Re: it just works

[Russ Urquhart russurquhart1@xxxxxxxx]

Two points that were made:

On Mar 3, 2006, at 9:00 AM, Patricia M. Godfrey wrote:
>
>  things that are easily intuited are intuitable.
> > A command line interface can fulfill this requirement, too,
> > provided the commands and syntax are consistent and predictable.
> Amen.
I agree with these, but just wanted to make a comment or two.
There were a couple of items I always try and remember from Alan
Cooper's Ui book, About Face. (I'd quote directly from it, but my ex-
boss still has my copy.) According to Cooper, users will use an
interface if it closely matches how they THINK the software works.
This is an important distinction, for me, because software can be
consistent yet not be as useable. (That's why I understand what
people mean when they say consistent, but don't like to use the word
myself.) To use Patricia's word, if an interface more closely matches
the user's mental model of how they think things work, then the
software is more intuitable. (Did I use that properly Patricia?)

The other point Cooper mentioned, about the Mac, but i think it can
be applied to any type of software (command line or GUI). He said
that the success of the early Mac's at least, was NOT that everything
used GUI's and Icons and pictures that looked like a printer,
document, folder, etc. The success was that the interface and how the
command worked within that interface created, for the new user, a
small but well defined vocabulary that, once discovered, could be
used to discover the rest of OS and how to use their computer.
Especially for the early Mac's I think this is true. (Some of the
later OSes have acquired some cruft to them, and could be a little
tighter, IMO.) This is also, IMO, the distinction and what developers
should strive for in an application/OS rather than just create an
icon or picture for EVERYTHING. Just making everything graphical is
not the answer. And the Mac OS, at least the early OS and some of the
new OS X, is not just making everything graphical.
 
With that said, I think this idea can, then, also be applied to
command line apps. I've seen it in action. When i worked for a
networking company here in Richardson Tx, Alcatel, all of the network
elements (NE's) that they made had a command line interface. The
breadth of commmands that you had to know to use these NE's was very
small. (There was a multitude of parameters you could give to a
command, but you probably only actually knew four or five commands.)
Now, across ALL those NE's, the commands were the same, with slight
parameter differences for the specific NE. This worked fine for all
the user's of this NE.
When the group i worked with went about designing a universal GUI for
all these devices, they had a lot of problems, especially in trying
to cover ALL permutations of commands and parameters. To make a long
story short, they were over budget, and out of time, and ended up
putting a command line interface into their GUI! :)

FWIW,

Russ