[haiku] Re: Who is Haiku for?

> I agree with Humdinger that everybody probably wants an easy-to-use
> UI. But I think one of the problems is that most of the geeks are
> unable to look at it from something else than their own perspective.
> If they can use the UI effectively they're sure that it's perfect for
> everybody. They don't mind reading manuals so they assume that anyone
> can and wants to read a manual to figure something out. And of course,
> many seem to believe that interaction design is only about choosing
> colours and deciding if buttons should be square or rounded.

This is not at all how I think when building an interface. I'm
somewhere around 0.5 myself, but I know it's very important to design
a graphical UI properly. A good UI should allow :
-Simplicity : this is for level 3 users. Not too much buttons, only
put what's really needed.
-Discoverability : this is for level 2 users : allow to find advanced
features with menus, label keyboard shortcuts and not hide them
-Efficience : for level 1 : allow to do everything with keyboard shortcuts
-CLI binding for level 0 : allow to do everything from command line
for easy scripting.

Haiku manages to have all of them quite well, actually. The CLI
binding is totally unobtrusive (think of commands like hey or alert).
Discoverability comes from both simplicity and efficience if you mic
them properly. Avoid having an "advanced" button hiding anything
complex, and it's fine.

-- 
Adrien Destugues / PulkoMandy
Elève ingénieur ENSSAT EII1- www.enssat.fr
GSoC student for Haiku - http://haiku-os.org
GrafX2 project team - http://code.google.com/p/grafx2

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