Re: ANNOUNCE: GNAT Programming System 1.4.0 release

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

On 2003-11-23, Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote:
> Exactly. And how often does the programmer hammering out his program do that?
> Microsoft has user interface labs where the observe people using Word and
> their other programs, and they base improvements to the interface using
> these observations.

And if you look at the Hall of Shames out there, you will see that much
of it comes from Microsoft.

At any rate this is why we have:

   http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/
   http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/1.0/

>> No, but it has nothing to do with the discussion either. 
>
> It most certainly does. You are arguing that am interface designed by a
> UI expert will lack essential features. I am arguing that the presence
> of features is in a sense orthogonal to the interface.

No I'm arguing that he will lack the understanding of the usage of the
program. Say you are making a program for some IT department in a
company. You design it very nice and the UI designer makes the GUI very
nice and spiffy. Then the user who is going to do a change on the status
of 200 employees sits and curses because he has to click with his mouse
all day to get the job done instead of simply running a script or some
such. The example is a bit extrem, but it brings out my point and that
is that it is the user who knows where the bottlenecks and annoyances
are. If the developer IS a user too he should be able to make a much
better program.


-- 
"Saving keystrokes is the job of the text editor, not the programming
 language."