[TriLUG] User Friendliness

[Jeff Tickle]

On Fri, 2004-06-04 at 02:07, Timothy A. Chagnon wrote:
> I disagree with you here.  I think Microsoft has done much harm by
> making things "user friendly."  They have essentially lowered the bar
> _so_ far in this respect that users don't learn anything about what's
> really going on in the background.  Plus, doing anything slightly more
> advanced takes that many more steps to get past the user friendliness.

You make a good point... and the world would be such a better place if
people would take time to actually learn a little bit about this magic
box that gives them email and Solitare.  Microsoft would love to make it
just that, too, so that none of the people would ever think "Ooh, maybe
I can make Solitare better!  Or even write my own software!"  (too
late.)

> <bad_analogy_pun>
> Teach a man to cat and he'll cat for a day.  Teach a man to man and
> he'll man for the rest of his life.
> </bad_analogy_pun>
> 
> Of course Linux could use more people making GUIs and user friendly
> interfaces, but I think we shouldn't hide things or dumb it down. 
> Personally I think the better approach is just to provide more
> information at hand, and make advanced tasks more efficient.

100% agreement there.  I think Linux is powerful enough that the user
can decide his own involvement, so to speak.  If it's your average "I
don't care, as long as I can get my email" user, fine.  If it's your
not-so-average "I don't care, as long as I can still write my own device
drivers and switch the kernel out with BSD if I want" user, that's fine
too.  They should still have that power.

Really, the main problem is on the graphical end.  For the most part,
that's not too bad either.  It's the little things that kill it, like
what Phillip noted about the menus.  I think people should take time to
learn how things work, but a graphical interface is a graphical
interface.  If you have things like drag-and-drop, they should be used
(imho).

> Here, here.  And it might even make people learn a bit and be more
> self-sufficient.

Exactly.  If they see how warm and welcoming the operating system is,
and maybe they one day click that little black box that says "terminal"
and read a page or two about it.  Who knows.  Maybe someday all our
uncle's cousin's boyfriends will be writing shell scripts and scheduling
cron jobs. ;-)

Thank you for your thoughts, Tim.

> -Tim
-- 
Jeff Tickle <jtickle at jtsoft.net>
JTSoft.net