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> Stop infantilising users, it's disrespectful and counter productive. Yet another logically-vacuous emotionally-manipulative statement. The equally-manipulat

by fouric 6y ago

> Stop infantilising users, it's disrespectful and counter productive. Yet another logically-vacuous emotionally-manipulative statement. The equally-manipulative counter-argument to that is "You're not emphasizing with the users - how would YOU like for, say, government bureaucrats to give you back a bunch of technical gibberish instead of telling you how you filled out the form incorrectly in plain English?" Use logic instead. I think that it's easy to build interfaces that are friendly to both power users and non-power-users - talk about the possibility of that using logic instead of trying to manipulate the emotions of others to shame them into agreeing with you.

jimmaswell 6y ago
Simple solution is a "connection failed" message with a "view technical details" option. Which is generally the best idea, sensible defaults and usability for the average user and as much customization/technical stuff as is appropriate for power users.
rapind 6y ago
I agree, except specifically when it involves government. I actually don’t want them to hide details, but that’s because I don’t want them handling super complicated stuff most of the time. Gives them too much room to hide.
reificator 6y ago
> I think that it's easy to build interfaces that are friendly to both power users and non-power-users All of the software I have ever used fits into one of three categories: * Tipped in favor of power users and frustrating to laymen * Tipped in favor of laymen and frustrating to power users * Frustrating to both laymen and power users If it's so easy, what's a good example of software that rides the line well? EDIT: And even within this dichotomy both groups are pretty fuzzy. Is a layman someone who doesn't know how something works, or someone who just wants to do the basics? Is a power-user someone who wants to customize, or someone who wants to optimize?
- emj 6y ago
  The groups are of course even less defined than in your edit, I consider my self to be in the group: Just make it work, but enable me to discover what went wrong. I think it takes to many development hours to make your GUI discoverable. The question is how to make good abstraction, how can you make the GUI use the same API as the CLI interface and how do you connect them in a meaningfull way. Network-manager really tried to do this, came 80% of the way imho.
- fsckboy 6y ago
  I really like your 3 tipped in favor of's. > If it's so easy, what's a good example of software that rides the line well? I agree with you that the GP was wrong to claim that it's easy. But here is a way to get something better than we have, and that is, GUI control panels that read-and-writes the same text config files that the user can, and do so in a cooperative way. For example, if the grammar of the config file is such that there is NOT-more-than-one-way-to-do-it, then it doesn't matter if either a human or software updates the file. and if you want the UI to squelch the noisy details of what's happening, that's fine, but keep the log and make sure it's easy to get to.
- fouric 6y ago
  > All of the software I have ever used fits into one of three categories: I think that almost every piece of software ever written is "bad", and that the majority is even worse at the level of "terrible" - so I agree with you! I just don't think that contradicts my point. I should clarify - "easy" meaning "if you think about it, it's relatively obvious what should be done". One of those things is good, pervasive, in-tool documentation - which takes a lot of effort, even if it's not a "hard problem" in the sense of being intellectually tricky. > If it's so easy, what's a good example of software that rides the line well? Firefox. Firefox is very easy to use as a non-technical user, and has a relatively high skill cap (used to be higher with XUL/XPCOM, but even now you can do useful things relatively easily with the WebExtensions model). The reason why there aren't more examples (even things that I absolutely love, like Emacs) is because (1) commercial software development is optimized for selling things (at the expense of power user (and often layman) usability), (2) open-source software devs rarely care about user-friendliness and/or aren't willing to write good docs, and (3) neither group seems to have the presence of mind to do the meta-analysis about why existing software isn't good. ...or, so I claim. I'm willing to be shown that I'm wrong, and change my mind accordingly - but as the result of a nice debate and not some malicious emotional manipulation, like what the poster I was replying to was doing.

by fouric 6y ago

jimmaswell 6y ago

Simple solution is a "connection failed" message with a "view technical details" option. Which is generally the best idea, sensible defaults and usability for the average user and as much customization/technical stuff as is appropriate for power users.

rapind 6y ago

I agree, except specifically when it involves government. I actually don’t want them to hide details, but that’s because I don’t want them handling super complicated stuff most of the time. Gives them too much room to hide.

reificator 6y ago

> I think that it's easy to build interfaces that are friendly to both power users and non-power-users All of the software I have ever used fits into one of three categories: * Tipped in favor of power users and frustrating to laymen * Tipped in favor of laymen and frustrating to power users * Frustrating to both laymen and power users If it's so easy, what's a good example of software that rides the line well? EDIT: And even within this dichotomy both groups are pretty fuzzy. Is a layman someone who doesn't know how something works, or someone who just wants to do the basics? Is a power-user someone who wants to customize, or someone who wants to optimize?

emj 6y ago
The groups are of course even less defined than in your edit, I consider my self to be in the group: Just make it work, but enable me to discover what went wrong. I think it takes to many development hours to make your GUI discoverable. The question is how to make good abstraction, how can you make the GUI use the same API as the CLI interface and how do you connect them in a meaningfull way. Network-manager really tried to do this, came 80% of the way imho.
fsckboy 6y ago
I really like your 3 tipped in favor of's. > If it's so easy, what's a good example of software that rides the line well? I agree with you that the GP was wrong to claim that it's easy. But here is a way to get something better than we have, and that is, GUI control panels that read-and-writes the same text config files that the user can, and do so in a cooperative way. For example, if the grammar of the config file is such that there is NOT-more-than-one-way-to-do-it, then it doesn't matter if either a human or software updates the file. and if you want the UI to squelch the noisy details of what's happening, that's fine, but keep the log and make sure it's easy to get to.
fouric 6y ago
> All of the software I have ever used fits into one of three categories: I think that almost every piece of software ever written is "bad", and that the majority is even worse at the level of "terrible" - so I agree with you! I just don't think that contradicts my point. I should clarify - "easy" meaning "if you think about it, it's relatively obvious what should be done". One of those things is good, pervasive, in-tool documentation - which takes a lot of effort, even if it's not a "hard problem" in the sense of being intellectually tricky. > If it's so easy, what's a good example of software that rides the line well? Firefox. Firefox is very easy to use as a non-technical user, and has a relatively high skill cap (used to be higher with XUL/XPCOM, but even now you can do useful things relatively easily with the WebExtensions model). The reason why there aren't more examples (even things that I absolutely love, like Emacs) is because (1) commercial software development is optimized for selling things (at the expense of power user (and often layman) usability), (2) open-source software devs rarely care about user-friendliness and/or aren't willing to write good docs, and (3) neither group seems to have the presence of mind to do the meta-analysis about why existing software isn't good. ...or, so I claim. I'm willing to be shown that I'm wrong, and change my mind accordingly - but as the result of a nice debate and not some malicious emotional manipulation, like what the poster I was replying to was doing.