And suddenly everything looks different
Samstag, 31 Januar 2009
It actually started all with a discussion about what a user friendly »computer« was supposed to behave like when, again, I became guilty of upgrading to the latest release of the software, and immersed myself into one of the last real adventures on this planet: What’s the new features, what does the interface look like now and how, provided I like what I see, can I make use of that. It’s a real joy.
However, there’s another, a different point of view and way of dealing with changes. While I cannot deny that I find changes in the software that I use very attractive, others find them very disturbing. They just don’t want to be bothered when it already worked for them. And it seems to be a major annoyance when, like with the release of KDE 4.2 a few days ago the GUI of KMail was almost rendered unusable.
Imagine! All mails gone! There was only grey bars left with a date on it. But the mails – gone. And anyway, the messages in the list look entirely different now. People got used to the way it used to look and now: Forced to rediscover everything! Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit, but not much.
You and me, we sit there and marvel how devs actually manage to get all these improvements done in just so little time. We push a few buttons, click, click and yes, this I’m gonna use and that – not. In short, we fall in love all over again.
And them? Desperation and endless phone calls with their guru on finding the familiar settings again. But isn’t that the users GNU/Linux and KDE want to attract if we file bugreports like that? Maybe the difference is just how people perceive their world. This reminds me on a screencast Wade Olson pasted (or I think it was him) on the planet once. I think this talk tells us a lot about the problem we are facing here.
Because of all of this I was going to write to kde-pim@kde.org to talk about how we could possibly guide our inexperienced users better when »bigger« changes happen to a user interface. But then, this applies to virtually any application in KDE and so I put this up for discussion to the entire community.
In kdepim this is quite straightforward really. There is the welcome message that can be used to display an introduction or overview of the changes to the user interface that needs to be displayed whenever the program was called for the first time after a change in the version number.
A more general approach could be that with every new version something like the tip of the day with an explanation pops up, but that would mean a lot of popping up with every upgrade 
So, what can we do for this group of users so that they can feel properly informed about how to deal with changes? I think there’s a lot to be gained from the point of usability.
The best changes and improvements will be rejected by the users if they don’t understand it.
Tags: KDE, planet-kde
January 31st, 2009 at 11:26
Maybe something like a “first-start-wizard” which shows the changes on one side, but gives also the option to choose the settings that the application looks and works like before. I must admit I was also astonished and had to look how kmail works. What I find even more important was the missing ability to import my old settings. I had to manually copy the config files and cvreate partly the config again (or did I miss an option ?)
greets
sho