Re: seahorse improvements

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sun, Jul 20, 2003 at 10:18:29PM -0500, Jacob Perkins wrote:
> I'm not sure what can be done about this. Perhaps use more verbose
> explanations and simpler terms.

Verbose just makes it worse... nobody will read it.

If you haven't, suggest reading up on some interface design books,
such as "User Interface Design For Programmers," "Designing From Both
Sides of the Screen" - these will give you some ideas.

> But, users that don't really understand
> the concepts probably shouldn't be using the software anyway.

The chance of people understanding GPG are zero - I don't understand
it, and I've read the long PGP manual twice, used GPG from time to
time, and am a computer programmer. Outside of other programmers, I
can't think of anyone I know that could be taught to understand GPG
without hours of one-on-one tutorial. Seriously.

You might start from the top down, with user goals, I am guessing some
might be:

 - send a message that cannot be intercepted en route

 - verify the origin of a message

 - encrypt a file

Ignoring entirely the implementation via GPG, what would a usable UI
for that look like?

Then figure out how to use GPG to implement the UI, rather than vice
versa.

I can't remember if I brought up earlier the research papers on PGP UI
that are out there, or at least one is:
http://lists.gnupg.org/pipermail/gnupg-devel/1999-August/009639.html

Havoc