Re: Why GNOME Hackers Should Care about Usability

[nils <n p sun com>]

So in other words, a home user has a different mental model of
the computer system than that of a (software) engineer.

<aside>
I remember way back when, when I was working at a company that
had actually bought Xerox Star Workstations. We needed to
shut down the Star Workstations 'cause we were going to replace
the monitor or something. The engineer - who had a pc background,
who was with me, asked the user if she could save all her files
so we could turn off the computer. The user didn't understand
the question (The Xerox Star did expose the system/OS level
concept of saving files to the user). The user merely opened
and closed documents - saving was done transparently by
the system.
</aside>

Drazen Kacar wrote:

> Havoc Pennington wrote:
>
> > What's an example of a conflict between "great for engineers" and
> > "great for home users"?
>
> Error messages, for example. I would prefer whatever strerror gives, but
> "No space left on device" might not be the best choice for somebody who is
> not familiar with programming.
>
> If the application thinks that my system is misconfigured, I'd like to get
> a message which says so in the terms which sysadmin or programmer could
> understand, because I'd like to fix the system, if it really is
> misconfigured. But that kind of message would be considered extremely
> user-unfriendly if viewed by somebody who doesn't posses the technical
> knowledge.
>
> > I don't think there are very many, and the
> > ones that exist are typically superficial, not fundamental aspects of
> > the desktop.
>
> --
>  .-.   .-.    I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had
> (_  \ /  _)   about you.
>      |
>      |        dave arsdigita com
>
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