[TYPO3-hci] Let's try to aks the users!

[Michael Scharkow]

JoH wrote:

> "less ways to do it" doesn't go well with "great variety.
> IMHO it's one of the major advantages of TYPO3 that there is always more
> than one way leading to the same goal.

This may be okay for templating etc. but for UI it just means inconsistency.

> I would prefer "more possibilities to disable/enable different ways of doing
> things".
> This way we could have a fully blown feature rich TYPO3 for the power user
> as well as the minimalistic one way solution for the anxious newbie.

The problem is that 99% of the end users don't know or care that button 
X can actually be disabled, etc. I think even in this list when people 
complain about the BE being too complex for beginners, most of them 
haven't actually seen a properly configured BE (which *can* be done with 
TSConfig).

I think a UI design goal must be that even with a full-blown BE, simple 
tasks must be easy to do, stuff that belongs together must appear 
together, redudancy must be avoided.

This has nothing to do with removing actual features which I don't want 
to (except if they're obsoleted by other features).

> Even though I have to admit that these things could still be improved.
> Maybe it's a good idea to change the default behaviour of the backend just
> by enabling different features that are already there but not very well
> known to most of the users.
> Things like "save and new", page uids in front of the titles in the page
> tree, editing more than one content element at once, predefined actions of
> the most common tasks ... the list is almost endless.

Ack, there are best practices of BE configuration now, but they are not 
obvious enough, and they require more efforts than even most agencies 
seem to be willing or able to deliver to their customers. I've got the 
impression that in most cases, the people deploying TYPO3 only care 
about FE features and templating and extension, whereas the completely 
configurable BE is neglected and *then* people start complaining about 
UI complexity.

> TYPO3 has got it's own style and IMHO we should try to keep it that way,
> since this has been a part of the success story during the last few years.
> Improving things should never lead to a loss of identity.
> So we should not try to do it _like_ the others do, we should try to do it
> even better!

Right, I find the actual Joomla UI not very intuitive, but I like the 
colorful buttons ;)

> I like the idea of having a special "bugtracker" to get the most popular
> features on a wishlist.

I fear that a lot of requested stuff is already possible but obscure...

Greetings,
Michael