[Seaside] Re: Rails and Seaside

Marcus Denker denker at iam.unibe.ch
Mon Jan 16 18:40:21 CET 2006


On 16.01.2006, at 18:20, Blanchard, Todd wrote:

> The usual rule of thumb in this community is "no bitching unless  
> you want to work on the solution".
>

But with the UI, it's quite hard to get people that are already in  
the community to accept any change.

Part of it is wrongly understood admiration for Alan, the reasoning  
seems to be that a system designed by
the team of the inventor of the modern UI can't be bad or even if  
it's bad that changing it would be an affront
against somebody (or something along that line).

The other is that people are used to have a system where you have a  
destinction between those who
"get it" (the enlightened) and those who don't (the dumb ones). And  
it's quite cool to be part of the
enlightened, and discuss in the small community of equals how dumb  
everybody else is. A off-putting
user interface helps a lot to keep the number of enlightend small,  
which is good.

The third is that people are just used to the interface "The green  
browser is good for you", they tell you,
  "You can use the color to distinguish the type of window, that's an  
important feature, it improves
productivity".  Ahh... well.

I allways tell them to ask people who have not used the system 5  
years to see the emotional reaction.
"Wow, that looks cool, I want to learn that!". No? Then we surely  
have the wrong interface.

      Marcus


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