Re: Options and choises rant

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 15 Jan 2006, at 10:28, Dennis Leeuw wrote:

> The "make everybody happy" paradigm might be part of the open  
> source community, since it helps to get more developers, but to me  
> it sounds like a wrong design approach for the end user. The more  
> options to choose from the less people feel comfortable with a  
> certain piece of software.
>
> Look at the remote control. The less buttons the easier people can  
> work with it. The more buttons, the more people feel initimidated  
> and the sooner people have the feeling that they must be doing  
> something wrong, because they don't know what all the buttons do.
>
> If I want to sell GNUstep as an environment to my dad, I think we  
> need applications with less options. To give an example:
>
> What do you expect of an e-mail client? You want to send e-mail,  
> reply to an e-mail, forward e-mail and archive mail you received.  
> To put it simple that's all an average user wants to do. Now have a  
> look at the Message menu of GNUMail. I can imagine people are  
> intimidated by all the options to choose from (I just picked  
> GNUMail because I know it so well). But I have seen this with some  
> of the applications on the Mac too.
>
> Maybe the less is more idea should be more often used. Maybe the  
> idea should be that a menu should be not longer then 10 entries,  
> next to being not deeper then 3 menus. How do others on this list  
> view this? Have other people experiences with users and how  
> programs are percieved?

I agree that we want fewer options in basic user interface.
I guess we should probably always have a way to 'drill down' to  
obscure and infrequently used settings ... but perhaps that sort of  
thing is best realised by having loadable modules  with their own  
separate documentation and configuration/options panels.

My wife and I have recently been discussing one of the many faults  
with politics in this country (the UK) ... the rhetoric of the  
current government and the main opposition party concentrates on  
offering people 'choice'.  Choices of schools, choices of hospitals  
etc.  Their theory being that when people can choose, the best  
schools, hospitals or whatever will prosper through popularity.   
While there may be an element of truth in that free-market theory, I  
don't think it's what we want.  We are among the most educated/ 
intelligent part of the population, and we can't spend time  
evaluating each school or hospital (or other service) to decide which  
is best for us, as we cannot become experts in all these areas.  If  
we can't do it, then I'm sure that the vast majority of the  
population can't do it either ... which means that the choice we are  
given is illusory.  What we actually need is expertise and research  
applied by people who know what they are doing ... to provide us with  
a small choice of the best options, not an ever widening choice of  
more varied options we can't evaluate in any reasonable timeframe.

Anyway, while software is generally much less complex than social  
institutions, I think the same thing applies ... the best options in  
software are products which do their jobs really well and simply and  
don't have lots of irrelevant options tacked on.  They have concise  
and consistent user interfaces and operating principles and have  
functionality chosen to be powerful and intuitive.

Apparently even microsoft have partially recognised this ... I  
recently followed a link to a news item about their latest release of  
'office' in which it was said they did lot's of market research to  
find out what new features people would like ... and found that over  
90% of the requested features were already in the software.
The conclusion they drew from this was that they needed a new,  
context sensitive,  user interface design to allow people to find  
features more easily.  I think they only got that partially right ...  
things like ms-office (and now open-office) are horribly bloated and  
need to be broken up and modularised, improving the gui is a good  
step, but it's not enough. A lot of stuff should be completely  
removed from core applications and some sort of 'howto' tool should  
be devised to use AI principles to help people find the right tool  
for the job.  Having a context sensitive gui within a single tool is  
a mistake ... we are much better at handling consistent interfaces  
rather than dynamically changing user interfaces, so if we are going  
to have to switch to handle a new task we want a radical ui change so  
we *know* we are handling a new task, and while we are operating  
within one tool we do not want the user interface changing.

PS.
I've read that research suggests 7 items as a maximum that people (in  
general) can readily keep in mind, so even a menu with ten items is  
probably longer than desirable.