Subject: Re: Control Center Behavior

["Dan Mann" <daniel_b_mann hotmail com>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "mike" <mike redtux demon co uk>
To: <desktop-devel-list gnome org>
Sent: Friday, July 19, 2002 10:00 PM
Subject: Re: Control Center Behavior



>
> just to add my thoughts to this issue
>
> I think that maybe a significant proportion of gnome users have come
> over from MS and are either sysadmins or doing support for coleagues in
> a MS office environment (ie: not coders)
>
> (my background is similar and I am probably not that unique)
>
> I also think that these sort of people are liable to go from windows to
> gnome, rather than KDE
>
> So I feel that these people (who are liable to be heavily represented on
> sites like gnomedesktop.org) could well have a feeling for "ordinary"
> desktop users, even if they are not typical themselves.

I work with about 300 "normal" office computer users, who have very very
little knowledge of the OS, and mostly just know a bit about the office
applications themselves.  I've got users who can't find a file if it's not
in the recently used file list of Word.....and some who doin't know how to
open a URL in IE unless I say "um, could you go to Yahoo for me?"

So Yeah, from that type of user's perspective I think I could offer some
advice to.....what it boils down to is that most of my users don't "like" or
"dislike" computers.  They just want the easiest way from A to B so that
they can do their work, and they don't want to have to memorize a computer
manual to do it.  Oh and the developers here, they want to do the same thing
as well.  They don't want any part of *nix.  And if you aren't in love with
computers and you are a developer, I can't say I blame them.  So much to
learn, when most people only want to do basic things.

Here's a good of how "easy" something has to be for my average end users:
PDF Creation -  I know I can download ghostscript, and a ps printer driver,
and print my word doc to  a postscript file and then convert it into a PDF.
I may only do this 2 times a month, so it's not a big deal to me.  But that
would be way to much for some users; they'd want to buy a copy acrobat, and
pay me to load it, just to do exactly the same thing in only 1 step instead
of 2.  And they'd be perfectly willing to pay 200.00 bucks for it.(now I
know I can do it easier with redmon and ghostscript, so don't bother to
reply unless there is an even better way; in that case feel free :-) That's
how easy it has to be.

Personally, I'd rather send my 200 bucks to the people who develop
ghostscript.

Dan