Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Lars Seipel]

On Tuesday 12 October 2010 15:56:02 Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
> Now we are really talking semantics. The point is that users should not be
> confronted with choices they don't really need to make or they don't
> understand.

I disagree. How should a user know about some nice feature if its whole 
existence is hidden from his eyes? Yeah, he should read the documentation but 
aren't we talking about improving usability right now? Imagine some random 
user does his installs the hard way for years and now discovers (someone tells 
him oder he learns about it by chance by searching the documentation for an 
unrelated problem) that Anaconda has the capabilities to make his life easier.

He goes like: "Woow cool, this is the stuff I've been searching for years. I 
don't have to waste my precious time anymore by setting all of this up by 
hand. Anaconda now takes care of it. Didn't thought those Anaconda developers 
are that genious. But why on earth didn't they tell me before their software 
was capable of doing that? Do they actually like watching people suffer? 
Seriously, you guys suck!"

Hiding features doesn't have to be beneficial to usability. It can be harmful, 
too.

> As long as most of these defaults and menus are not displayed initially
> that would probably be fine.
> The problem here is that every time you present the user with data dumps
> (e.g. lists of defaults) or menus you create a cognitive hurdle where the
> user wonders what he's supposed to do or gets worried that he breaks
> something. Minimizing that is really key to creating a streamlined
> installation interface.

There are other ways to prevent confusion and worries about potential 
brokenness. If there are sane defaults and it is clearly communicated to the 
user that using those is the recommended way and gives him the best results in 
most cases, I don't see a problem. If users can trust in those defaults being 
sane and that by not touching them they get a good default configuration, they 
aren't helpless as they know what to do. However, if they wish to change 
something in future attempts they already know where they have to look. 

> new installed system. The user doesn't care at all about "partitions",
> "LVM" or "mountpoints".

I think you are strongly limiting the definition of what an user can be. So who 
is an user of Anaconda? For me, that is all those people using Anaconda. There 
is some guy from your neighborhood installing Fedora to surf the internet. 
There is some developer installing Fedora to work on the latest and greatest 
software in the GNU/Linux/X/freedesktop.org stack. There are designers using 
Anaconda to install the free software they need to create your favorite 
layout. There are also sysadmins deploying Fedora/RHEL/CentOS to many 
computers in their company, a public school or at your ISP's datacenter. So 
when you restrict Anaconda's userbase to just one kind of user, the whole 
assumption on which you build your enhancements to usability is wrong and will 
lead to software which sucks in usability as soon as you want to do something 
that you didn't consider basic enough to show it to users.

Lars.