10 Aug
2011
10 Aug
'11
9:57 p.m.
2011/8/8 Cedric Roux <sed(a)free.fr>fr>:
----- Original Message -----
You can do 2/ but still support a new user
getting there,
without too much hassle.
are you sure?
No, I'm just pretending my arbitrary, random believe would be valid
truth - imitating Religion ;)
did you write some program?
I've been
writing (web-)scripts, forms, libraries, tools, but possibly
nothing one would call an
application - nothing with much user-interaction that would require a
lot of GUI, so far.
Thinking about my above statement again, maybe I have to qualify:
Often implementing the main functionality seemed to happen faster than
the work on details and final adjustments.
Anyway: As I see it, I've always been a ' visual guy ' , interested
in GUI stuff to a degree, that I started to even
write my custom toolkit.
You say it's easy to make vi "user friendly",
can you elaborate?
I try:
What about starting with a simple message:
"Welcome to vi, a text-editor , Press ESC : q to quit, Press ESC :
h for help. "
Do you notice, how much this changes the user experience ?? Almost
effortlessly !
- the user feels welcome and recognized
- s/he gets a hint, what the app is about (Ah, it's a text editor)
- s/he gets a hint how to continue and where to get more help
- s/he has enough information to do a fist command and see the app
respond - what a success !
- s/he doesn't have to quit the text editor with a hardware-reset ;)
...and I try to think on the
best approach is:
1 - make the program useful
2 - write it in such a way that it's easy to change
things if the design is bad/unusable/not well thought.
And, based on their popularity, I miserably fail
in 1 and when I need to change things in there I
very often fail at 2 (but that's something no one
but me can fix).
Likely that's if we hard-code the GUI, which is very common
but a bad practice IYAM - although hard to change and impossible occasionally.
I think it's ok to *first* write the tool for yourself
(while you embody a power user )
But sooner or later, if you've made a cool, new, custom GUI,
you have to think about how to make other users
feel comfortable as well.
(At least if you'd like your tool to be used more widely.)
I am sincerely curious, to learn and improve my
skills.
Thank you for being interested.
--
E.R.