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Advice for Developers: Make Common Usage Easy
Ken Hendrickson writes "Thomas Sowell has some fantastic common-sense advice for software developers from the viewpoint of an ordinary user: Make it easy to do what almost everybody wants to do. I don't believe he uses Free Software; that means that Microsoft is not satisfying their customers, and Free Software can perform better than Microsoft even in the ease of use area!"
read "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum : Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How To Restore The Sanity" by Alan Cooper.
This book clearly and succintly states the difference between how programmers and engineers design (for the edge case), and how people really want things to work (make the common cases easy.) An excellent book, it could be used as a textbook but it's too short. Go read it.
Design your software from use case perspectives to get a clear idea of what the user is actually doing with the system. Seems to me programmer's don't tend to spend a lot of time getting a strong idea of how the client is actually using the product. Focus your energy on the paths that 80% of the product use follows.
I think the poster is saying that Microsoft has left an opening in this field by not satisfying their customer base. This is a field that open source can attempt to fill.
Richard Gabriel's "The Rise of Worse is Better" is an excellent explanation of this methodology.
Sadly, Gabriel's analysis holds up even today (almost 20 years later).
That's odd, because I'm using Fedora Core 2, and it's just as easy as you describe for Windows XP. I drop in a blank CD, when the empty window appears, I drag files to it, then select a single menu option to record it. One dialog for sanity, and off it goes.
BTW, your comparison is invalid. It compares the best of what you like with the worst of what you dislike.
Also don't forget that, most of the time, the way that an user thinks about the application (the user "mental model") is really different than the designer's mental model.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
The Inmates is an excellent book for a non-techie. It's also very entertaining IMO. But for a textbook there's an alternative, also by Alan Cooper, About Face 2.0. It's actually quoted a number of times in The Inmates.
It's a lot more work to read, but time well spent for any developer.
I'm not certain I agree with this. Few one-use or even just low-end point-and-shoot cameras have good lenses, shutters with wide speed ranges, or sophisticated metering. It is generally the case that, as these features are added into a camera, the manufacturers give the user the ability to configure them as needed. However, the program modes are also designed to take advantage of these features in optimizing the settings for the shot it is being asked to make. As a result, you in fact can take a much better picture with a high-end camera in program mode than you can in a low-end camera in its single mode. I've been using cameras -- focusing, setting shutter speeds & apetures, reading internal and external meters, etc. -- for over thirty years and have a pretty good idea what all those settings mean. But I find that for 90% of the pictures I take, the program modes in my Canon S1 IS do a better job, faster, than I can do, despite being able to configure any of dozens of parameters myself. I do not get anywhere near the same results out of a single-use or low-end point and shoot camera. There is value in providing those features, there is value in exposing those features to user configuration, and there is value in giving the user an "autopilot" to take computerized control over all those features when appropriate.
The whole book is good, you should read it from the start.
Well, the first person to design the steering wheel probably didn't think to patent it. . .
Especially since he was a ship builder before the founding of the British patent system. Before the adoption of the steering wheel automobiles used tillers. Philology recapitualates ontology.
Engineering evolution, like biological, is often additive rather than innovative. Sometimes this is a Good Thing.
KFG
Actually, they did patent it. See the Seldon Patent, which was a huge problem for early car makers. Similar patents encumbered early aircraft makers.
This book was written in the 80's but the concepts are timeless. It's not software specific but it is an excellent primer for designers and engineers of all types.
The Design of Everyday thingsI generally agree with the principle that simple things should be easy to do. When you take your keys out of your car, your headlights should go off. That is what 99.9% of the users intend. It should be harder (require a special button or something) to make them go on if the keys are removed.
Mr. Sowell, however, seems pretty reactionary about software change.
He is upset that his scrabble vendor released their game on CD. He would rather have it on floppy disks, which are more expensive to produce. And, some machines now don't have floppy disks. This complait has no merit.
He is upset, that the scrabble game he has plays music. Probably because his old game didn't. What he doesn't consider is that most users of this product probably want the music. Products should ship exactly like this. Turn on all the options that the majority of the users want. Make those in the minority use the preferences.
Software is going to change, and make more use of increased hardware capabilities. There is no stopping that. Although there is some truth here, there is a lot of pointless ranting.
Both are excellent reading for those interested in the art (science?) of good UI/usability design.
This is what Bill Gates really succeeded at: making computers easy enough for the masses to use.
I'm going to assume that you're talking about Apple BASIC here... only a fool or a Microserf would give Gates and Windows the credit for making computers usable by regular people.
homo logicus, Allan Cooper author of Inmates running the Asylum and creator of Visual Basic calls this. Software developers, coders call them what you like actually are very different to ordinary garden variety software users. Garden variety users run software to achieve goals. Cooper outlines in the book *goal directed* development that prescribes the interaction of the user to achive their goals and alligns user interaction with the software created.
This is not simply interface design ~ the sort normally tacked on the top of a product by graphic designers but a form of user interaction contract between user, user interaction and the underlying software completed before gui design, software engineering, coding etc. Think of it as a form of a user interaction interface (in the coding sense) that allows users to achive goals. Cooper pointed out this part is negotiatable with developers but not to be used as a guideline, but as a specification to be followed.
Having more power does not necessarily allow them to achieve their goals any better. In fact more complexity can actaully increase cognitive friction, a term describing the mental model you must construct to work the software to do something. Think about the cognitive friction the next time you want to create a document in MS Word ~ a product with a complex interface whose goal is essentially to create text documents.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup