Ask Jakob Nielsen Almost Anything 292
Let's put it this way: when it comes to software, hardware, and Web usability issues, Jakob Nielsen be da man! There's been lots of talk about Linux usability since before kernel 1.0, and there has been so much discussion about Web site usability vs. technological cuteness, not only here on Slashdot but everywhere such things are discussed, that heads spin every time the subject comes up. So let's bypass all the people who have usability opinions just because they have opinions, and go straight to The World's Leading Expert. Read his Web site first to keep from asking questions he's answered over and over, then start typing (or moderating). Answers are scheduled to appear Friday.
Fonts on the web (Score:4)
Linux and the Desktop (Score:5)
/. usability rating? (Score:5)
BEFORE YOU FLAME (Score:2)
I'm not saying that all linux desktops will be on this standard, I'm simply talking about those who are. I'm sure you'll always be able to do what you like with your own desktop, but we need to start getting some standards for the standard distributions.
So frames still suck? (Score:1)
Experiment vs experience? (Score:5)
A question (Score:4)
How practical/useful would it be if computer interfaces, in general, went in this sort of direction, allowing the user to enforce the format they want, rather than relying on the programmer or web-page designer to produce something usable?
hmm.. (Score:1)
is not linux usability directly proportional to how intelligent you are versus how long you have been using winblows?
if you have been using linux for a long time it doesnt really matter what version you are using or how X windows is config'd.
Amazon Affiliation? (Score:5)
Can you think of a usability feature ... (Score:4)
... that is very obvious and necessary in your opinion, but is hardly ever or has never been implemented, or is implemented poorly?
And what's the biggest sin you see in most applications?
Short vs long pages (Score:5)
Eazel vs. Gnome and KDE (Score:2)
Browsers compensating for bad sites (Score:5)
worst you've ever seen (Score:3)
KDE, Gnome. What's wrong and what's right ? (Score:4)
Now the KDE and Gnome are usable and at least one claims to be mature. What are they doing right ? What are they doing wrong and what do the need to address in the near term ( I.e. obvious usability bugs ) and the long term ( pushing the envelope and making things better ).
How much stuff is needed at the lower levels of the system to make these projects more usable than they are now ?
What do you think is the most glaring gap among Linux applications. My favorite is a clone of "edit.com" from Windows/dos. What's yours' ?
Patent culture vs Open Source culture (Score:5)
Design from the Users eyes or the users mind ? (Score:4)
Do you think that a good user interface can be designed without an understanding of the process behind it ?
HTML v... HTML ? (Score:4)
We all would like to make standards-compliant websites, but the truth is that MSIE v. Netscape basically killed the idea of using HTML4... anything past 3's extensions and you start getting wierd rendering - is there a solution?
Revolutionary UNIX GUIs (Score:5)
"They need to rethink the entire approach... They're saying let's implement a Mac-like interface so that we can have a nicer Unix. That's a nice thing, I guess, but it's not really revolutionary."
Can you describe some specific ideas and UI elements you would consider if you were designing the "revolutionary" Linux GUI?
Books (Score:1)
A few ideas... (Score:1)
Here's what I've come up with so far:
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Re:Linux and the Desktop (Score:2)
So your sysadmin can create a standard build for your department, section, group or your personal sorry a... that fits your exact needs.
Asking about what should we standartize globally is either:
Standards Compliance (Score:5)
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Conservatism and straight-jacketing (Score:4)
Practice what you preach with www. ? (Score:1)
The good, the bad, and the opinionated (Score:1)
Well, that rules out a substantial portion of the people here, me included. Will there be a Jon Katz interview at some point, dedicated to people to have opinions just because they have opinions. (It is a matter of opinion whether I am referring to Jon or his detractors.)
And for people who didn't catch the implied tag at the beginning:
</irony>
Palm and Handhelds (Score:5)
What do you think of Palm's new color devices? Do you think that color is the way to go on a portable device, or do you believe that greyscale displays provide all of the funcitonality needed for a PDA.
