Re: A Customer's Request For Open Source Software

[Preben Randhol <randhol+abuse@pvv.org>]

Stephane Richard wrote:
> And to that, I have to agree.   A good user interface (in today's business
> world) is just as important than good functionality.  Let's face it,
> business users today just dont want to have to do Shift-Ctrl-Alt-F4 to get
> something to print.  they wanna click the file menu, then print. Or they
> want to push that little button with the Printer drawn on it.  It's been my
> professional experiences.  Some hard core users like to have that complicate
> key combo.

Well. Consider this. You have a nice shiny GUI and you have 200 new
student that should be registered in a database. You have gotten a file
of names and ids etc... So what do you do? Yes you print the file and
sit and click-i-click for a couple of days to get them all in. Wereas if
you had a non GUI interface you could easily script it to take 5 min.
What I'm saying is that a GUI is everything and it is certainly not the
best interface always.

As to the printing; you need both! You need both a shortcut and a
icon/menu. Because using the keyboard is much faster than reaching for
the mouse all the time. I mean consider making a program for editing
text without Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X, Ctrl-V or equivalent shortcuts and you get
my meaning.

> To me it's a question of balancing the two.  You can't give 600 features on
> a screen because the screen gets cluttered beyond usability.  If you take
> these 600 and split them into Tabs (which looks quite nice) then other users
> will complain there's just too many steps to getting at the end.  so do you
> cut 600 features down to 400?  Other users will complain that it lacks
> features then. :-)...It's hard to balance the functional / usability ratio
> but I think it can still be done....First of my example is exagerated, 600
> features is a lot for a screen of any design. At that point you can usually
> put part of that into somekind of preferences that can be setup during the
> installation for example so they still have it, but dont havfe to bother
> with it unless then want to change it permanently.

A really good GUI interface (I have seen some of these lately) should
have these choices:

      I'm a computer illiterate
      I'm a normal user
      I'm an expert user.

If you choose the first you get simple menus and a limit set of options
that are most useful. As you choose a higher level more options are
presented.

-- 
�I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet.
 So who am I to judge.�
                 - The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radioplay)