> > The premise of your proposal is that users will notice that there's > > extra information, know what to do with it, and do the right thing, > > with reasonable consistency. ... > > Each of those conditionals will not actually be satisfied. User's > > tend not to notice such things. The tend not to understand what > > they mean. Even when they understand, they tend to evaluate > > choices poorly. They tend to apply choices inconsistently. > > Yes, yes, yes, and yes (all modulo "are we letting 'perfect' be the > enemy of 'better'?" -- you have a *really* dim view of the average > users' capabilities!)
I think Dave's dim view is pretty much accurate, though I can't show that in any concrete way. But the more important point is that you're presupposing that the changes are "better", and my contention is that we don't know enough about UI design and user experience to say that. To people like you and me, it's clear that giving more information -- and especially such important information as this! -- is better. But that's not really true, and even information that we think is essential... is actually confusing to non-technical users. Here I can cite studies; I have one that looked at browser cues such as the lock symbol, and found that users so misunderstand the lock symbol that they (1) think a lock symbol on the web page itself is *better* than one in the browser frame (that's quite backward), (2) don't know what the lock symbol is telling them *at all*, and have various cockamamie ideas about what it means, and so on. We have to be very careful about such changes, and not assume that we know what's better. Barry _______________________________________________ dmarc mailing list dmarc@ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/dmarc