[linux-audio-user] Opening up the discussion

[Erik Steffl]

Lee Revell wrote:
> On Mon, 2005-07-25 at 10:46 +0200, Mario Lang wrote:
> 
>>That is the point, I absolutely dont feel reading up on something
>>is necessarily a bad thing.  My hair stand up if I watch
>>a typical no-clue windows user more or less randomly hitting
>>buttons in the interface until "something" works.  I do feel this
>>"it has to work out of the box without me having to know anything
>>about it" attitude is childish.
> 
> I disagree violently with this line of reasoning.  Software should
> ALWAYS work the way the user expects it to unless there is a DAMN GOOD
> REASON, for example if you are offering a much more powerful interface
> than the user is used to.
> 
> For example, most apps (Firefox and IE) use "Ctrl-F" to 'Find in page'.
> Except Evolution, which forces you to use "Ctrl-S" to 'Find (Search) in
> page', because they have already bound Ctrl-F to 'Forward message'.
> 
> This is a MAJOR usability bug; "We didn't feel like doing it the normal
> way" is NEVER a "good reason" for usability purposes.

   what are you talking about? '/' is the search key, in vi as well as 
in mozilla/firefox. This ctrl-whatever nonsense is unintuitive and needs 
to be stopped. before it ruins computer usability completely.

   And btw what you're saying is not directly related to what you're 
responding to. Yes, the interface should be consistent and adhere to 
standards (or reasonable expectations) whereever possible but that does 
not mean that you will immediately be able to work with program. Take 
pretty much any program that's not trivial and you'll have to spend time 
to learn what it does, regardless of how good the interface is. E.g. 
blender has IMO pretty good interface but I still went through tutorial 
to be able to do anything remotely resembling computer graphics (even 
though I was able to control it immediately).

   there's no such thing as 'the way user expects' IN GENERAL. There are 
cases where you can predict expectations but number of cases where it 
makes no sense and number of cases where user expectations should NOT be 
followed (intuition is not always the best indicator to follow) but 
instead user should _learn_.

	erik