On a related note, how do you see Palm/Handheld devices evolving in the next few years?
http://fortes.com/ [fortes.com]MacOS X vs. Gnome... (Score:5)
I'm currently a user of both an older version of the MacOS and Linux, where Linux is running (on both boxes I have) a combination of Sawmill and Gnome. I've been reading a lot about Aqua, both how much more advanced the rendering library is than anything we have on Linux, and about what a decline in usability it is compared to the MacOS of old. For one critique, check the recent article on arstechnica.com; it goes into more detail than I can.
I haven't used Aqua myself yet, but I'm beginning to think that in some ways its "dock" is inferior from a human interface point of view to the panel in Gnome, depending on how it's configured. If I've set up the pager to hold minimized applications, they're not in danger of being mistaken for application launchers or links to documents or directories. Applets are dissimilar to either; although the default tiles, IMHO, need to be a little better, all of the above seem to be differentiated much better than in MacOS.
I'm not thinking in terms of a "we must have a standard and make everyone use it" schtick that a lot of people get on when they talk about improving Linux's user interfaces; it doesn't seem to have helped Windows and MacOS all that much, IMHO. But how would you change the defaults in gnome (or KDE) to improve usability? Might their relative customability be useful in usability experiments?
I guess a good question would be, even though I like it a lot, is the panel trying to do too much?
Non-GUI apps and usability (Score:5)
Re:[OT]/. strikes again (Score:2)
But... the people hitting these site (supposedly) want the information there, which is why a page/site is up in the first place. the DDoS atackers generally don't read for content, I'm thinking 8^D
It is a major PITA, though...
Microsoft's Mars Project (Score:5)
Filipe Fortes http://fortes.com [fortes.com]
Would you volunteer... (Score:5)
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Education (Score:5)
Re:/. strikes again (Score:1)
Yes, I agree that from an objective standpoint the slashdot-effect is much like a DoS attack, but you know the difference. At least in this case people are trying to obtain information.
I guess the question should be who's obligation is it to serve information on the internet? Is it slashdot's obligation to tell the admins that they will be posting a link? Or is it the admin's job to make sure the site is up and running and can serve an amount of traffic that the slashdot effect can induce?
I feel that I am not personally qualified to answer this question, but I am sure it is a question that deserves some attention by all parties involved.
Re:/. usability rating? (Score:1)
I had a hell of a time looking for a 'post reply to root' link. Unlike the 'Reply to This' feature, which is a link, it's a button bundled with UI elements dedicated to screening results-- my eye ignored the Reply button because I'd glance at the stuff to the left of it first.
Another issue: on Netscape 4.7 for NT, hilighting text only makes it change color from black to dark blue, which is hard to see. This is mostly an issue with the Netscape search feature that hilights text that it's Ctrl-F found.
Also, is there a way to get a list of all the past quotes? Sometimes I forget to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page (since all the new stuff is at the top!) and would like to peruse these little bon mots...
Aqua (Score:5)
(You 'da man!)
Re:Patent culture vs Open Source culture (Score:1)
You can't tell if a patent is obvious from the title, you need to read the claims. The claims are the only legally binding definition of what is covered by a patent.
In the case of this particular patent, the claims appear to relate to a set of (say) radio-button options with two phases of selection. After action one (e.g., waving your mouse over a button), all the items in the particular exclusive set of radio buttons are modified in appearence to give the user feedback as to the exclusivity of the radio button operation. A second action (e.g., click) is necessary to cause the operation of the buttons.
Not saying it's obvious, not saying it's not. Just saying you're reading too much into the title.
Alternately... (Score:2)
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Web pages that suck (Score:1)
The web is no excuse for bad design (Score:5)
It seems that all the good practices we've learned in the last ten years of GUI design are simply thrown out the window, just because an app is on the web.
Zero keyboard navigability, garish visuals, bad fonts, and unintelligible buttons seem to be the norm instead of the exception nowadays. If a company released the same interface on the desktop, they'd be laughed out of existence.
