Fwd: Re: Application duplication (was: Re: cdbakeoven)

[Thomas Zander]

On Sat, Apr 20, 2002 at 08:04:31PM +0200, Martijn Klingens wrote:
> On Saturday 20 April 2002 18:46, Thomas Zander wrote:
> > Now thats a good example of a contradiction in terminus (hope I spelled
> > that correctly).
> 
> My Latin is a bit rusty, but I think you did :-)
> 
> > So you want a changing interface that will be usable; and by the first rule
> > of GUI design that means your changing interface still has to still be
> > consitent...
> 
> What's so contraditing in that? The interface does the same thing as evolution 
> does with nature: it will gradually adapt itself over time. Survival of the 
> fittest features... the UI will always be consistent with itself, and since 
> all of KDE uses the self-evolving GUI the entire desktop will be consistent 
> with itself. Even now KDE is not 100% consistent with Windows, Mac OS or 
> whatever else, and that's only a good thing. Just braindead cloning others 
> and not adding your own ideas would be very bad to do. As long as the 
> self-evolving GUI remains consistent with itself I see no problems and lot of 
> advantages. Only problem is how to code such a thing... :-)

You refer to internal consistency; I also mean consistency over time.  So a
feature is where you expect it to be every time you 'search' for it.
This is true with 'save before close' dialogs (being there and yes doing the same
thing) as much as with toolbars or menubar entries.
The biggest problem people had with 'Kays Power Tools' was that they read in
a magazine about a really cool feature and could not find it in their GUI. 
That was because the application had not yet decided your level of expertise
was great enough to present that feature.

The other way around is that I use a feature ones every 6 months (changing
my background colors for example) I don't want the feature to suddenly be
positioned somewhere else.
Even if I seldomly use a feature, I still see that the feature is there when 
I select an equivilant feature in the same menu.

In other words; it is impossible to keep internal consistency, consitency over 
time _and_ consistency between the user-model and programmers-model in check 
if the applications starts changing the interface.

Maybe it can be done; if I type [tab][tab] in bash I see a list of commands; that
could be sorted on usage. But for a limited set of commands (like most applications
we have today) I don't see how it will gain the user in speed.
-- 
Thomas Zander                                            zander at earthling.net
The only thing worse than failure is the fear of trying something new
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