Mike McCarty wrote:
Tim wrote:
Tim:
A good GUI shouldn't need documentation, though; it should explain
itself intuitively, and provide some hints for the more difficult
bits.
akonstam@xxxxxxxxxxx
I have an ex-student who made a claim like this recently. His company
produces a product that needs no documentation. It is "intuitively
obvious" he says.
Balderdash. I am still waiting for the program that needs no
documentation.
Then it's not a "good GUI". :-\ I did say a good GUI shouldn't need
it, I didn't say all GUIs are good. A lot are quite crap, like the two
examples I gave.
ANY significant system needs documentation. I take it that the only
good GUI is a trivial, useless one, then.
On the other side of the coin, a lot of non-GUI programs are crap to use
for similar reasons: Unintuitive ways of working, requires
documentation to understand how to use them, and the documentation is
poor.
Nobody has said otherwise, AFAIK.
Mike
You can't make a one size fits all gui. What's intuitive to one person
might be obscure to someone else. Everybody's expectations are
different, where you would expect to find Preferences... (assuming they
are even called that) might be the last place I'd look. Much as I hate
to say it, that's one thing we have to thank Microsoft for. Windows has
moulded the expectations of the great unwashed to understand
"intuitively" how to work PC software. That means the need for
documentation has perhaps reduced but certainly not eliminated. If a
piece of software I install doesn't have a help file, it's instant
deinstall and no correspondence will be entered into.
