On 13 May 2020, Andreas Röhler wrote:
Agree with everything beside two last paragraphs. Enjoying the
possibilities to extend and assisting new users being productive seems
no contradiction. May you give an example where an smooth entrance
hinders the power of more complex functionality?
The newcomer-vs-expert tradeoff is real, and it's pervasive throughout UI and
UX design.
One example is button-based functionality. For both experts and newcomers,
those buttons/icons take away screen real estate -- but for newcomers they make
features easier to find, so it's worth it. For experts, they *just* take away
screen real estate, while providing little or no benefit.
Use of small symbols to indicate state in the modeline is another area. Experienced users know
what "**" in the mode line means, what "%" means, etc. Newcomers are
frequently confused by the mode line; it is noise to them, until they know how to interpret it --
but that takes a bit of investment. Now, we could provide bigger, more verbose signs of current
state -- but then we'd be taking away screen real estate again.
Another area is the keybinding space and the minibuffer. Just about every time
I have watched a new user use Emacs, I have noticed how frequently they
accidentally hit some key combination or sequence and wind up in some weird
state that they never meant to be in -- and don't know how to get out of.
Often they have minibuffer prompts sitting around all the time, and are unaware
that Emacs is asking them for some piece of information (after all, the user
didn't mean to put Emacs into that state and has no idea she did so). But
having those keybindings available is *good* for experts, as we know from
personal experience.
I could go on. I've taught many newcomers to Emacs, and often the things that
are hardest for them are exactly the things that are *good* for the experienced
user.
These design tradeoffs cannot be avoided. It would be a fallacy to think that
it's always possible to be *both* maximally newcomer-friendly and
investor-friendly.
(The term "user-friendly" is itself misleading. There is no such thing as "a user" in a way that makes the term "user-friendly"
meaningful. Better terms would at least attempt to make important distinctions -- "newcomer-friendly", "expert-friendly",
"ADHD-friendly", "limited-movement-friendly", "visually-impaired-friendly", etc -- and would encourage designers to understand
that being good in some categories means being bad in others.)
Best regards,
-Karl