Re: Default Template discussion

Hi Murray,

Fully agree with your mail.

GUI's need to work for all kinds of people. Especially as Wiki's are
targetting quite a broad audience of people.
The numerous mails on this topic have already revealed quite some
different viewpoints on the new Default Template, with several  new
and useful insights.


Tx for the help,

      dirk


On 7/22/07, Murray Altheim <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dirk Frederickx wrote:
> [...]
> > Ref. the bottom-page-actions discussion.
> > I've seen several 'votes' in favour of bottom-page-actions.
> > (allthough I hardly use them myself)
>
> Dirk,
>
> One of the things I brought up early in the discussion was that in
> normal user surveys it takes something like a test population of
> over 400 people to gain enough statistical weight to make reasonable
> predictions about people's preferences. When the test group is small,
> and especially when the test group is specialized (such as the
> recent studies on brain function conducted *only* on university
> students, hardly a normal population!), we have to remember that we
> are a very small group, and very specialized. What we do is almost
> irrelevant to what the typical user does. We're used to keyboard
> shortcuts, knowing which features exist and usually where they are,
> and what the features (or names of features) do. Most users won't.
>
> Given we don't have a nice large test population the best we can do
> is follow user interface guidelines, and try very hard to think like
> a user, i.e., forget what we know about the software and pretend we
> have never seen a wiki before, or at least pretend that we've never
> edited a wiki before. Most people haven't.
>
> I'm probably preaching to the choir here a bit, but I always have to
> remind myself that my own habits are likely not that of the typical
> user. My own thoughts on the bottom-of-page issue come from that:
> if a user reads a page, gets to the bottom, and then can't see any
> actions, they'll probably not take any. It often takes a long time
> for a novice to understand the basic functions of any software
> program, to capture what it does, how it works, where features are
> located. Once they get over that hump things usually are fine (well,
> except for extremely complicated programs like MS Word).
>
> Murray
>
> ...........................................................................
> Murray Altheim <murray07 at altheim.com>                           ===  = =
> http://www.altheim.com/murray/                                     = =  ===
> SGML Grease Monkey, Banjo Player, Wantanabe Zen Monk               = =  = =
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