CD burning with Nautilus, was: Why xcdroast and not gcombust?

[Havoc Pennington]

On Tue, 2003-09-09 at 03:41, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-09-08 at 20:59, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > If you really want to answer this question in a methodical way, there is
> > a whole discipline you can get a degree in. My favorite book I like to 
> > suggest is called "Designing From Both Sides of the Screen"
> > 
> > If you follow the well-thought-out process there for answering the
> > questions "who will use this?" "what do they want to do?" "how should
> > the UI facilitate that?" then you can come to some kind of serious
> > answer to the question.
> 
> This is what we should do, and I think I have done my part of it ;-): My
> wife (she is one of those prototype end users who find all the bugs)
> told me that she wouldn't _expect_ a "burn this" button in the playlist
> manager/music app/whatever. I.e. if she would want to burn her music she
> would first go to the CD burning app (or Nautilus module, implementation
> doesn't matter), because she doesn't use music apps very often (she
> listens to CDs on the stereo if she wants music) and so doens't know of
> a "burn this" button. So do the same and ask your spouses, friends,
> household members, other _ordinary_ people.

Taking a poll isn't the whole answer though; it can't address tradeoffs,
and you won't ever get new ideas or solutions that way. If someone has
used a CD burning app then they'll expect a CD burning app and won't
think of doing it a different way. But that doesn't mean the iTunes way
wouldn't be welcome once they saw it. It certainly also depends on the
user; e.g. your wife doesn't use music apps, but millions of people do.

So the design process is a way to try to work through these issues
methodically.

Havoc