[TYPO3-hci] The Paradox of Choice

[Andreas Balzer]

JoH asenau schrieb:
>>> No. - And I can explain why ...
>>> I am the end user of TYPO3 and I use it to create something for my
>>> client he/she can work with. The clients are only using a very small
>>> part of the system which is necessary to add, delete and/or edit
>>> different elements (content, news, sometimes users and newsletters).
>>>
>> Hm.. I'm an end user too. And i'm my own client ;) I see every part of
>> T3, and i'm using many functions too, because I have to manage a
>> website of our school.. ..as a pupil, not as a person of a web
>> company.
> 
> But I guess that you don't see yourself as a DAU who is just able to handle
> a simple mail client, do you?
> 
>>> The major part of TYPO3 will remain unseen for those clients so _if_
>>> you want to call them "end users", they are end users of the editing
>>> features.
>> I'm editing many different pages per day.. Maybe 20.
> 
> So you are an end user.
> 
>>> They will never change a template, be it pure TS ore TV based, they
>>> will
>> I'm redesigning more than 50 DIN A 4 pages of pure TS. Believe me..
> 
> So you are an admin too and you need a lot more skills than those pupils who
> are just editors, don't you?
> 
>> End users do things like that ;)
> 
> No - admins do things like that.
> 
>>> never use the kickstarter, they will never touch a constant. They
>>> will never use all the other features outside the editors view.
>> I used kickstarter and it crashed my server..  I won't use it again..
> 
> Should not happen with the kickstarter - you should definitely give it
> another try when you want to create a new extension.
> 
>> You see.. It's only about who cares on the website. I mean I'm not
>> doing my own website, but I'm part of the editor team and so I'm an
>> end user. The same for a person which just creates a blog or
>> something else.
>>
>> There are people who create sites on their own, and there are people
>> who ask a company do manage it.. However: T3 should be able to be
>> handled by both types of persons.
> 
> But you have to admit that someone, who is going to handle all this stuff on
> his own, is a lot more than just a simple end user. It doesn't matter if the
> people who are managing the system are coming from an external company or
> from your school. In both cases they need a lot of experience and more than
> just basic knowledge about webservers, databases, PHP, HTML, CSS and all the
> other stuff which is necessary to run a TYPO3 system.
> IMHO we can expect this kind of people to be able and willing to understand
> more complex things than a simple editor. We can expect them to have enough
> knowledge to understand the different approaches to solve the same tasks and
> to choose the one that fits their needs best.
> 
> This is why I don't like the "many options = bad usability" paradigm.
> It is only true for those people who are confused when they have to make a
> decision for the right way to go - if such a person is working as an admin
> IMHO it is the wrong person
> for this job.
> 
> Joey
> 
well but what about if you have to manage such a website
  and actually you're not an admin? If you have to learn everything by 
yourself, because there's noone telling you: "This works like this and 
if you want to do that thing, you have to click here, here and then on 
this icon...." What about if there's noone who helping you, because you 
don't know, that there's such a great mailinglist and chat community?

In fact you'll open a browserwindow and you see hundreds of tiny icons 
and somewhere between there's the link to a documentation. (Of course 
you had read that before..)

As a newbee, you start to work like the documentation said. You have 
exactly done step 1, step 2, step 3 and all the others. OK.. Fine. 
Worked. But what if the first documentation said "Do it this way", and 
the next says "Do it that way!"? You'll start to think about: "Why 
should I do this that way now and not the way i used to do it? What's 
the difference?" Well, there's noone telling you.. So actually you try. 
But in many ways you do not succeed.. So what about if such a person 
(call it a DAU person at the beginning) has to become an admin very 
quickly? Wordpress is intuitive. See it, start it using. T3 is more 
like: See it, SHOCK and read thousand pages of documentations. Well I 
read those docs (and every entry in the mailinglists) for about 3 years 
to be able to manage such a T3 installation. And I did not start with 
extension programming yet.

So I guess we can't expect, that every user knows, how T3 works.. T3 has 
to be intuitive and in my opinion 'intuitive' means as less icons as 
possible, but with many 'advanced' buttons..

I mean Windows doesn't show the control panel on your desktop, does it? 
In fact the first thing that you see if you have just installed Windows 
is a simple and easy to use tour (it even starts automaticly! :D). After 
you have succeeded or canceled the  tour, you see a blank desktop. Every 
of the trillions of possibilities Windows offers are hided at the 
beginning, but accessible with the start menu.

Would they have chosen to display a blank desktop at the beginning, if 
"many options [at startup] = bad usuability" would not be true?

Just a thought.

Andreas