Plasma User Types

[Michael Rudolph]

On Friday 11 April 2008 15:50:35 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> On Friday 11 April 2008, Celeste Lyn Paul wrote:
> > I've finished the interviews for the Plasma user groups.  A full
> > report and
>
> awesome. we're going to do a session based on your blog entry and the
> user profiles today to get everyone onside and aware. hopefully this
> will also help guide us over the next few days here in milano (and
> beyond)

Hello everyone,

I'm really intrigued to learn about your report and analysis, Celeste. 
And I'm also looking forward to hear what you will come up with in 
Milan. Because, honestly, I have problems understanding plasma user 
types so far. But perhaps i just disagree with you here.

With my limited comprehension I sincerely hope that all these user types 
will not be relevant to the further progress of plasma. Distinguishing 
in this way seems to me like prematurely caving in. And although you 
ruled that answer out in a previous blog post, Celeste, I think, 
that "everyone" is the description of the typical plasma user type.

A user's curiosity is a factor that I hope will not matter at all. As I 
see it, whenever we interact with our environment, patterns emerge as 
we reduce complexity and try to make sense of the huge amounts of data 
coming in. This process is commonly referred to as learning and it is 
inevitable. We can not not extract patterns out of what happens around 
us. Now, being curious means to be actively participating and shaping 
this learning process. Not being curious meas to be a very, very sorry 
being. Because you're not actively involved, you're just "being learned 
with".
In software design we construe an almost complete reality for the user, 
since everthing is virtual, we can not rely on common patterns like 
gravity or magnetism from the real world. If we want windows to snap 
together, and act magnetically, we have to create (or imitate) 
magnetism ourselves. In this vein we almost completely control the 
stream of data the user is dealing with; interaction patterns do not 
emerge from real world properties, we have to carefully design these 
patterns to create a pleasant and non-disturbing user experience. This 
is a very pedagogical task, and as good pedagogues we have to work hard 
to spark curiosity in every user.

Likewise a user's experience level should not matter in a properly 
designed system, because proper design means that the system gracefully 
scales to the users needs and expectations. A couple of days back Aza 
Raskin was giving a talk at google tech talks again and complimented 
the 30boxes interface in contrast to google calendar's, because their 
interface for adding new appointments is just a single lineedit. And 
the controller behind the lineedit is smart enough to extract relevant 
information. After the talk a google employee asked about 
discoverability, which surely is quite limited given just a single 
lineedit and no radio buttons, checkboxes and other labeled lineedits. 
I don't remember Aza's answer, but mine is better anyway :-)  F* 
discoverability! If the controller behind the lineedit is smart enough 
to extract places, times, people and so on, the user can just type 
whatever comes to his mind and his calendar will just do the right 
thing with the input. And it doesn't really matter that the user might 
miss out on two or three features; because what is much more important, 
he can enter data his own way, without thinking about features at all.
Why not let the user discover new features as sites like Lifehacker or 
43folders write about advanced features of your calendar? This way the 
features are much more likely to be presented in terms of a user's 
workflow and ultimately in terms of the user. If developers advertise 
the features themselves they will most likely be described in terms of 
computer mumbo jumbo and a user who learns about them that way, will 
probably start to translate his appointments, that previously he just 
entered, into computer terms based on all the great features he now 
knows about. Creating user interfaces that don't get in the users way 
will actually work for everyone, regardless of their experience.

Also discriminating between Linux and Windows users does not do plasma 
justice. It has so great potential that every user should be able to be 
instantly productive with plasma, even when they learned to do things 
the wrong way through years of Windows usage.

Since large parts of the framework are already in place we should 
considerably raise the bar for our design goals to not thwart what has 
already been achieved.

Now if only that lazy bum who promised to draft a vision statement got 
his act together. - No wait! That was me. I'll put the little that I 
got up on techbase tomorrow, so others might be able to already see, 
what I'm talking about.

So as Aaron just said an hour ago: I'll go to bed, so tomorrow I can get 
up, first thing in the morning :-)

michael