interesting article, for all those who think Ubuntu is already easy

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thursday 25 May 2006 01:49, Michael T. Richter wrote:
> How about not calling it "Enable DMA"?  How about giving it a
> descriptive title like "speed up DVD drive"?  (And before the
> inevitable "what about other drives?" gets asked -- what,
> precisely, prevents you from having the same option covered by
> multiple descriptive settings? Think of them as symlinks for system
> options....)  You can put an exclamation icon next to it to
> indicate a possible threat, have a tooltip that says "this enables
> DMA if your system doesn't already do it, but may be hazardous" and
> have a pop-up that explains the issue further with a "do you really
> want to try this?" and a confirmation button.  THAT is what GUI
> design is all about.  It's not "this is tricky so make it hard on
> the end-user".  It's "this is tricky, so make it easy on the
> end-user".

Good point, I raised the same issues in my own way in an earlier post. 
Good to see you and I finally agree on something :-)

> Matthew's response here is typical of the developer community,
> however, so I feel a little bad singling out his statement.  It was
> just conveniently located.  A quick search through Sounder --
> especially on any issue related to making the user's job less
> onerous -- will find you dozens more people who make exactly the
> same error.
>
> > If that's the case, you need to redesign your GUI from scratch.
>
> The problem is deeper than that, Robert.  You need to redesign your
> whole approach to things from the basis of a decent GUI, not design
> your GUI to gloss over the misfeatures of your system.

I've been thinking about this recently. I'm pretty well known for 
being opposed to GUIfying everything in sight and I don't use GUI 
config tools much myself, but I do recognise that others want them. 
There is benefit to making things easier on these folks, so to expand 
on your theme:

Some config things are appropriate for GUI tools, some aren't. Toolbar 
buttons, anything related to GUI layout and go-fast DVD settings are; 
apache, boot loaders, network settings and bind probably aren't (look 
to webmin to see how messy these things get if you try and be even 
minimally functional).

The GUI is an abstraction of the underlying machine - for the most 
part you don't work with file systems and binaries directly, you work 
with icons and places where files go. The focus is on "what does this 
thing accomplish?" rather than "what is the nature of this thing?". 
CLI is the opposite - you deal with the hardware directly, and the 
focus is on what things are with no abstraction.

Config settings that a user can and should make must be presented in a 
way that a user can find them and know what they are by *only* 
considering the final effect. To make DVDs go fast, the setting must 
be in a category called DVD, or Movies, or Multimedia. The last place 
it would go is Disks -> DMA. The user does not see a DVD drive as a 
disk - a disk is a mysterious thing inside the box that stores stuff, 
a DVD is a shiny platter that he can control and put on a tray. These 
are very different things, regardless of how the kernel sees them. 
The user has no idea what DMA is and doesn't want/need to know, so 
don't require him to know.

I'm reminded of a quote that's so old I forget where it comes from, 
might even be the original Star project:

"Never expose the underlying implementation in a GUI"

-- 
If only me, you and dead people understand hex, 
how many people understand hex?

Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five