Acho que encontrei o artigo de ontem que tem rendido essa discussão toda. O Linus tá descendo o Pau na usabilidade do Gnome. Mas o pessoal do Gnome já reagiu. Infelizmente tá tudo em Inglês. Vou postar a do Linus primeiro. Depois a do pessoal do Gnome:
Linus:
[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
Linus Torvalds torvalds at osdl.org
Mon Dec 12 20:19:59 PST 2005
* Previous message: [Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
* Next message: [Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME
* Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]
On Mon, 12 Dec 2005, Gregory Raiz wrote:
>
> Technical users often feel that a usable design can dumb down the interface.
No.
That's not what I'm talking about at all.
When user interfaces means that something CANNOT BE DONE, it's not about
"usable design" any more. At that point, it's about UNusable design.
Any Gnome people who argue that it's about "usability" have their heads up
their asses so far that it's not funny. I've argued with them about this
before, and I know others have too, and mostly given up.
"Usability" is an issue only if you can do something at all. But if you
can't do the thing at all, it's pointless to talk about usability: the
thing is BY DEFINITION not usable if it cannot be used for a specific
task.
Then a person that claims that it's usable for something else is a FUCKING
IDIOT.
And in that FUCKING IDIOT vein:
> The majority of end-users want a simple printer dialog.
This is a great example of being a F.I.
There is no such thing as a "majority of end users" in general. For
example, maybe _I_ am in what you _claim_ to be a majority, in that I
want a simple printer dialog - because I have a simple printer, and
even simpler printer needs.
So a simple printer dialog doesn't bother me, and as such you can count me
in your "majority".
But I can guarantee you one thing: the _vast_ majority of people are part
of a specific minority when it comes to something. This is somethign that
the F.I. "interface designers" in the Gnome sense seems to continually
overlook.
For example, maybe I don't care about printers. But I _do_ care about my
mouse. If I can't control the left/middle/right button actions, I get
really upset. Again, the "majority" of people may not care, so by your
majority argument, the mouse setup should be so simple that the majority
of people can never get confused. But I _do_ care.
In other words: your "majority" argument is total and utter BULLSHIT. It
can be true for any particular feature, but it's simply not true in
general.
To put it in mathematical terms: "The Intersection of all Majorities is
the empty set", or its corollary: "The Union of even the smallest
minorities is the universal set".
It's a total logical fallacy to think that the intersection of two
majorities would still be a majority. It is pretty damn rare, in fact,
because these things are absolutely not correlated.
And the technical term for somebody who claims to do user interface design
and not understand this fact is a "FUCKING IDIOT".
And this has _nothing_ to do with "technical users". Even totally
non-technical users care about something. In fact, it might be their
printer, and having a way to set the paper type and resolution by hand.
Another way of saying this: we're _all_ "special" some way. We're damn
quirky, even the nontechnical among us.
But hey, just continue to remove all that confusing functionality from
Gnome. I don't care. I voted with my feet.
Linus
Pessoal do Gnome:
Source: PlanetGNOME
Categories: GNOME People
08:02
Christian Schaller (Uraeus): Usability
The little flamewar with Linus about usability do bring up a few good points. So usability was made a focus for the GNOME 2.x series and a lot of good have come of that, but it has had some unforseen side effects.
First of all, the vast majority of GNOME users and developers don't know the details of why certain things are like they are in any given module, we only know the details of the select modules we develop/follow closely. The issue of printer options as discussed is one good example, I had no idea (before the Linus thread) why things where the way they where.
The problem is that we and the community in general have started to assume that UI design decisions are behind everything in GNOME being the way they are. So when people come complaining about missing printer options, the assumption is that that its a design decision and not simply something not implemented yet (as was the case in the printer options case) or Havoc simply not having had the time and interest to work on Linus's mouse button mapping issue enough to bring it to completion. Yet, out there people assumed this things where caused by design decisions, even people relativly close to the development community, and often people would even give this assumption as the answer to anyone they talk with who brought up the issue.
The rate to which this belief has become embedded in peoples conception is actually amazing. I have had multiple discussions with people complaining about this or that in GNOME, and when looking into it finding that the reason something is the way it is has nothing to do with a 'make it simple' design decision, but simply that the developers haven't gotten around to it yet, or in some cases not being aware of the usecase/need. And I have then found that when returning with this information I actually have to spend a lot of time convincing people that their wanted functionality XY is simply a lack of developertime/awareness and not a concious UI design decision.
This is a problem in many ways. It creates fertile grounds for silly misunderstandings like the issues brought up by Linus.It might also cause a lot of people to not create patches adding the functionality they want because they assume its omission is on purpose and thus hindering people from joining the project.
On the other hand I guess it do mean people have a lot of faith in the level of the UI design work going into GNOME, since they obviously assume nothing is in GNOME or ever happens in GNOME without a lot of UI thought having gone into it
Source: PlanetGNOME
Categories: GNOME People
