Preferences dialog suggestions

[Ross Boylan]

A couple of comments:

First, 
On Sat, Oct 19, 2002 at 03:41:13AM -0700, Chris Lyttle wrote:
> 3) Advanced Preferences button - Add this to General, when checked shows
> extra tab with more complicated prefs settings called 'Advanced'.
> 
This strikes me as a very unintuitive interface, if I understand it.
You have one tab, which has a button.  If you press the button, you
get more tabs.  I think this  connection is too buried to be useful,
and is not in most people's expectations of how user interfaces behave.
Surely if you just have a tab called Advanced (or several with names
like Advanced X) the naive user will be happy to leave them alone?


Second, on the interesting point of knowing what the average user
wants, if someone were ambitious they could collect info on user prefs
and send them back.  I know: big hassle, privacy concerns,... Just a
thought.


Finally, on the whole usability debate, I'd like to repeat a tale from
"The Inmates are Running the Asylumn" (?).  Someone had an app which
was very powerful and had lots of features.  Usability studies found
most users were confused.  They redesigned it, stripping out a lot of
the complexity.  Note that this is the feared case of actually
removing functionality.  Back to the usability labs: they had people
use the old and the new version.  Users not only liked the new version
better; they thought it was *more* powerful.  The lesson is that
excessive complexity, which seems as if it is offering more choices,
can actually end up hiding capabilities.