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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: What is obvious?; Context sensitive sidebars.
From:       "D. Moya" <turingt () gmail ! com>
Date:       2005-03-14 20:01:05
Message-ID: 11ee04940503141201742d83a () mail ! gmail ! com
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Hi, I'm new to the list. I love how KDE developers in general are
embracing a usability culture, and I'd like to be involved in design
of the "interaction architecture" for the 4.0 release.

Though I feel that in the Open Source world the academic research on
usability is not known enough, and several myths on users forged on
the "developers" front are repeated once and again. I hope that we
developers learn to hear more from the HCI experts and finally embrace
the known design techniques and lore from the cognitive scientific
research.


On Sat, 12 Mar 2005 02:35:56 +0100, Sven Burmeister
<sven.burmeister@gmx.net> wrote:
> From my experience there are three kind of users, which have all to be
> considered. 
>First, users that are reluctant to learn/understand/remember [...]
> Second, beginners that want to learn/understand/remember. [...]
> Third, advanced users.

I'm afraid you've fallen into the trap of the "user levels" meme.
There are several reasons why this compartment of interfaces into
levels of expertise is a bad idea. Right from my mind now I can recall
these:
* A user may be beginner for some tasks, and expert for others.
* It is difficult to say whether a user is novice or expert, even for oneself.
* Users learn. When a user has used an application for a while, is at
ease with it and want access to the advanced functions, dropping her
into a changed interface (the one for the next expertise level) would
be a terrible thing to do.
* How do you categorize expert users on rarely/seldom used
applications? You can't expect them to remember the details of an app
used several months ago, but the user want to accomplish expert tasks,
not just the basics. (These are called "transient" applications, and
there are specific design tips to create them).


Here is an article where a much better model for user learning and
"intuitive" interfaces is explained:

http://www.webpronews.com/webdevelopment/sitedesign/wpn-26-20050117WhatMakesaDesignSeemIntuitive.html

It includes the concept of the "Knowledge Gap" to complete a given
task in an interface. Where the Gap is wide, the user must be trained
before she can complete the task. An intuitive interface would be one
in which the training is done in small, discoverable steps.

Note that any user might benefit for a discoverable interface for
incremental learning, not just office types. There ARE some scenarios
where it's better having a training program to form expert users and
make them proficient with a difficult but high-performance interface.
But this will only happen in corporate environments, where paying for
such a program would pay off, and users are highly motivated (to keep
their jobs).

A top-level heuristic (rule of thumb) to design user interfaces is
"treat your user as very clever but very busy". So a good interface
should be designed putting all users into your "reluctant to
learn/understand/remember" category, not requiring that users "want"
to learn your application before they're able to use it.

Also note that an expert user with a desire to learn (and not just
*use* the app) is most probably a programmer, so she would most
benefit of having an API not a GUI. That's another reason why a GUI
should treat all users as busy and not get in the way of getting tasks
done.


Back to the KDE desktop, a way to achieve the "incremental learning"
would be presenting at first use a walk-through tutorial on the very
basic interaction techniques (right and double clicking, on-mouse-over
tooltips, using menus, keyboard accelerators, etc.) and then requiring
in the HIG that all applications make their functionality discoverable
through these standard techniques. For a user knowing these
techniques, any application that makes its features easily findable
would be intuitive.

Several distros are taking this same approach and provide a "Welcome"
screen that shows some tasks to do when you first use the computer,
but they usually don't include this basic training - they show the
available applications, but don't teach a common ground that all users
should know.

Microsoft got it right since Windows 98, and I believe that's one of
the reasons it's widely considered as easy to use, even though it
isn't.

Diego.-
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