On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 12:44 PM, William K. Volkman <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, 2009-01-13 at 16:16, Eugene Eric Kim wrote: >> It would be worth actually testing this in a user study. >> However, the fact that this question comes up at all (over and over >> again) seems to be an indication of unnecessary complexity. > > I assert that it is really a fundamental lack of understanding of > collections and multiple-membership that is a fault. They don't > understand why there are two actions so it seems redundant. Is there > some place where the "over and over again" question keeps coming up? > Perhaps it should be part of the FAQ rather than attempting to fix a > non-problem.
Sure, I'll buy that. And I also think that the software should do its best to help the user understand these two distinctions, rather than expecting them to have read a FAQ before they can safely delete (or remove) an entry. As I said before, there's an easy way to resolve this. Watch users work, and see if they trip up over this. >> As for adding pop-ups, I'm suggesting it be a conditional popup with a >> default so that it's only one additional keystroke if you want to >> remove from multiple collections. > > Pop-up dialogs disorient and confuse new users and annoy power users, > eventually people just mindlessly click through them. Read through the > 15 years of users studies that have already been done on the antivirus > and web browser pop-ups and see that adding the pop-ups actually made > the users less secure because they get in a habit of clicking through > them. Look at the 5% of the people who liked Clippy, now questions from > 5% of your users seems like a lot but it is nothing compared hatred > incurred by the other 95% of the people. Come on, now. Point me to the user study that says that _all_ pop-ups hurt usability or are counter to expert usage, and I will happily shut up. I'm totally sensitive to your point. Believe it or not, I hate superfluous pop-ups also. But discounting the very notion of them as always hurting expert usage seems a bit extreme, wouldn't you agree? =Eugene -- ====================================================================== Eugene Eric Kim ................................ http://xri.net/=eekim Blue Oxen Associates ........................ http://www.blueoxen.com/ ====================================================================== _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list unsubscribe here: http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/chandler-users Chandler wiki: http://chandlerproject.org/wikihome
