4 ms·

I think it's a false choice. The example of Acorn and Pixelmator is strange. Acorn is not much easier to pick up, it has almost all the buttons. Personally fou

by Detrus 15y ago

I think it's a false choice. The example of Acorn and Pixelmator is strange. Acorn is not much easier to pick up, it has almost all the buttons. Personally found it harder to use and understand what it's for. If you don't understand it's particular use case and want to do a common task that it doesn't have, it suddenly becomes very hard to use. In the current app ecosystem pro and consumer apps are indeed divided but there's no reason for this except tradition. You can present a full featured app as a simple consumer app by changing its UI. Then slowly reveal buttons and features if you detect it gets used everyday for example. You could use a feature search UI, letting people use keywords to find the features they need. Basically a modern skin on the old command line. Just because apps are done a certain way now doesn't mean you should copy this trend. Programming languages are a good comparison. A full featured programming language can be easy enough for beginners if it has good tutorials and obviously serve serious users. A limited programming language will become hard in many beginner cases. DSLs usually make it clear what they are, a GUI like Acorn doesn't. It's possible to make full featured programming languages look easy to beginners. LISP does it in a way, although its syntax looks unpleasant the fundamentals are easy to pick up. The same can be done for GUIs by introducing fundamentals that repeat. That might seem hard because today we have a mishmash of menus and buttons, where the only way to simplify is to have fewer buttons and menus and make them bigger.

LukasMathis 15y ago
Slowly revealing new buttons is probably not a good idea, since UIs that change on their own are confusing; things are never the way you expect them to be. Similarly, searching doesn't work well for beginners, because they don't know what to search for. If you only know what you want the result to be, and not how to get there, or what features you need to achieve the desired result, it's easier if you can just click on things you see, and undo changes if they're going in the wrong direction. Microsoft tried pretty much everything they could think of in Word, attempting to do exactly what you're suggesting: make an app that works for professionals, but is discoverable for beginners. This is where things like Clippy came from. It's really, really hard to get this right.
- Detrus 15y ago
  Clippy is plopping intrusive tutorials on top of a complex interface. It's not a serious attempt at execution, it's bureaucratic incompetence. What I'm talking about is more akin to Google and Wolfram, when they give you an answer to a math problem. When you ask "how much water is in the oceans" it would try to figure out if you meant volume, show you related formulas, etc. Similarly for a photo editor you'd say "make the head bigger" and it would list the features one would need, like the selection and resize tools. So if you only know what the result should be, use keywords to find features, then click to see if they're the right features. It's perfectly doable, just hasn't been attempted.

by Detrus 15y ago

LukasMathis 15y ago

Slowly revealing new buttons is probably not a good idea, since UIs that change on their own are confusing; things are never the way you expect them to be. Similarly, searching doesn't work well for beginners, because they don't know what to search for. If you only know what you want the result to be, and not how to get there, or what features you need to achieve the desired result, it's easier if you can just click on things you see, and undo changes if they're going in the wrong direction. Microsoft tried pretty much everything they could think of in Word, attempting to do exactly what you're suggesting: make an app that works for professionals, but is discoverable for beginners. This is where things like Clippy came from. It's really, really hard to get this right.

Detrus 15y ago
Clippy is plopping intrusive tutorials on top of a complex interface. It's not a serious attempt at execution, it's bureaucratic incompetence. What I'm talking about is more akin to Google and Wolfram, when they give you an answer to a math problem. When you ask "how much water is in the oceans" it would try to figure out if you meant volume, show you related formulas, etc. Similarly for a photo editor you'd say "make the head bigger" and it would list the features one would need, like the selection and resize tools. So if you only know what the result should be, use keywords to find features, then click to see if they're the right features. It's perfectly doable, just hasn't been attempted.