On Thu, 06 Aug 2015 08:15:46 +0100, scott wrote:

>>> It's a bit like the way you can drive a way without having a clue how
>>> an internal combustion engine actually works.
>>>
>>> Is that "dumbing down"? Or is that "removing unimportant
>>> implementation details"? Where do you draw the line?
> 
> I would say you provide the information to allow the user to do what is
> expected in normal situations. In the past it was expected a car might
> not start at some point, not anymore. Therefore there is no need for a
> user to know how to diagnose an engine that won't start (beyond being
> told there's no fuel left!).
> 
> Or take a photocopier. It's still expected that paper might get jammed
> somewhere, so there is provision to explain to the user how to open the
> correct panel/drawer to unjam the paper. The user doesn't need to know
> how it works to do that.
> 
> If everyone took the time to learn how everything worked that they used
> we'd have a world full of curious engineers and nobody with any time to
> do other tasks :-)
> 
>> I think that is the crux of the problem.
>> I don't have an answer.
> 
> The difficulty with software like MS Office it is used by a huge range
> of people with very different requirements. My mum wants to type a
> letter and struggles to change the line spacing to make it look right.
> My gf wants to make a form in Word with boxes for people to check and
> type in. I want a complex workbook in Excel with macros. Designing a UI
> that works well for all those people cannot be easy.

The thing that I'm learning is that designing for all the different use 
cases is a pretty intractable task.

If you design for a particular use case, though, then you have a design 
that you can use as a basis to deal with other use cases.

But it requires time with people and understanding how they use a system, 
rather than bolting a UI onto code when the internals are done.

Jim

-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

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