[Gllug] On Linux desktops...

[David Damerell]

[Another braindead LookOut quoting style reformatted.]

On Wednesday, 17 Oct 2001, Richard Cottrill wrote:
>Of David Damerell
>>>looks like. So, Pine has a better GUI than vi, for example, because it's a
>>>lot easier to get into initially,
>>Which is meaningless to the experienced user.
>>>the shortcuts are easily available,
>>Which, if it can't be suppressed, is actively harmful to the
>>experienced user, who loses 2 lines of screen real estate to stuff
>>they already know.
>This is the sort of attitude that Nielsen's pointing to. This doesn't make
>it a 'bad' opinion; it's just not conducive to making good (graphical) user
>interfaces. User interfaces should have all sorts of nifty things in them.
>Experts should be able to customise, new users should not be lost.

Unfortunately, the experts are normally forgotten in the quest to help
the new users, or even actively hampered from using the tool properly.

Nielsen - whose work I am quite familiar with, thank you - doesn't
normally deal with this, because practically all his current writing
is about Webshites - and no-one wants to become an expert in the use
of a particular Web site, whereas they have lots of new users. But,
you'll see that he says that on intranet sites that the same users
will access regularly, it's necessary to bias things more towards the
experts (and the two aims _can't_ necessarily be reconciled.)

-- 
David Damerell <damerell at chiark.greenend.org.uk> flcl?

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