From kde-usability Thu Jul 26 09:42:07 2001 From: "Aaron J. Seigo" Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 09:42:07 +0000 To: kde-usability Subject: Re: feedback from the gnome usability study. X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-usability&m=99616536430498 hi > (An aside here. I know the idea of different options for different user > levels is not new, but I know it hasn't been done before. The closest > thing anybody's got is how Windows hides the less-frequently used options > in the pull-down menus. I _don't_ know why that is. It may be for the > reasons above. Any ideas from anyone?) perhaps because they don't work (explaining why it hasn't been done before)? as to why it doesn't work, here are some of the reasons as i understand them (disclaimer: I am not a usability guru): o people are not uniformly "expert", "literate", "novice", etc. a person may know how to deal with email just fine, but be completely lost with a PIM. to be effective, each aspect of the desktop should have its own user level setting. this is an insane amount of work to get right and introduces a new complexity: how to allow someone to easily customize the user level in each component of the desktop to suit their experience and comforts. o if people are presented with a simpler version of the complex whole, they probably will never move on to experience the rest of the feature set. people use what they are presented with and most don't explore beyond that. therefore setting an environment to display just basic simplicities probably permenantly discounts the efforts put into the functionality not presented. o many users (including the novices) often find user level settings, such as the Windows menus that hide options, to be intrusive, annoying and worse than the alternatives. o it is possible to present a feature rich environment that is not so overwhelming or obtuse that people can't or don't want to begin using it so in the end, for a lot more work put into creating effective user level settings you risk hamstringing the entire environment and don't stand to gain much in the way of usability. it does sound like a good idea at the outset however =) -- Aaron Seigo _______________________________________________ kde-usability mailing list kde-usability@master.kde.org http://master.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-usability