From owner-freebsd-hackers Mon Sep 17 20:30:22 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-94-248-46.mmcable.com [24.94.248.46]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 0665A37B408 for ; Mon, 17 Sep 2001 20:30:19 -0700 (PDT) Received: (qmail 82975 invoked by uid 100); 18 Sep 2001 03:30:17 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15270.49097.5043.451524@guru.mired.org> Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2001 22:30:17 -0500 To: Stijn Hoop Cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Recent changes to libdialog are weird In-Reply-To: <20010917141108.C455@pcwin002.win.tue.nl> References: <20010917135045.B455@pcwin002.win.tue.nl> <95866.1000728005@axl.seasidesoftware.co.za> <20010917141108.C455@pcwin002.win.tue.nl> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Stijn Hoop types: > I think everyone is qualified - user interface isn't about qualification, > it just needs to be non-intrusive and easily accessible for everyone. [1] Well, if it's not easily accessible to everyone, then it's clearly failed. That's the easy part. As for non-intrusive, I think nearly everyone is equally qualified, including me. I've leared the hard way that UI's that I think of as non-intrusive and obvious are a major PITA for most people, so I stopped doing UI design. Unfortunately, most other designers at my qualification level didn't stop, so most UIs suck. The exceptions are accidental, or the product of those few people who are better-qualifed than "nearly everyone". > [1] Yes this is an ideal which probably can't be achieved - but we can try to > make things better, can't we? :) Depends on how you decide what's better. If you use "feels better to me", then it's not at all clear that you're moving in the right direction. If you use a quantitive measure of some kind - the GOMS keystroke model seems to be a good fit here, but I'm not really qualified - then you can not only tell that it's better, but how much better, and how close to perfect you've gotten. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message