a 
modularised design?

> 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.

Nice... didn't know that. My girlfriend initially suggested 5, which I 
thought was way too little... but apperently I should have listened. She 
was much closer to the 7 then I was... :)

Dennis

--
"It is not necessary to change.
 After all, survival is not mandatory."
        Dr. W. Edwards Deming