Incredibly insightful article on ease of use vs. power

Interesting: Eric Raymond is listed in the Unix Haters acknowledgements.

    One way to look at GUIs is to look at electronics. Think of all the
electrical components there are today, from blenders to complex circuitry.
All of these things are useful and powerful things, but in order for the
end-user to use them they must be put into something and presented to the
end-user as something that will help them perform certain tasks. For
example, if we had a motor and the other pieces we could build our own
blender, but who wants to buy a kit to build a blender, when they can spare
themselves the hassle and go buy a fully assembled model?
    A brief look at electronics shows that in the beginning, products
were built quite simply, yet built so that people had easy access to the
insides. As manufacturing techniques and technology progressed those same
products had more and more features, and became more complicated over time.
But another noticeable difference was that the insides of the component
weren't as easy to get to as they used to. 
    This comes down to a Linux/Windows theory of mine, to take with a
grain of salt. Coming from the perspective I tried to explain above, Windows
comes across as a products with all of the bells and whistles, but not much
is known about how it works(for the most part). Linux, on the other hand,
you can tear apart to pieces if you wanted to and know everything that is
going on. However, there is considerable work to be done to make such a raw
system into a computer that someone with no computer experience can sit down
and easily use. I look forward to seeing what projects such as Eazel and the
further advancements of the KDE and Gnome bring into the mix.     Windows has
that 'veneer' over its inner workings; you know what is happening only from
what it's telling you it's doing, but you can't really pry the lid open to
see what exactly that is. This would be okay if it didn't make itself so
incompatible with other operating systems. I would say that Microsoft's
troubles have more to do with its business practices than its user
interface.

Lucas Vogel

-----Original Message-----
From: Shawn T. Rutledge [mailto:rutledge@cx47646-a.phnx1.az.home.com]
Sent: Sunday, September 10, 2000 3:14 PM
To: plug-discuss@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us
Subject: Incredibly insightful article on ease of use vs. power


We have the occasional flamewars over this.... but this guy really
gets the big picture. Helped to crystallize some ideas which I've
understood subconsciously but couldn't have said so well.

http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/06-01/dilger.html

Also brings up the point that choosing power rather than ease of use
(as most linux users do) is primarily a male attitude.

Now go contrast it with this...

http://catalog.com/hopkins/unix-haters/preface.html

which is all about how it doesn't make sense to go out of our way to
do things in backwards and difficult ways, when we know of better ways.

Good UI design straddles a line between two extremes -
making an artificial veneer over the truth of how the software actually
works, so that you can't understand it, but don't need to (until it
breaks, or you want to do something that falls outside the provided box);
and on the other hand, slavish dedication to inappropriate metaphors (like
the metaphor that everything is a file, and files must always be arranged
hierarchically). In the latter case the UI is very truthful and powerful,
but artificially difficult because the metaphor doesn't match the task.

Another tradeoff is between accurately modeling the real world in software,
and making "magic" - modeling as we wish the world appeared. The use of
computers gives us that choice; if all the problems in the real world
were accurately duplicated in the virtual world, then there would be no
point. Judicious improvement is the whole point. But in either case
the UI should exactly match the chosen model; if the model is wrong, then
change that, don't veneer over it.

-- 
  _______                   Shawn T. Rutledge / KB7PWD  ecloud@bigfoot.com
 (_  | |_)          http://www.bigfoot.com/~ecloud  kb7pwd@kb7pwd.ampr.org
 __) | | \________________________________________________________________
Get money for spare CPU cycles at http://www.ProcessTree.com/?sponsor=5903

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