linuxaudio.org

2011/8/8 Cedric Roux :

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> ----- Original Message -----

>> You can do 2/ but still support a new user getting there,

>> without too much hassle.

>

> are you sure?
No, I'm just pretending my arbitrary, random believe would be valid

truth  - imitating Religion  ;)
> did you write some program?

I've been writing (web-)scripts, forms, libraries, tools, but possibly

nothing one would call an

application - nothing with much user-interaction that would require a

lot of GUI, so far.
Thinking about my above statement again, maybe I have to qualify:

Often implementing the main functionality seemed to happen faster than

the work on details and final adjustments.
Anyway: As I see it, I've always been a ' visual guy ' , interested

in GUI stuff to a degree, that I started to even

write my custom toolkit.
>

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> You say it's easy to make vi "user friendly",

> can you elaborate?

>

I try:

What about starting with a simple message:

"Welcome to vi, a text-editor , Press ESC : q   to quit,   Press ESC :

h   for help. "
Do you notice, how much this changes the user experience ?? Almost

effortlessly !
- the user feels welcome and recognized

- s/he gets a hint, what the app is about  (Ah, it's a text editor)

- s/he gets a hint how to continue and where to get more help

- s/he has enough information to do a fist command and see the app

respond - what a success !

- s/he doesn't have to quit the text editor with a hardware-reset  ;)
> ...and I try to think on the

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> best approach is:

> 1 - make the program useful

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> 2 - write it in such a way that it's easy to change

> things if the design is bad/unusable/not well thought.

> And, based on their popularity, I miserably fail

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> in 1 and when I need to change things in there I

> very often fail at 2 (but that's something no one

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> but me can fix).

>

Likely that's if we hard-code the GUI, which is very common

but a bad practice IYAM - although hard to change and impossible occasionally.
I think it's ok to *first* write the tool for yourself

(while you embody a power user )

But sooner or later, if you've made a cool, new, custom GUI,

you have to think about how to make other users

feel comfortable as well.

(At least if you'd like your tool to be used more widely.)
> I am sincerely curious, to learn and improve my skills.

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>

Thank you for being interested.

--

E.R.

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