Why incremental UI changes are the way to go

[Mark Kretschmann]

Heya,

so Nikolaj and I just had a little discussion on IRC. The gist was: Is
it better to make a radical change of the UI (Look-And-Feel), or do it
incrementally, in smaller steps? Let me explain to you again (I'd
voiced it on IRC when not everyone was there) why I think that
incremental changes are better:


* We make mistakes. Lots of them. Everybody does so in fact - that's
why you learn by trial and error. Especially with design things we are
sometimes convinced that "this is it", only to realize a while later
that it wasn't so great after all. It has happened many times
(toolbar...), and often you can only judge something after having it
out in the wild.

* Given that we are prone to making mistakes, it would make us look
pretty stupid indeed if we created a radical new GUI, only to change
it completely again in the next release.

* Our resources are limited. We can can only handle doing a certain
amount of changes properly. The bigger the changes are, the more work
and resources are required, which we simply don't have.

* Incremental changes give the user a chance to get used to them more
easily. Being confronted with something totally new turns many people
off (see 1.4 -> 2.0).


This is why I advocate an approach like we did it in 2.2.1, where we
improved the Toolbar and also the Context View (in a minor way). In
the upcoming releases we can do further improvements in this style.
Polish a little here, introduce a new look there, etc. I think this
works really well for everyone involved, and it's much less risky than
doing it Rambo style (radically) :)

-- 
Mark Kretschmann
Amarok Developer
www.kde.org - amarok.kde.org