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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: Question about your KPresenter's review
From:       Toshitaka Fujioka <toshitaka () kde ! gr ! jp>
Date:       2002-02-12 14:08:47
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On Sunday 10 February 2002 04:34, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
[snip]
> On today's machines, the traditional arguments for tight-packed binary
> formats are specious.  Disks are cheap; processor clocks for parsing
> and decoding are cheap.  It makes much more sense to optimize for
> minimizing *human* use of time -- which means transparent data, the
> counterpart of open source code.

I don't think that every user has high-capacity disk and high-performance
processor. My machine is Celeron 333MHz/HD:20GB/MEM:192MB. ;)

> 2.  Failure to follow basic principles of good UI design
>
> And, at least with Kpresenter, you have not gotten the surface gloss
> right either.  When I open Kpresenter on a document, the main screen
> shows me:
>
> 1. Ten pulldown menus
> 2. Fifty-nine icons
> 3. Six different toolbars, five horizontal and one vertical.
>
> I do not have to look any further than that to know that the user
> interface is going to be a mess, and was designed by a geek with no
> feel for ergonomics.  From an end-user's point of view this is
> *impossibly* cluttered.  It's like a bad parody of Microsoft Windows,
> or rather what Windows would be like if Microsoft didn't do any
> end-user testing (that is, an even *worse* pile of crap than it is
> now).
>
> You guys need to learn the Macintosh way of progressive disclosure.
> The initial screen should only offer basic, common operations, with
> more options unfolding only when the transaction state requires them.
> (For example, none of the text-related icons except "create text box"
> should be visible at all unless the user has a text box selected.)
>
> Here's another one.  You have many pulldown entries that duplicate
> icon functions.  Why?  Sure, users may want pulldowns or they may
> want icons, but they are unlikely to want both at once.  Choose one
> as a default, not both.
>
> User-interface design is not rocket science.  It largely consists of
> getting details like these right -- and knowing *why* they're right,
> because you have to be respectful of the end-user's time and limited
> attention span.  Cathy is not a geek; she has more important things to
> do than pick her way though that ugly jumble.
>
> It's not like KDE people *cannot* get UIs right.  Kmail's, for
> example, is pretty good.  The rest of you desperately need to read a
> few good books on UI design, like Jef Raskin's "The Humane Interface"
> or Bruce Tognazzini's "TOG on Interfaces", and think about what you
> read.  And go look at a Macintosh for a while.  We need to be *better*
> than that.

I'm not a geek. ;p But you're right. I didn't do the study of UI design.

> 3.  Documentation, documentation, documentation.
>
> But the best thing you can do is just stop coding.  Right now.  Stop!
>
> Now go fix your documentation until it is (a) feature-complete, and (b) has
> been tested on end-users.
>
> Now get yourself a nice fascist release manager who will *not* allow a new
> version of any KDE component to be released unless the documentation is
> fully up to date.
>
> About 70% of KPresenter is unusable to Cathy because it's not documented.
> The remaining 30% is much harder to use than it ought to be because it's
> not documented.
>
> I hear people tell me that the documentation is behind because KPresenter
> us evolving too fast.  What this tells me is that the developers are
> masturbating -- coding strictly to please themselves, not documenting, and
> not thinking or not caring that the lack of documentation makes KDE
> frustrating and impossible for the end-users for which it is supposed to
> be targeted.

masturbating ?  Hahaha, nice joke. ;) But I can't stop coding. Because,
KPresenter(CVS HEAD) has a lot of bugs. I must fix these bugs.
(If somebody does not fix a bug, a bug is not fixed. And if somebody does not
implement the feature, the feature is not usable. If nobody does it, I do it.)

Of course I'll write a document. But now I don't have a time. 

Thank you for a valuable opinion. I make effort in order to make the
best presentation software.

Thank you.
-- 
Toshitaka Fujioka
http://www.kde.org                The K Desktop Environment Project
                                                    fujioka@kde.org
http://www.kde.gr.jp               Japan KDE User's Group
                                                    toshitaka@kde.gr.jp

-- A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.  Lao-zi --  


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