On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 7:03 PM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 18:34 +0200, drago01 wrote:
On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 6:30 PM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 10:53 -0400, Neal Becker wrote:
I don't agree. There's nothing unusual about a dumbed-down interface for novices, with an 'advanced' tab hiding more options.
As someone else has pointed out, a lot of usability experts consider this a bad idea, for two reasons:
- everyone thinks they're an expert, even if they're not, and hits
'advanced'
- it creates a confusing decision point for *everyone*: how do you know
if you need the 'advanced' options? You can't really know without looking at them, so you have to look at them to decide if you need them, so essentially we're presenting the advanced options to everyone...
Well most people just press "Next", "Next", "Next" ....
As I recall, several distros have done usability studies and found that this isn't actually true. People have been *trained* to just press next, next, next under specific circumstances - like Windows software installation - but it's not everyone's default behaviour, especially the kinds of people who tend to install Linux distributions.
Any pointers to those studies? Not saying that you are lying, but I am actually interested to see them.
(Have you ever observed people trying to use subway ticket machines in an unfamiliar city? They certainly don't just click next, next, next, in my experience. They read every screen carefully and worry which of the many options to choose. Frequently, when the process is too complex, they worry that they've somehow got something wrong, cancel, and start over.)
It involves money ;)
Even when people do it, it's more of an 'exasperation fallback': it's what people do when they hit their breaking point of potential decisions, they go 'oh what the hell, I'll just hit next on everything'. If we get to that point we've already 'lost', because we exasperated the user: even if they happen to get a fully functional install, they're not happy with the experience.
Or they think "don't care, just install the damn thing".