[Freedombox-discuss] Natural market for Freedom Box, responsive interfaces

[Nick Daly]

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Chris Hall writes:

> A lot of new users will be completely baffled and frustrated by the same
> interface a knowledgeable user finds fairly acceptable, now that they
> know how to use it, and that a developer considers completely intuitive.
>
> The path from new and frustrated to knowledgeable and accepting is via
> 'discoverability'.
>
> ...My experience is that while there is no single interface that makes
> everybody happy, no perfect solution, I think we all realize some are
> better than others, and we will most certainly tend to favor, and use,
> the ones we are comfortable with.

I'm with you on promoting a discoverable UI, but there's some trouble in
the fact that nobody can agree on what "discoverability" actually is in
the real world.  I've seen people quite, equally, angry toward both the
Android and iPhone UIs, both of which are designed to be the most
approachable UIs available (YouTube also has some great examples of a
Metro UI getting thrown across a room, IIRC).

Thus, discoverability is closely tied in with education and expectation
setting: a user who knows what to try to discover will be a lot happier
than one who doesn't.  Somewhere, there's a great Gimp triangle: UIs can
be made any two of discoverable, efficient, or memorable, but balancing
all three is difficult.  Jonas would say this work needs to land on the
2.0 release, and I agree, *but* that doesn't mean we can't start working
or raising awareness now.  You just need to keep in mind that it'll be a
bit before that becomes a focus for most people actively hacking on the
project.

I'll publish new images tonight, and you'll be able to run Plinth in a
Virtualbox VM and access it through your browser.  If you have UI
feedback, that would be a good target.  Keep in mind that everything's
incomplete, right now, so don't be disappointed if you have a lot of
feedback to give.

Nick
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