Re: Options and choises rant

[Markus Hitter]

Am 15.01.2006 um 11:28 schrieb Dennis Leeuw:

> 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.

I agree with you, but I'd want to expand this to developers as well.  
Simplicity is one of the biggest advantages of OpenStep/GNUstep/Cocoa  
over other development environments. The average developer doesn't  
want to get lost in the 100+ options you can invoke gcc with. They  
don't want the burden of the decision wether to use C, C++, C++ with  
templates, C++ with STL, C++ with boost, ... . They don't want to  
wade through 150 available methods; they'd prefer 20 methods, even if  
this requires a few additional lines of code. They don't want to  
learn 574 classes, they want to concentrate at solving their  
programming task. OK, "they" is actually "me" here.


> Look at the remote control. The less buttons the easier people can  
> work with it.

This is why I have 5 to 7 items in (Mac OS X) Mail's toolbar, only.  
Even the "Reply" button vanished as it is easier (not quicker) to  
always click "Reply all", then remove unwanted adresses. I use the  
menu for setup tasks, only.


My preferred example of a totally overfeatured tool is ssh. Once you  
found out how to use it, it's simple. But there are so many options I  
never fully understood the man page(s). Try and error (and partial  
understanding) teached me you can forget about all but one encryption  
algorithm, you can forget about all but one option (-u), you can  
forget about ssh-agent. Even the use of passphrases is questionable.  
Maybe I'm wrong, but I'll probably never notice.

vim vs. classic vi is another sample: Once I accidently got into  
vim's help section. Hundreds of commands I'll never have a use for  
it, because you can work around them with a few of the classic  
commands easily. vim hides the useless features better than ssh.


> Have other people experiences with users and how programs are  
> percieved?

There's one problem with the less-is-more paradigm: People remember  
best what they already know. If their old mail client has an reply- 
not-to-all-but-to-all-my-buddies button, their first question when  
using the new client is "where's the reply-not-to-all-but-to-all-my- 
buddies button?". Accordingly, their first impression of the new  
client is: "It's not that good".

It's sometimes hard to get people over this first impression, but the  
survival and current success of Mac OS X, the appearance of  
distributions like Ubuntu show, it's possible. Let me add: It's  
essential for the survival of personal computing as such.


my $0.02
Markus

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Dipl. Ing. Markus Hitter
http://www.jump-ing.de/