A forward look at KDE4

[Aaron J. Seigo]

i hate to be the burster of bubbles....

On Wednesday 22 February 2006 10:26, Tompos Ákos wrote:
> Your's are just as valuable. 

yes, they are valuable but not *as* valuable. people actually involved in 
getting work done are the most valuable (and there's more than just coding to 
be done). imagine if everyone just made observations but nobody wrote code, 
authored documentation, did user testing, performed bug triage and Q/A, 
created artwork, oversaw releases, wrote press releases, coordinated 
community events ...... nothing would happen.

> You are the End User. The one who can't see 
> behind the curtains. If you see that something is illogical, than it's
> illogical, even if 100 coders tell otherwise. :-) You can spot gui
> design bug better because you don't know the coding reason behind it.

i find usability experts (who often observe users as part of the process) to 
be far better at this than users, actually. getting groups of users who make 
themselves available to usability people for testing (voluntary guinea pigs) 
would be an interesting thing to see happen ...

> Programers tend to see the program from the perspective of the code,
> using it's logic to back up the missing logic from the UI.

this is often very true, however (and unfortunately =)

> A good UI is intuitive, and doesn't need programers to understand it.

actually, there is no such thing as an intuitive interface (not even the 
nipple; that's a learned interface, ask any nurse). there are familiar 
interfaces, interfaces that feel intuitive because you've learned them 
before, and certainly confusing and unlearnable interfaces... of course, this 
is getting a bit off the topic and onto one of my pet interests (usability)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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