Re: [LAU] An appeal to famous artists?

2011/8/8 Cedric Roux <sed@email-addr-hidden>:
> ----- 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.

>
> 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
> best approach is:

> 1 - make the program useful
> 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
> in 1 and when I need to change things in there I

> very often fail at 2 (but that's something no one
> 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.
>
Thank you for being interested.

-- 
E.R.
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