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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: kde4 proposal: user expertise
From:       Diego Moya <turingt () gmail ! com>
Date:       2005-10-19 12:31:42
Message-ID: 11ee04940510190531o7bff6804k () mail ! gmail ! com
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On 19/10/05, JoaoBR <joao@matik.com.br> wrote:
> so for me the user level discussion never went into the right direction and
> certain ideas (eve if still uncertain) are slapped
>
But it doesn't help bringing back those ideas for which there are
already good refutations. If you state the problems under a new light,
I'm sure none will object to discuss them.


On 19/10/05, Diego Moya <turingt@gmail.com> wrote:
> By having a FAQ, Peppe and you could both have read all those
> arguments and begin posting *new* valuable ideas to the process

... as I recognize you have done in your previous message. By having
the "quarterly debate" archived in a highly visible place, we would
have saved ourselves explaining again why user skills as a feature is
a bad idea and you could have just stated your thoughts on the FreeBSD
installation process.



> So now this guy makes a try and ask in a mailing list and some sends him to
> read the book instead starting thinking --- what then perhaps could lead to
> the idea that KDE needs to create a default user in the 0-group in order to
> make KDE usable for normal people and that this account is automatically
> pwless login so that the user real gets an impression of KDE the first time
> and is not beeing kicked out before even seeing KDE.
>
> And so we may get a first useful definition of "what kind of user you are"
> needs to be asked before login in.
>
> So, as part of the install process needs to be asked if this person has skills
> and if this is a network computer or a personal computer.
>
> That would make sense then.
>

There's no reason why "network computer" and "personal computer" would
make more sense than "beginner user" and "expert user". The problem of
the first login is one of default configurations: by doing nothing
special in the install process, the default should leave the system
functioning in a beginner-friendly way - i.e. KDE up and running in a
non-root account, without any weird configuration options thrown on
user's face.

This is a different subject of that stated by Peppe, which was the
old-and-wrong idea of classifying functionality under labels related
to some "expertise level". Your question is more about the need of
taking into account different user backgrounds and tweaking the design
to support all of them, something which is at the core of
user-centered design and to which I wholeheartedly agree.

But the design solution to this problem is NOT making just everything
*configurable* without further consideration, because that assumes
that the user understands the provided configuration options. IMHO
this is the single worst design mistake deeply ingrained in the KDE
culture, and is based in not understanding the design principles about
user knowledge. When allowing for user configuration, *extra care*
should be taken in which are the provided options.

The correct design solution is to make a proper "information
architecture" of the options available. In your example, the user
shouldn't be forced to *choose* between "network" and "personal
computer": they should be presented with *both* categories, with all
network-related features grouped under this label and selectable
one-by-one, and the same for "personal" (you mean office-like?)
features. (You could try the Mandriva installation process, they got
it quite right).

This way a really expert user can fine-tune the system to his needs,
while a novice user can go with whatever default options are provided
by the designers - or even dare to change some of those features that
he happens to understand. So the correct question to ask was not "what
kind of user you are" but "what kind of knowledge do you have about
your needs, and about the solutions to those needs included in the
system". With this design there's no need to included some hardcoded
pre-definitions of the kinds of possible users; these definitions
would always be incomplete.
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