[PLUG] CUPS, Commentary on Crappy UI

[Rich Shepard]

On Mon, 22 Mar 2004, Bill Spears wrote:

> I came across these links to commentaries by Eric Raymond about his
> similar experience with CUPS in which he says that we will have to make
> software much more discoverable and transparent if we want it to be widely
> used.

  It's too bad that it takes someone of ESR's stature to get a positive
response from folks like those at Easy Software. I went through the same
nonsense a few years ago. But, I discovered that configuring CUPS through
the command line interface didn't work; I _had_ to use the BUI to do the
job.

  This is, unfortunately, another validation of why developers should never
write documentation. They cannot see the software from the naive users'
perspective. In the late 80s I wrote a database program and asked a friend
at work to give it a usability test for me. He crashed it almost
immediately! I was watching at the time and asked him why he did what he
did. He shrugged and said it seemed like a fun thing to try. Well, with
Fred's help I blocked all the possible wrong things a user could do that
didn't even occur to me. It was a very good lesson, though.

Rich

-- 
Dr. Richard B. Shepard, President
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>