Re: [Usability]too much choice?

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

fre 2003-02-21 klockan 19.37 skrev Alan Horkan:
> While Havoc had some very good points in his essay about too many
> preferences, there were a few things about it that did not sit well with
> me although i did not think about it deeply enough to be able to provide
> good feedback.
> (/me is trying very hard not to comment about options XYZ i miss in
> metacity).
> 
> I found this rebuttal very interesting
> http://www.mosfet.org/free-software-rebuttal.html
> 
> the most important idea in it to me was that you can have much more
> options if you organise them better, organisation is the bigger problem
> than too much choice.

That's true to some extent, but you can organize all you want and still
at some point it's still too hard as a user to easily find the stuff
you're actually looking for, since the other stuff that's present and
you're *not* looking for will cause too much visual/mental noise. A
single tree is not difficult to recognize and find fast, but in a forest
it is, even if you have good maps and even if the trees were to be
organized in straight lines or grouped into groups of younger or older
trees or something like that. This is a wellknown problem in HCI design.

That's also why there have been endless debates about the best way to
organize preferences for example -- there are several solutions that use
good mental concepts (trees, tabs etc.) as a basis but still don't scale
very well.

You can't have everything. Many developers are aware of the conflict
between a bug-free program, a feature-rich program, and fast
development, and that you can't have all of those. That's the same
conflict as with "we'll organize stuff better for better usability" and
"we'll include many preferences". You can't have both of those. There's
a balance to be made.

It seems Mosfet completely ignores this in the rebuttal, and claims that
the solution is just to organize better, in contrast with what almost
all HCI and usability research points out. To me, that seems like
someone is either claiming the impossible on purpose, or just being
naive.


Christian