What can be done to encourage web developers to follow solid, trusted, UI design guidelines?
your numerous patents (Score:1)
Re:OT: Attention Karma abusers. Your time has come (Score:1)
What we need is a higher limit on total scores so the difference between 1 and 2 is less significant, instead of a 20% quality boost.
Of course, checking the "No Score +1 Bonus" box by default would probably solve the problem, most times I don't even bother with it, although this time I'm ingoring it on purpose.
When you are a generally good person (poster) you can ignore (or at least not worry about) Karma, just like in real life.
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Re:/. usability rating? (Score:1)
Why won't people "read" web pages? (Score:4)
You say that people don't "read" web pages but instead "scan" them through quickly.
Do you think that the reason why people don't read web pages is because of some psychological phenomena, or due to the fact that it used to cost a lot to hang around on-line and read stuff, or why exactly is that? Why should web pages be different from books? Or is the reason overtly small fonts used in almost every other page to cram as much information as possible into each page?
As a side note, an idea: I think all browsers should be able to display the hierarchical structure of the web page, and provide effective means to search data from that hierarchy. I find "search" boxes which always say "no hits" most annoying.
Re:Patent culture vs Open Source culture (Score:1)
Usability and aesthetics (Score:5)
Re:/. usability rating? (Score:1)
Re:Revolutionary UNIX GUIs (Score:2)
user unfriendly? (Score:3)
(I don't mean for these questions to sound argumentative, I'm just reiterating things I've heard many times from various people on the web)
Methods for usability testing (Score:2)
Re:Amazon Affiliation? (Score:2)
"In general, the Web is different from many earlier changes in the business environment in allowing for patents for many of the new business strategies because they are supported by technology. I strongly recommend that companies start treating the Web as their primary strategic business driver such that they can take part in this patent bonanza. The smallest hesitation will allow your competitors to collect the patents on everything you need to survive. Futurism is no longer a luxury: it's a necessary defensive measure to get your patents in place.
Mr. Neilson, I would like to ask- have you read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and if so do you believe that the open source software movement can make a commercial or social change in the "marketplace of ideas", and finally, if so, how can you reconcile the open-source coder's desire to collaboratively trade ideas and code against the business strategy of definsively patenting all potentially useful intellectual property?
What's Next? (Score:5)
What is the next "big thing" in interfaces?
Surely "windowing" can't be the end-all-be-all of interfaces. Is there some paradigm shift around the corner which we can't conceive of right now? Perhaps the same "leap" which occurred going from command line/text to windows.
kuro5hin.org [kuro5hin.org]
Re:Usability and management (Score:2)
Dynamic data, the web and beyond... (Score:2)
Data is still relatively static and barely cross-referenced and very very rarely cross-referenced in any dynamic manner. When the data changes the user rarely knows until they requery. This however is beginning to change as bandwith and processing power open up new possiblities.
What do you see as the major differences and problems in designing for active data as opposed to passive data ? And do you forsee a standard (XML? + ?) for passing information between sources, and more importantly allowing the sources to be informed of changes.
Opinions on the "Internet Desktop" (Score:4)
"Fundamentally, it is pretty silly to have a special browser for certain information objects simply because they happen to come from a specific storage location. There is no reason to treat information differently because it comes from the Internet instead of coming from your harddisk."
I've always been curious about this mindset. Generally, information on the internet is in the form of HTML or text files, and any other files need to be copied to a local location before being usable (Causing a long wait time, breaking any illusions of transparency). Internet files are also generally organized by someone who has an eye towards both navigation and graphical prettiness. The majority of the information is contained in the connections between various files, allowing for quick movements to different spots (in well-designed sites, of course)
Local files, on the other hand, are created using many different types of programs, and require a seperate application to view more often than web information does. Local information is being created by a single user for specialized use, with little view towards the overall structure of the filesystem. Information is usually contained within single files, with little relation to other files other than basic categories in directories.
