[TYPO3-hci] The Paradox of Choice

[Lasse Norby]

Hi Joey

I gotta ask you - who is the typo3 end user?
Is it you - "the typo3 specialized (and certified) developer", or is it 
your client?
IMHO it's your client..
You may chose to call her "dumb", but I would simply call her "not very 
interested". She buys a content management system from you, with one 
single purpose in mind; to easily and effectively manage the content on 
her website. That's all! She doesn't care about the magic behind the 
curtains, and she certainly doesn't care if it has 100.000 thousand 
features, endless possibilities and multiple ways of doing things - at 
least not as much as you care, that's for sure! She simply expects it to 
work, the way she expects it to work, so she can get on with other 
business.
But sadly typo3 doesn't always live up to the expectations. Heck - I'm 
too *dumb* to fully grasp the ideas behind many things in typo3.
If only things behave the way most expect them to, it would also be more 
powerful to many more. Ease of use = power! :-)

 > But it seems that you are just following a trend that can be noticed in
 > almost every area of life: In many western countries the average Joe 
is less
 > skilled than he has been 20 or 30 years ago. Instead of improving the
 > education of all these average Joes, they just dumb down the whole system
 > including the language to make sure that the same number of students will
 > get a final college degree. Today there are students at German 
universities
 > with average skills below those of a secondary school student of the 
early
 > 80s.

Here in denmark our youngsters are "punked" for not being as skilled in 
spelling, math's etc as they were 20-30 years ago. And at the moment 
denmark is *only* nr. 5 or 6 in europe in these skills...
Well - maybe our tools simply got better?
Today we have MS Word or OpenOffice which both includes an excellent 
spell checker. So the importance and benefits of being a good speller 
isn't what it used to be, cause it doesn't really matter anymore. What 
matters today is the end result.
Was the average Joe 20 or 30 years ago as skilled a "farmer" or "hunter" 
as our forefathers? I don't think he was. It simply wasn't a useful 
skill to have anymore as our tools for farming and hunting have been 
vastly improved.
Point is that average Joe's of today have sooo many other useful skills 
that weren't even known 20 - 30 years ago.
Today it's a skill to find information on the web - quick.
It's a skill to be able to "network".
It's a skill to be able to keep many balls in the air - at once.
It's evolution baby! And evolution doesn't care how you spell! It just 
want to see results!

 > If the understanding of "improving the usability" in this team is 
"dumb it
 > down until everbybody can use it" I think I am wasting my time here.

The way I understand "improving the usability" is "smarten it up so that 
average joe can use it effectively - and brilliant johnny finds and uses 
the advanced features if he needs to".
This doesn't mean sacrificing anything, but rather hiding some things 
away until needed. In a smart and effective way.

cheers!
Lasse