[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME

Calum Benson Calum.Benson at Sun.COM
Tue Mar 27 09:14:01 PDT 2007


On Wed, 2007-02-21 at 08:10 -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: 
> 
> On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Calum Benson wrote:
> > 
> > GNOME has plenty of settings you can lock down to stop people getting
> > into a mess; if you maintain their machines, did you ever consider doing
> > any of this for their accounts?  If not, was it lack of an obvious way
> > to do so (during installation or elsewhere) that prevented you from
> > doing so, or some other reason?
> 
> I had (and still have) _no_ idea.
> 
> I think Gnome people have this very strange dichotomy:
>  - "We have tons of config options.." (it's true, sometimes, just not 
>    where I cared)
>  - "..but we hide them, because only experts should use them"

I don't think anybody's ever said "only experts should use them"; if
they have, they've misunderstood the approach GNOME is trying to take
IMHO.  They're hidden because, to the best of our knowledge (via
usability studies and the like), they fall into the category of "not
needed by most users most of the time, if ever".  It's just GNOME's
approach to the well-documented usability principle of progressive
disclosure-- hiding stuff until it's needed.

I would agree that there's no reason the hidden stuff should be
cryptically hard to find or, once found, any harder to use than the
in-your-face stuff, as far as that is possible.  There are certainly
places that GNOME could improve on that front (a couple of short-lived
"powertoys" projects sprung up as one way of addressing this, although I
wouldn't say that's ideal), but at the same time, that shouldn't mean
cluttering up the front-line user interface for everyone.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum.benson at sun.com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems





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