Why, then, is there this idea that the same tool should be used for both types of information? I typically use a web browser for viewing HTML files: it lets me click the links that someone else has set up to ease my movement, applies the format the web author created, and gives me an interface for the time-consuming file download. Why should this be integrated with the program I use to navigate a directory tree of files that do not have links, lack an html format, and do not need to be downloaded from an incredibly slow resource to be used? And, what kind of justification is there for NOT splitting up access of a resource with millisecond responses from one with responses that can range all the way to hours?
Usability, Innovation, The failure of HTML (Score:5)
Secondly, how do you feel regarding the failures of HTML as an interface delivery mechanism? The notion that the web has gone from pure information (93 and before) to presenting specific chunks of information in a taped-together layout that is built outside of the best use functionality of HTML. Do you agree that trying to put together an application interface with Microsoft Word is a ridiculous idea, so why are we trying to put together functional GUIs with a markup specific to text formatting?
Can you envision another non document-centric mechanism for bringing the web interface back in line with application UIs?
Re:Practice what you preach with www. ? (Score:2)
It's perfectly acceptable for example.com & www.example.com to point to two totally different websites, for example here [perl.com] & here [perl.com]. It's also very common for there to be no hostname associated with a domainname, simply because there is no 'obvious' host to associate with the domain. While the http protocol is very pervasive, there may well be a better candidate in the default telnet server or some other protocol.
Don't be lazy, a URL contains a protocol, a full hostname and a file reference. Enter all of them at all times.
UI Hall of Shame (Score:4)
Re:hyperlinks (Score:2)
Documentation (Score:2)
~luge
Older, better user interfaces like Grail and NLS (Score:3)
I think that the original Macintosh team deserves a lot of credit for what they did, but they had to make a lot of compromises that probably don't make sense anymore
In this Alan Kay video tape [uvc.com], he demonstrates a great gestural user interface called Grail. In this environment, users interacted with the system by using a tablet. For example the user could delete objects by scratching them out, instead of selecting them and activating a menu.
The other system that really impressed me was Doug Engelbart's [bootstrap.org] NLS and AUGMENT systems. His system allowed the user to enter commands using a chord keyboard while operating the mouse. This seems somewhat harder to learn but much more efficient than the Mac and Mac clone system that are in common use today.
The "Digital Divide" (Score:2)
Anyway, my question. Since the study showed -- and you seem to concur -- that older people and less-educated people are the least likely to be using the internet, these groups could be considered the biggest "growth markets" for e-commerce companies. However, it seems that the techniques necessary to appeal to these two groups would be significantly different. How do you see internet companies trying to appeal to these "new" demographics (if at all) to increase their market share in the next few years?
Filling in forms (Score:2)
My question: do you see any emerging conventions for form fill-in? (Highlighting erroneous fields, allowing corrections, etc.)
Disturbing anecdotes (Score:5)
Your work is chock full of terrifying statistics about what happens when we create slow, hard-to-navigate sites. When I (an information architect) try to convince my project teams to heed those statistics, though, nobody seems to listen. People continue to clamor for images, frames, JavaScript, etc.
If Ronald Reagan's speeches proved one thing to us, it's this: a well-chosen anecdote can drown out innumerable (and true) statistics. I was wondering whether you might have any good terrifying anecdotes that might scare people who are about to make an unusable web site into doing the right thing.
How can Open Source projects incorporate usability (Score:3)
thanks.
Re:Linux and the Desktop (Score:2)
Fine. Then replace "Linux" with "Linux distributions" in his question.
Sans-serif fonts are better for now - reference (Score:2)
see
Bruce Tognazzini's explanation [asktog.com] (Tog being an original Macintosh UI guy among other things - he's up there with Jakob in the UI / Usability field).
If you're really interested and want academic literature, start at the Human Computer Interaction Bibliography at www.hcibib.org [hcibib.org], search for serif for a couple references.
