A really good article on software usability

[Les Mikesell]

On Fri, 2007-01-05 at 15:15 +0000, Anne Wilson wrote:

> > > If the user does not use their brain, then all is lost.  There's a
> > > number of people I've come very close to telling that they're too stupid
> > > to use a computer.  No matter how many years of instructing, no matter
> > > how many years they complain about the same thing going wrong, they
> > > don't learn, they don't pay attention to the explanations, they just
> > > whinge at you while you're talking to them.
> >
> > Yes, that's the point.  For a lot of things, software should work
> > like an appliance.  If the thing that needs to be done can be
> > predicted, just do it without offering any choices.  
> 
> <scream.......>  Where have I seen that idea?  Oh yes, in systems that I won't 
> use.

Does your refrigerator ask you every time you are nearby if you would
like it to keep your food cool or not?  Instead of prompting every
time for whether or not you'd like to save or lose all your work,
why don't programs have a default for how many revisions you'd
like it to keep and always save all changes unless explicitly told
to exit without saving?  If it ends up saving work you wanted to
throw away, then you'd have an after-the-fact way to fix the
unusual case instead of being bothered every time selecting the
obvious choice.  And by the way, I don't mean that programs shouldn't
have a way to select choices, I mean that they should have the
obvious defaults already set and a way that you can change the
defaults if you have some unusual need.  And the rest of the time
they should know that humans are creatures of habit.  This mode
also sets things up for someone else to help a user make the right
choices once or an administrator to set up a whole office without
having to make everyone memorize the meta-alt-cokebottle magic
keypresses that they might need every time to repeat the choices.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com