[TriLUG] redhat-config-network question

[Brent Fox]

On Thu, 2003-02-27 at 23:52, Ilan Volow wrote:
> Regarding BlueCurve: Consistency is important. But just because you make
> something look consistent with something else does not mean that you
> have made it act consistent. Just because you have blended look does not
> mean that you have blended feel. Appearance does not equal behavior.
> Many UI people will tell you it is worse to have something that looks
> similiar and acts different as opposed to something that looks different
> *and* acts different. When you have two environments that are made to be
> virtually indistinguishable in appearance but behave differently, you
> are basically betraying the end user into thinking that one program will
> have the same sets of behaviors as another. And when these expectations
> about action and consequence are routinely violated, you will have
> anything ranging from an increase in the time and frustration it takes
> to do a task to outright destruction of the work the user has done.
> 
> 
> A perfect example of these differences in behavior would be the file
> dialogs of the two major linux dekstop environments, where KDE's dialog
> has "Ok" and "Cancel" buttons on the left and right, respectively, while
> GNOME has their "Cancel" button on the left and their "Ok" button on the
> right.* 
> 
>        GNOME:        [Cancel]  [Ok]
>        KDE:            [Ok]  [Cancel]
> 
> 
> An example more pertinant to the scenario below would be the "no" and
> "yes" dialog buttons
> 
>        GNOME:          [No]  [Yes]
>        KDE:           [Yes]  [No]
> 
> 
> Now let's say that we have an end user with oodles of experience using
> Dia, a GNOME diagramming program, who decides to try a new piece of
> software he or she hasn't used before, called "KWrite". 
> 
> As the user is writing their term paper with KWrite, they realize that
> their window is not maximized and go to hit the maximize button, which
> is located very dangerously close to the button that tends to quit
> applications (following a UI precdent set by the very same people who
> gave you the talking paper clip). It's 3AM, the term paper is due in 10
> hours, and the end-user is now on their 12th cup of coffee and more
> jittery than a bowl full of Jello on the San Andreas fault line. The
> worse case scenario happens, the end user hits the "Close Window" button
> accidently, and all seems lost. But then, out of nowhere, an "Are you
> sure you want to quit without saving" dialog pops up to save the day!
> The user has only 500 milliseconds to think! Relying on his or her quick
> wits and intuition, the end-user pieces together in 350 milliseconds
> that because the KWrite dialog is aesthetically indistinguishable from
> the Dia dialog in all its BlueCurvey goodness, it must behave in exactly
> the same way! In Dia you save your work from total annihilation by
> answering the question "Do you want to quit without saving" with the
> left button "No", so it must be the exact same for KWrite. Quick, hit
> the left button in KWrite before all is lost.....

> Well, the course was on the literary analysis of J.R.R Tolkien. It'll
> probably be fun to repeat it next semester, anyhow.
> 
> Of course from then on end-user will say to every one they meet "Those
> nasty Redhatses. Steals our precious paper from us, they did. Dirty,
> nasty linux zealotses. They lies to us about linux not being hard to
> use." And then you see them in a Windows XP "switcher" ad 6 months later
> talking about how the made the switch to XP after linux lost their term
> paper.  ;)
> 
> The moral of the story: If you can't make it act 100% the same, don't
> even bother making it look similiar. Consistency in appearance is
> important, but consistency in behavior is several orders of magnitude
> more important than that. At least when something *looks* different
> there is an implication that it will *act* different. 
> 
> When the Red Hat road tour came by NCSU, I tried to explain this to the
> guy that created the whole BlueCurve theme. I was rather disappointed
> that he didn't consider this a big deal. 
> 

I agree with you.  That's a perfect example of inconsistency causing
real problems for a user by violating the principle of least surprise. 
We're nowhere near having a consistent UI at the moment.  It will take a
long time to get there.  Unfortunately it's not something we can
accomplish in one release or even a few releases, so things will be in
an in-between state for a few releases.  Remember, 8.0 was our very
first attempt at this.  We have a long way to go.

It's like the conversion to UTF-8 encoding.  Long term, it's the right
thing to do, but it takes a number of releases to get it done.  It's
painful while the transition is happening, but things will be better
when all text is UTF-8 encoded.


Cheers,
   Brent

> *Some people will take notice of the fact that GNOME recently switched
> the button ordering for their dialogs. This was the right decision to
> make. Apple had originally placed "Cancel" on the left and "Ok" on the
> right because it matches with paradigm in western culture of Negative/Go
> Back actions being on the left (brake pedal, taking screw out, reading
> backwards etc.) and Affirmative/Go ahead (gas pedel, putting screw in,
> reading ahead) on the right. Microsoft switched the ordering because
> they didn't want a lawsuit from apple (fat lot of good that did them).
> KDE copied microsoft because "they've got billions of dollars, so they
> must know what we're doing", and GNOME copied KDE because "they've
> already got a desktop environment out there and running, so they must
> know what they're doing." 
-- 
Brent Fox <bfox at linuxheadquarters.com>