Re:MacOS X and Aqua interface (Score:3)
Jakob mentions that sometimes things are implemented the wrong way. (Web navigation should be on the right near the scroll bar to minimize cursor movement) but because it has been done that way for so long, switching to the proper way decreases usability. (Right side web navigation is a little awkward because we've all been trained to look to the left.) Do you think that some of the radical changes in Aqua will cause a usability decline even if the change is to do something in the "scientifically" correct way?
Also, with browsers refusing to implement standards properly do you endorse the use of tables to create page layout even though the specs say we should use CSS-P? I want to create pages to spec, but because of lousy browsers I'm forced to use tables if I want the output to be predictable across many browsers. (I don't want to have to write multiple versions and use browser detection.)
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New generations of web users (Score:2)
Re:Opinions on the "Internet Desktop" (Score:2)
"More often" isn't necessarily sufficient justification. The desktop environment he discusses would presumably run whatever code was appropriate for the data, regardless of whether it came from the Web or not.
Is that because the location information is best structured that way, or because people aren't used to structuring it as hypertext (or hyperwhatever, as a node could well not be text...), or because the tools for structuring it in that fashion are inconvenient or unfamiliar?
It may well be that structuring at least some of the stuff on your (electronic) desktop as hypertext might make it easier to keep track of.
See, for example, something Nielsen says in "The Internet Desktop":
The latency issue is perhaps a more severe problem, although perhaps some form of caching is the right way to handle that.
Re:Linux and the Desktop (Score:2)
Unfortunately, at this present time, your sysadmin has never heard of "usability". What opinions he may have are probably completely fallacious. With nearly 100% probability, that sysadmin will create a system that (s)he thinks is comfortable (for the sysadmin!), alienating the users who are neither computer experts nor reading the mind of the sysadmin.
And there will be global standards. They are called "GNOME", "KDE", "Redhat", "SuSE", and a number of other things. Your 'normal' users will not significantly change the default parameters on the GNOME or KDE installation the distro ships with. (How many Windows desktops still have the sickenly-blue/cyan background on them? And that's an _easy_ setting to change now-a-days, both browsers will let you change it with a simple context menu!)
Your sysadmin will always be able to create a customized system, but the standards created by KDE and GNOME should be usable standards. You want to destroy that usability, that's your choice, but there should be a focus on usability in those who are setting the de facto standards.
Thinking that we should not standardize globally is... a lost cause. It will happen, de facto, and those who are doing it should consider these issues carefully, rather then ignoring them.
Re:doesn't seem very useful (Score:2)
You specify how you want to view web-space, and all websites would conform to the format you specified.
I think a LOT of users would be willing to spend a few seconds, customising their view, in preference to spending hours searching for where some wannabe web author hid the button bar. And to be able to eliminate frames or tables, for some machines, that would be digital heaven.
Re:What a lame question (Score:2)
web applications (Score:2)
With W3C standards like DOM Level 2 and SVG coming down the pipes, developers will have more and more power to make the browser much more intelligent than it is today. This opens up a whole new world of user-interfaces where a website may not be seen as a hierarchy of "pages" but a single application with it's own functionality.
When more browsers support these standards, do you advocate more developers use this "dynamic" paradigm, or do you prefer that the browser just download static pages which link to other pages?
interfaces for tiny devices (Score:3)
Amazon-Like Quality Patents (Score:2)
23. Nielsen, J.: Tooltips on webpages, U.S. Patent 5,937,417 (1999)
11. Nielsen, J.: Password helper using a client-side master password which automatically presents the appropriate server-side password to a particular remote server, U.S. Patent 6,006,333 (1999) [don't Windows .PWL files do something similar?]
50. Nielsen, J.: System and method for temporally varying pointer icons, U.S. Patent 5,784,056 (1998)
A whole number of them are from 1999, which means that you're frantically inventing great new things and spend tens of thousands of $$$ just patenting the things... There are about 30 patents listed in 1999, which means 2 patents every three weeks, for an amount of at least 500$K patenting costs and patent attorney fees to get them patented...
