RE: Galeon target users?

El sáb, 12-10-2002 a las 13:17, [email protected] escribió:
> >-- Messaggio originale --
> >From: Tommi Komulainen <[email protected]>
> >
> >So who exactly are the target users then?  I think that has become less
> >clear since galeon1 was obviously on power user crack :)
> 
> Yeah 1.0 was. Some previous versions was a lot less so.
> 

Even if the usability of galeon x.y where x <= 1 was not as good as what
we have in galeon 2, it was not very bad. I would say that in cases it
was even better (but in most it was a bit worse).


> It's really hard to say what is the target users for the whole team. I guess
> users I target and users, say ricardo, target, are very very different.

My first target is me. I want a browser that I can use comfortably.
It is better if some other people like it, but that's secondary.

> I have very clear what my target user is and I guess it make sense to say
> it (once again ;)), hoping to be able to make it clear with my sucky english.
> I target the vaste majority of users that doesnt have specific interest
> in computers but use computers to get their work done. This sounds very
> generic but the only way I think I'm able to show it is by examples.
> My girlfriend (again ... sorry) use computers to write letters, keep lists
> of clients at work ... She use a web browser to find documentation about
> his work, to decide which movie to see ... She doesnt have any interest
> to learn about web pages internals, to learn gestures, to apply a particular
> css to his page. I see she could benefit from a better css, but she for
> sure doesnt want to learn what a css is and how to write it. So, no, I dont
> think galeon should have the css crack we had in 1.2.

If you mean the alternate styleshets menu, you are wrong. That menu was
useful for accessibility (if webpages were built correctly). It would be
more used if more browsers had it.

If you mean the user styleshet that could be set in the prefs dialog, I
could agree that it didn't need space in the UI, but the functionality
was useful. Again, it could help accessibility (making fonts always big
enough and acoiding stupid colors).

> Would she spend time learning gestures ? No, not really, it doesnt matter
> if they would make her work a bit faster. She _doesnt want_, she _doesnt
> need_ to be educated about computers, she has different interests. 

But would a way to enable gestures make her work harder? Probably not a
lot harder. 

And that feature would make some other people work easier. And maybe
some day your gf will try it and like it.

Personally I find gestures very hard to use, but looking at the great
number of users that ask for them I guess it is useful for some people.

The tricky part is to find a good balance between useful features and a
clean UI. Sometimes you can't add a feature without making the UI a lot
more complex. Whether this is the case or not I'll leave it to you or
someone who really cares about that feature ;-)

> Does
> she need many cool features in a web browser, does she have fun trying them
> out ? Again, no, not really. The simpler the browser is, the better.
> Is my girlfriend totally stupid about computers -> we could ignore her maybe
> ? No, she isnt. She got two works and she was ever the more clued of her
> office.

>From the manifesto: "Galeon aims to utilize the simplest interface
possible for a browser. Keep in mind that simple does not necessarily
mean less powerful."

I think that we agree that cool features are good when they don't get in
the way of people's work (and don't add too much work for the poor
developers).

The difference is that you are sometimes too much conservative with the
interface (too much of Seth's HIG). OTOH, I think the HIG is good when
not abused. We need to read the HIG as a recommendation and apply it
with common sense.

What does this means in this case? The HIG says that you should put the
"Preferences" menu item in the edit menu. That's very good for most apps
because in most apps you don't change the prefs very often. 

But it seems to be common to change the prefs of a web browser. If you
don't believe it, just look at the people complaining. I already know
that the people reading and posting to this list is not representative
of your user target, but they are representative of current galeon's
users.

What was galeon1 solution: we had a menu called "Settings" with some
preferences that were often changed and the "Preferences" menu item.
That was good for many users and I doubt that it made harder using
galeon to your girlfriend or any other user of your target.

> 
> So now I tried to define who I target, let's try to delimit better the field
> defining who I dont target. I dont target most of you reading my mail :)

That's good. But I think you should at least keep the people reading
this list in mind when designing the UI. Even if they are not you first
target they should be kept in mind when possible.

Screwing your current user base is not a very good idea ;-)


> I dont target most of people submitting bugs on bugzilla. People active
> in the free software obviously have fun trying out new coolness, learning
> about a crack feature that would make their work faster, learning what javascript
> is and when it's better to turn it off. But this is not the real world.
> This is a very small community with specific interests.
> I know in this way I risk to lose "visible" users. (It's just a risk, I
> have a small hope hackers could learn to like simple things too ;)).
> But my target is not to gain the higher number of "visible" users is possible.
> 
> In conclusion I'm trying to hack for real world people, not for computer
> geeks. I do so because I believe free software is actually _closed_ for
> most people. If we want to make it really open we need to start to focus
> on real users needs and not on our small community needs.

But our small community should not be always screwed in favor of the
rest of the world. After all, we are the current users of the software
and the people investing time in maintaining it. I like clean interfaces
as much as you, but for me clean != naked.

Designing interfaces is hard. I didn't know that it was so hard when I
started working in galeon. Hard problems don't have simplistic solutions
like "remove options not used by more that 50% of people".

> 
> Unfortunately I did not have this very clear when I started galeon and I
> contributed to grow a community where these interests are not shared.
> But I dont have any interest spending my time for a closed community of
> computer geeks, so I could not get used to it.
> I'm convinced there is a way to not fork the project. Experimenting a simpler
> ui by configure switch is just one of them.

Those are nautilus 1 userlevels and they are considered bad for
usability. I agree with that. 

<offtopic>Customizable toolbars and menus would be great if gnome had a
standard way of using them. They would avoid all this silly
discussions.</offtopic>


Cheers,
Ricardo

-- 
Ricardo Fernández Pascual
[email protected]
Murcia. España.



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