From kde-usability Fri Jan 23 15:53:20 2004 From: "Aaron J. Seigo" Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2004 15:53:20 +0000 To: kde-usability Subject: Re: OT: Intermediate users (was: Re: Taskbar: Message-Id: <200401230853.20932.aseigo () kde ! org> X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-usability&m=107487347129510 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On January 23, 2004 02:59, Vedran Ljuboviĉ wrote: > the power user. It's all those people in between, and it turns out that > there's a lot of them. People that know just about as much on computers so > that they don't want to throw all that knowledge away - and too little to > derive some general knowledge on computers and OSes. > > Any interesting ideas on how to cater to that specific group of users? as Michael said, we could simply clone what they already know. really, that's the only way to make them "comfortable". but "comfort" is not the best place for them or KDE, really, since they aren't comfortable with it because it's a good idea: they are comfortable with it because they've invested time into learning it, something most people don't want to do again. where i'm working for 3 days of each week, we're slowly acclimatizing our rather advanced set of users[1] to Linux. they are very hesitant to change anything, and that includes their Windows application software (forget about changing the OS). basically, they dislike computers because they are usually in their way, but they can't work without them. they've risen to a certain level of competency and things more or less work, so they don't want anything to change. however, we've been doing a bit of a social experiment: whenever there's a problem with the software, we fix it on a Linux/KDE system if at all possible. what was at first curiosity but extreme distrust is turning into interest and acceptance. by the end of the year, i wouldn't be surprised to see a change to Linux/KDE be something they'd _welcome_. what i'm saying is that it's a social/psychological/cultural problem, and not one that we can fix or should address via the technology. we don't need to make it harder to transition to KDE than necessary, but shortchanging KDE won't really gain anything worthwhile in the long run. [1] they are energy traders and as such use some pretty complex vertical software as well as really wring all the tricks out of Excel and Access. most of them have 3 monitors, and some have more than one computer they deal with. - -- Aaron J. Seigo GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43 while (!horse()); cart(); -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.2-rc1-SuSE (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFAEUNw1rcusafx20MRAolwAJ9DnI439tEXtfPHbpkJLnYGRujk5wCbB7NE JaZ3h5v3U5CX4B+Bs2q0gKY= =D9Q3 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ kde-usability mailing list kde-usability@kde.org https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-usability