This all seems very Amazon-like, and either I've missed something really important, or is something else going on?
Okay... I'll do the stupid things first, then you shy people follow.
Re:Opinions on the "Internet Desktop" (Score:2)
Who said anything about an "integrated web browser"? Nielsen said
which is not necessarily equivalent to providing an "integrated Web browser". He goes on to say:
(although I'm not certain that they'd all be "applets"; I'd like to see a "lines of code" or "bytes of generated code" value, with public flogging for anybody referring to anything above that value as an "applet").
A "Web browser" could (to a first order of approximation) be viewed as a combination of:
with the HTML presentation widget firing up the latter code if you click on a link.
Making it fairly easy for arbitrary presentation (and editing) widgets to insert links into their display, at least when they're displaying something text-based (which might involve recognizing strings that look like URLs, as some mail programs do, for example), and to cause a new window to be popped up, and to fetch a document, when the link is activated, might be a way of providing this functionality. In some sense you could, I guess, think of this as an "integrated Web browser", but it's not a case of swallowing up a separate Web browser program into other applications, it's a case of providing Internet access capability to those applications, just as file access capability is provided by OS libraries (at least in the case of the second bullet item).
(I have the impression that this may well be the way in which Internet Explorer is "integrated" into Windows - a bunch of library routines, or COM objects, exist that provide that functionality, and IE is one application that uses those routines/objects.)
Well, I've read Word documents, graphics, source code, MP3 files, video files, etc. from links in a browser.
And if you're saying that none of those documents have links in them, well, I could imagine somebody might put links in Word documents - or source code; I've put URLs into source code for references, and it might be nice to be able to click on them and have the reference document pop up in another window.
You're not presuming here that only HTML documents can contain links, I hope....
...which would be the "presentation applet" for HTML.
Perhaps you use your browser as something like an FTP client, but that doesn't mean that everybody does. I think it would be an extremely interesting experiment to see whether one could organize a desktop around hypertext.
Re:Fonts on the web (Score:2)
It could just be the wretched quality of Unix san serif fonts in general, though. For some reason they lag dramatically behind those on a PC, let alone the class-leading Macintosh.
D
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Are college degrees in HCI helpful? (Score:2)
Re:Are you kiddding? (Score:2)
Shift in site design, content vs presentation (Score:2)
Lately I've seen several sites which in my opinion try to give the visitor a richer experience by (re)creating a(/the) user interface for them (using a lot of CSS, DHTML, CSS-positioning, Java, etc) which shifts quite a bit of the focus from the content part to the presentational part. It looks really nice, but suffers slightly on the content side.
Do sites like these represent a step in the wrong direction regarding usability? Is it wrong by them to explore the boundaries of the medium like they do?
Re:Linux and the Desktop (Score:2)
I like unix systems for the for the control that they give, but I love my mac for the way it stays out of my way. My rule... If the computer has work to do use unix, if I have work to do use a mac.
My first few peeks at OSX scare me. (see http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/1q00/macos-x-d
NT is amazingly inelegant.
I don't know UI design, I am completely incapable of designing an environment where I can function as smoothly as I do with MacOS.
What platform should I be looking for as my next working OS? The one I use to browse the web and generally muck about?
Any chance of a desktop environment designed to make my life better?
Would you care to comment on the direction that the various UI's are going? Windows, Mac, KDE, GNOME. What is right? What is wrong?
Your webpage - why is it the way it is (Score:2)
sorry if i sound like i am cutting you down, i just want to have your expert advise on these things.
User interface query (Score:3)
Personally I would prefer touch screens and voice recognition ala star trek, but even these would seem to be similar to the windowing systems we currently use.
A alternative solution (to me at least) would be a 3D holographic display that would let you truly navigate the web or hard drive by just pointing/touching in the general area you are interested in and having the display change accordingly. But all this goes back to my original question, what interface (or combination of interfaces) would be the most intuitive in your opinion?
slashdot usability rating? - sm61144450146994 (Score:3)
Hi Jakob,
Q2. What are the areas that need attention?
