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> A way to list all known accounts (I'll call this "discoverability" or "browsability".) I'm gonna go farther and say that the entire notion of discoverabilit
by wfunction 9y ago
> A way to list all known accounts
(I'll call this "discoverability" or "browsability".)
I'm gonna go farther and say that the entire notion of discoverability is undervalued in a whole range of scenarios, not just here. Many of us programmers are so used to the notion of "you should already know X in order to do Y" that we completely ignore how detrimental and unusable it is for mortals.
At the risk of going off-topic, another example is the fundamental difference between a GUI and a CLI... the poor user who's just trying to learn how to use the computer can always click a menu or right-click an empty window to see most things that can possibly be done (there's only so many buttons on a mouse), but good luck having them discover what they can do with their keyboard. e.g. there's a command called "apropos foo" but how the hell is the user supposed to know about it? On a GUI you just click the Help menu (it's already there) and look at the contents. And even the help system can't know about every command. People have to read manuals and remember a ton of things before they can use CLI tools, in contrast with GUI tools which they can discover as they go. (Obligatory note: I'm not saying they can always substitute for each other, or that even one is always better... e.g. it's obviously much harder to automate GUI tasks. Just drawing a comparison here because I think there is a larger point to be made.)
Another (off-topic) example is the difference between opt-out and opt-in systems for practically anything. In practice (maybe not in theory), people have to know what to opt out of in order to have any chance of being successful at it, but they are generally allowed to discover what they can opt into. Of course this is usually due to misaligned incentives, but the point is that knowing a-priori what to do can be a crux of what makes something practical vs. impractical for consumer usage.
- sokoloff 9y ago> good luck having them discover what they can do with their keyboard. e.g. there's a command called "apropos foo" but how the hell is the user supposed to know about it? This is one of the prime drivers behind stackoverflow (and related)'s success. I'm amazed at the number of times I run into a "how to get equipment X to behave in fashion Y" and find a cookbook recipe of exactly (or more than half of) what I need to do. It's my own personal reminder that the world is a big place with lots of people not all that different from myself.