[TriLUG] User Friendliness

[stan briggs]

a few thoughts on david's excellent points:

it was not the geeks that made windows popular.
it was not us geeks tweaking memory management, disk sizes, and such
that made windows popular. it was ease of use. and not just for the
end-user. it was easy to install and get up and running. for the most
part it really did not require a lot understanding of what was happening
under the hood. how many of you remember your first windows install? the
biggest pain was switching floppies on demand. but the point is that
almost literally anyone could do it! you could install a computer!
(note: the biggest pain was really making your own copy of the
floppies!)

applications are close.
i believe, i truly believe, that, for the most part, we are getting very
close with ease of use of applications. we need more applications but
the ones that are there are getting close. the desktops are cool and
slick. (though i can't sometimes figure out how to add to some of the
menus, either.) the applications are not going to come in-mass and
really get good until the mass end-user train is on our tracks.

making basic sys-admin work easy is the ticket.
i really believe that it's the low- to mid- level administation (basic
install, automated updates, workgoup'ing, etc.) that so many people have
been able to do for so long on windows that will make us successful.
there will always be us geeks working under the hood. there will always
be end-users that will use what is provided for them. we need to make it
easier for these administators to be.

my $.03

stan

> --- "Timothy A. Chagnon" <tchagnon at futeki.net> wrote:
>> I applaud your effort. Here's my $0.02.
>>
>> On Fri, 2004-06-04 at 01:00, Jeff Tickle wrote:
>> > Because if there's one
>> > thing Microsoft got right, it's making a computer easy to use...
>>
>> 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.
>
> I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with your disagreement... ;)
> Users really don't need to know what's going on in the background.  A
> computer is a tool.  A tool is something simple that anyone can pick
> up and use and accomplish a task in the best and easiest way possible.
>  Take a hammer for instance.  You pick up a hammer, you beat a nail
> into 2 pieces of wood to put them together.  That's ALL you need to
> know about the hammer.  You don't need to know where its weight is
> balanced, you don't need to know how heavy the head is or what kind of
> wood the handle is made of, or what kind of alloy for that matter.
> You can also see that the back of the head has a use too, pretty
> obvious, helps you take your nail back out.  Did I have to know all
> that other stuff to know that?  Not at all.
>
> I could make another analogy of users on a network neededing to know
> what us network/system admins do.  Think they should understand TCP/IP
> before using their computer on the Internet?  Hell I've been doing
> this for 8 years and I still don't give a damn what the packet looks
> like.  Should we teach them that stuff too?
>
> my fun $0.02 !
> David M.
>
>>
>> <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>
>>
>
>
>
>
>
> __________________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
> http://messenger.yahoo.com/
> --
> TriLUG mailing list        :
> http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational
> FAQ  : http://trilug.org/faq/
> TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/
> TriLUG PGP Keyring         : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc