[TYPO3-hci] The Paradox of Choice

[Susanne Moog]

Hi Lasse,

Lasse Norby wrote:
> 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.

If your client wants an easy to use content management system it doesn't 
necessarily mean that the cms should be easy to use out of the box but 
that you have to restrict the features fitting for your customers needs 
and knowledge.

As you said in the end of your post I think it is not necessary to dumb 
any features in Typo3 but it would be an improvement if there were 
smarter ways to hide them.


> 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! :-)

Could you give an example on where Typo3 doesn't behave like expected? 
Sorry, I don't get what you mean here.

>  > 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.

Arg. OpenOffice and MS Word have a quite good spell checker, I don't 
want to say anything against that - BUT! it doesn't and cannot find 
every mistake you make especially not the grammatical ones and I think 
everyone should be able to write at least a letter to his or her 
grandmother without making mistakes. Day by day I see mistakes being 
made that could be avoided if the author of those texts just had thought 
a minute instead of leaving the thinking to his computer.

With the same argument you could banish math lessons as your computer 
and your calculator are perfectly able to solve your arithmetic problems.

> 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.
But nearly noone still has the skill to find information without it - 
quick as was possible thirty years ago with a library.

> It's a skill to be able to "network".
That was a skill 20 or 30 years ago, too. It just wasn't called fancy 
networking and you didn't need your computer to do it.

> It's a skill to be able to keep many balls in the air - at once.
There are more people with this skill today as 20 years ago? Interesting.

> It's evolution baby! And evolution doesn't care how you spell! It just 
> want to see results!
I'm quite sure the evolution itself doesn't care how I spell, but it 
doesn't care how I network either.

> 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.

I can nearly agree on this statements but I don't think it is necessary 
that the average joe has an easy interface that comes with the standard 
installation. I think it would improve usability for both categories of 
users if there where more and easier possibilities for customizing the 
interface.

Regards,

Susanne