> One important take away [...] is that people love sticking to the old way of doing things, even if there's an easier, new way to do it.
I think "ease of use" is highly attribute, enormously dependent on the expectations and workflows a user has already learned.
If there is an arcane mouse gesture/shortcut/menu item/cmd command that a user knows very clearly how to use and a simple-looking button with unclear purpose, then for that user the former is probably a lot easier to use.
I see by the “programmers” the opposite: see Gnome KDE etc. The normal user would like to have desktop icons. The programmers make a GUI but probably never leave the terminal so they don’t care. The users would like to drag the border of the window to resize. The “programmers” again resize only their terminal windows with some arcane keyboard combination so they leave the border 1 pixel wide. See recent HN about new Ubuntu version for more of such insanity.
Disclaimer: a user if Linux who wants to use desktop and drag the window borders and scrollers. For Gnome I’ve wasted so much time to achieve that. A normal user can’t do that.
This is more a phenomenon of the UNIX developer culture than other desktop environments.
I came to realize that the only care to be around programmers that do care about UI/UX experience and hanging out with designers is to be on the Apple, Google, Microsoft platforms.
Check on each of their conferences how many UI/UX sessions are there and how many show up on a random UNIX conference.
That's particularly interesting, because I wrote an XFCE theme in order to get:
- 1 pixel wide window borders (left/right/bottom)
- big thick corners to grab with the mouse
- and an aesthetically pleasing (to me) titlebar that is high contrast when not the focus (because that's when you're looking for a new window to select) and medium contrast when it is the focus (because most of the time you already know what you're typing into).
I think "ease of use" is highly attribute, enormously dependent on the expectations and workflows a user has already learned.
If there is an arcane mouse gesture/shortcut/menu item/cmd command that a user knows very clearly how to use and a simple-looking button with unclear purpose, then for that user the former is probably a lot easier to use.