Review Request: New dynamic bias

Mark Kretschmann kretschmann at kde.org
Tue Feb 22 10:55:53 CET 2011


On Tue, Feb 22, 2011 at 10:03 AM, Valorie Zimmerman
<valorie.zimmerman at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 21, 2011 at 10:38 PM, Mark Kretschmann <kretschmann at kde.org> wrote:
>> Bottom line: If we don't want Amarok to be a complete nerd tool, it
>> might make sense to go back to our original goal with Amarok 2, which
>> was "making powerful features easy to use". We used to say: "Amarok 2
>> should be able to pass the Mom-Test: If our Mom's can't use it, we did
>> not do it well enough."
>
> The choice is not between "uber-complicated and arcane" and
> "dumbed-down."

I would prefer not to speak of "dumb interfaces". It is possible,
albeit very hard, to create UIs that manage to make complex and
powerful things simple to use. Certain things that are impossible to
make simple might just be too complex overall. Does a music player
need a feature that lets you create specific playlists with any number
of properties and biases that one can imagine? Maybe. Or maybe it's
overkill? These are difficult questions to answer.

Doing that should be the focus of any good designer, and achieving
that goal separates the good ones from the not-so-good-ones. Of course
this also needs coordination with backend/middleware, and ideally
input from usability experts. But if we want to be better than our
competition, then we should strife towards these goals, I think :)

-- 
Mark Kretschmann
Amarok Developer, Senior Software Engineer at Nokia
Fellow of the Free Software Foundation Europe
http://amarok.kde.org - http://fsfe.org - http://nokia.com


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