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

[Matthew Garrett]

On Thu, May 25, 2006 at 07:49:41AM +0800, 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".

Because:

(a) "Speed up DVD drive" isn't an accurate description of what it does, 
and
(b) Users would quite rightly ask why their DVD drive isn't /always/ 
sped up, and
(c) We could just *fix the damned problem* in such a way that the 
checkbox is entirely pointless.

Calling it "Speed up DVD drive" is about as bad as calling it "Make my 
computer work". If it can be made to work, it should work. If it can't 
be, there shouldn't be a tempting option that breaks things.
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org