Re: Stop the bling, fergawdssake!

On 13/11/2011 3:30 PM, Ron Hunter wrote:
> On 11/13/2011 12:05 PM, Greywolf wrote:
>> On 12/11/2011 9:46 PM, Ken Springer wrote:
>>> Hey, Greywolf,
>>>
>>> On 11/12/11 2:16 PM, Greywolf wrote:
>>>> Two lines is "immensely"????? Anyhow, not an issue, now that all new
>>>> monitors are hi-res.
>>>
>>> But there are a lot of users who do not have hi-res monitors. :-)
>>>
>>>
>>
>> True. But my objection distills to this: the hidden menu-bar is the
>> default, not an option (as it should be, for those that need it.)
>>
>> Actually, I believe that adding options is a Good Thing. (Eg, I want
>> real archiving added to Tbird, not the mbox "folder" that passes for
>> archiving. Real archiving would be located outside Tbird, on a separate
>> partition if available, and would save messages by filenames adapted
>> from Subject and/or From, as specified by the user.)
>>
>> However, no matter how sweet the new option or feature, DO NOT CHANGE
>> THE UI DEFAULTS. The user base is increasingly made up of _average_
>> users, who are too easily confused when the UI changes after an update.
>>
>> Data-point: my wife thought she'd done something foolish, and that's why
>> the menu-bar disappeared. She thought it was her fault. Now, was that a
>> good user experience for her?
>>
>> I didn't think so, either.
>>
>> HTH,
>> Wolf K.
>
> If everyone thought that way, we would still be waiting for someone to
> invent the wheel.

That must be one of the most irrelevant red herrings ever. It's 
illogical: if we were waiting for it, it must have already been thought 
of. It's also ad-hominem [snip retaliatory ad-hominem in first draft: 
see, I'm being nice; :-)]

As plainly as I can:
I'm not objecting to _what_ was done (make the menu bar hidable), but 
_how_ it was done (hide it as default).

Extending the option of hiding to the menu-bar is just fine. Hiding it 
as default is not. The one is a minor innovation, and good of its kind. 
The other is a violation of design principles, the first of which is, 
Never make a change to an existing function such that a user is likely 
to be confused (or worse).

To put it another way: design me a wheel of a UI, something radically 
new, in which interaction is done differently than selecting actions 
with a movable pointer, and I will be interested to see how it works, 
and whether it does get me there faster than walking on my own two feet.

It's been done. If it's not available on desktops and laptops within the 
next year or so, those machines will die out.

HTH
Wolf K.