Re: My usability experience - Asa Dotzler should be fired

On Aug 17, 4:48 pm, Asa Dotzler <[email protected]> wrote:
> Chris Eaton wrote:
> > On Aug 16, 8:17 pm, Asa Dotzler<[email protected]>  wrote:
> >> [email protected] wrote:
>
> >>> I'm both in the power user and enterprise camp
> >> Ah. OK. So not really representative of most Mozilla users? That's
> >> useful information for this discussion and this usability newsgroup.
>
> >> - A
>
> > You do realize that grandma got FF because a power user put it there,
> > right? The people you're dismissing and insulting are your best
> > marketing tool.
>
> > Chase them off, and they start changing grandma's browser to something
> > else you'll find the other users you apparently care so much about
> > following. It doesn't make sense, particularly for something as minor
> > as a version number in a dialog box that nobody who isn't a power user
> > *ever* uses.
>
> I'm sorry if you feel it's insulting. I think it's relevant though. It
> turns out that we're trying really really hard to build a browser that's
> perfect for your grandma and my neighbor who's an aerospace engineer but
> doesn't spend a lot of time on the Web.  We're not trying to build a
> browser for ourselves that's perfect for our use case "out of the box".
>   I don't think it's insulting to say that. The good news for power
> users like you and me, are that Firefox is customizable. We can make it
> work the way we want it to.
>
> As far as enterprise features goes, there is a discussion going on in a
> dedicated forum that would be a far better audience with which to share
> your enterprise concerns. You can continue to share them here, but they
> won't have the impact they could if you were in the appropriate forum.
>
> Putting enterprise aside, you and I are power users and we will manage
> what ever happens because Firefox is very focused on customizability.
> But most regular people don't do a lot of customizing and basically
> "take what's handed them" and so we absolutely do need to be thinking
> about how to make the default Firefox behave in ways that are empowering
> for those regular people.
>
> - A

But how does this help my parents, or grandma, or anybody else like
them? Those people don't go to Help > About. To test this out I
actually called my parents and asked them what version of FF they use.

They have absolutely no idea. They don't know Help > About exists.
They don't care. Long as the browser works they don't think about it.
If it doesn't work, they still don't think to check that. They just
call me and then I tell them to go there as the first step of
troubleshooting.

Removing the version number from Help > About does nothing for them.
Clearly it causes inconvenience for other people. That's the whole
issue here. I've not seen it explained well just what the *gain* from
this change is. The loss is pretty clear because the power user
community is screaming about it.

If the number itself is the issue, switch to a text representation
like "July 2011 Release" instead. That still tells people who need to
know what they're running just what they have, but without being an
arbitrary number that doesn't mean anything anymore (it's the
information I'm attached to, not that it comes as an integer). But
don't take a useful piece of information and remove it entirely when
the people its meant to help don't know its even there to begin with.