Re: The Revenge of the Geeks
Date: Tue, 05 Feb 2013 01:57:12 -0600
Message-ID: <keqe3l$2nk$1_at_news.albasani.net>
On 2/4/2013 5:28 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
> On 2/4/2013 5:09 PM, Gene Wirchenko wrote:
>> On Fri, 01 Feb 2013 20:12:39 -0500, Arne Vajhøj <arne_at_vajhoej.dk>
>> wrote:
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>>> By the judgement of the author or by the judgement of
>>> neutral judges??
>>
>> Who cares about neutral judges? How about someone with some skin
>> in?
>>
>> I maintain an in-house client billing app that has a form for
>> handling invoicing. There are 34 buttons for various general
>> functions that one might want to do and for each work order being
>> presented, there are two or three (depends on circumstances) more
>> buttons. This is the sort of design that could get submitted to the
>> Interface Hall of Shame.
>>
>> However, and this is a big however, it makes invoicing fairly
>> easy. The owner of the company suggested the general approach. I
>> made it work. He uses it for invoicing, and when I was working Down
>> There, I was doing invoicing with it as well. It works and works
>> well.
>>
>> But a neutral judge might choke on the buttons.
>
> I doubt it. Good UX is different for different types
> of people. People that use an app a lot is known to prefer
> to have as much functionality as possible directly
> accessible without going through too much hassle.
>
could be.
I generally prefer keyboard shortcuts for a lot of things, and in general am not a fan of "wall of buttons" style GUIs, but don't really exactly think keyboard shortcuts are any one-true-user-input either.
> And anyway it is not really your idea, so you do not risk
> your judgement to be influenced by owners pride. The owner
> may be a poor judge as it is his baby.
>
yeah, I am the user of a lot of my own stuff, so can't really be called a neutral-observer here here, and generally felt it pointless to try to argue over whether or not I can judge myself objectively... dealt with this problem enough even trying to resolve something as simple as personality type... (though on this one I did eventually settle on ISTP as probably most-likely-correct, despite so often coming off so much like an INTx...).
but, yeah, I can claim to have good luck with my stuff, and whether or not other people think it is all crap, oh well, either way...
as for determining whether or not a person is acting in accordance with their own best interests is, however, a similarly difficult problem, as is determining exactly what ones' best interests actually *are* (like, with the potential of inefficiency and opportunity cost and so on, leading to the issue that even a generally effective course of action may not necessarily be optimal).
it seems that a person either ends up with potentially mutually contradictory conclusions (where the "self-interest value" becomes context-dependent), or has to deal with the ugly issue of (often arbitrary) "intrinsic properties", and the issue that there is no good way to validate whether "intrinsic worth" actually has worth, and if a person defines it in terms of self-benefit (or some other similar metric), they are right back where they started. (stupid philosophical logic circles...).
easier just to be like "well, it works for me".
it is generally much more effective IME to argue about things that can be tested and measured.
elsewhere, I managed to get into an argument with people between storing images in PNG and JPEG, vs using DDS.
I personally prefer PNG and JPEG...
some people insisted though that DDS was essentially the "one true graphics format" and that PNG and JPEG and similar are essentially "legacy formats".
I disagreed...
there are plenty of reasons to prefer something like PNG or JPEG over something like DDS or BMP or similar.
and, there are measurable reasons to prefer something like PNG or JPEG over DDS or BMP as well, ...
well, and there is always WDP / JXR (HD Photo / JPEG-XR)...
but, alas... Received on Tue Feb 05 2013 - 08:57:12 CET