I ask this because the code for the slashdot site, (slashcode) [slashcode.com] is open sourced and many (new) developers use slashdot as a guide for developing their own sites.
Re:Opinions on the "Internet Desktop" (Score:2)
So look at the URL when you need to know that. I do not necessarily want to have to think about where something is every time I look at it.
Re:Page size problem (Score:2)
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Ask a Dane? (Score:2)
Looks like a pattern to me... :-)
Color-coded links (Score:3)
The links used one color for visited links (say blue) and another for not visited (say red), as usual now. But the color was continous. If I have visited the URL, one day ago it was a bit redder than the one just visited. And so on. A link visited one month ago would be as red as one never visited.
Do you think this feature added in usability?
I find it better than the current discrete model.
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URLs without extensions (Score:2)
What do you think about Berners-Lee's recommendation to keep extensions off URL (I see you site uses
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GIF vs PNG (Score:2)
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Java Swing (Score:2)
What do you think about the dilemma "1 interface, many platforms" / "1 platform, many interfaces"?
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What (if any) web site testing method? (Score:2)
What web site testing method would you recommend for usability testing? Is there a guerilla version of that method for when I'm in a hurry?
Open Source & Usability (Score:2)
1. Do you think its likely that the open source community could develop a truely usable product, from non-tech-person point of view? As Donald Norman and Alan Cooper have said in their books, programmers tend to "design" software for like-minded people (in other words, other tech-people) even though the needs of the end-user are often very different. Also, open source projects tend to suffer from major feature-creep, which results in software too complex for real people to use. Programmers want control and complexity, users want simplicity. Even when the various Linux magazines have articles on Linux GUIs, the authors' own words show a level of disdain for non-tech-oriented people who just want to use computers to get some work done.
2. Assuming the open-source community could develop a truely usable product, do you think its worth the effort to try to improve Linux, or should we start a new OS from scratch (or at least based on a Linux/BSD kernel) built from the ground up targetted specifically at average people, not techies? Most Linux distros try to put on a pretty face during installation or on boot-up, but the tech-orientation of Linux still shows through. Users still have to drop to the command line to execute cryptic commands, edit arcane config files and manually compile apps. (I'm a programmer and even I don't want to be bothered by this stuff!)
3. If some people got together and decided to build a new OS from the ground up, targetted at real people, would you be willing to offer some guidance and suggestions to the project on a continuing basis?
Novice and Expert Users (Score:3)
Do you think there is any way, in the same interface, to accomodate the needs of both expert and novice users?
Adobe Photoshop gives the user three different interfaces for a similar task: the brightness/contrast dialog, the levels dialog, and the curves dialog. All three make global changes to the amount of detail in an image, with the curves dialog being the most powerful and the least intuitive, and the brightness/contrast being the least powerful and the most intuitive.
Microsoft Office 2000 hides menu items that it thinks you don't need, and hides toolbars until you tell the program to display them or until you start on a task that uses one of those toolbars.
Do you think either approach makes sense? Do you think that the needs of novice and expert users are so fundamentally different that it's best that the two groups use different pieces of software?
Re:MPhil? (Score:2)
The Masters degrees, though, come in three flavours. MPhil (Master of Philosophy), which is pure research, MSc (Master of Science), which is about 50% research, 50% exams, and MRes (Master of Research), which has no real research at all and is pure exams.
Re:Linux and the Desktop (Score:2)
Re:Opinions on the "Internet Desktop" (Score:2)
Precisely.
So what exactly was your objection to the "desktop has no edges" notion? Are you saying one should only have this transparency when using one's "current browser"?
Re:text columns and reading online (Score:2)
besides, aspect ratio aside, reading narrow columns is still easier. a tabloid is much wider than a monitor but you don't use a 1 column layout.
Re:Linux and the Desktop (Score:2)