[squeak-dev] Re: UI design

Hannes Hirzel hannes.hirzel at gmail.com
Thu Apr 8 20:27:12 UTC 2010


On 4/8/10, radoslav hodnicak <rh at 4096.sk> wrote:
>
> Yeah but that was back when people actually read stuff. They don't seem to
> do that anymore.
> In the past year or so I started using several new (to
> me) quite complex products, and I didn't read the documentation to *any*
> of them.

Yes, going for a first run. But later on I like to have something at hand.
In particular summaries and cheat sheets.

What about including the Terse Guide to Squeak?

http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5699

> I expected them (products) to be designed in an intuitive enough way so that
> I can learn along as I'm using them.

> Even when I got stuck with something,
> I went to look to the forums, youtube, tutorials, whatever before I turned
> to the written documentation coming with the product (if at all).

I consider a tutorial to be part of the product documentation. And the
Pharoistas seemingly do that as well.... :-)

> Give me a well designed product without a manual and I'll be happy using
> it.
> Give me a badly designed product and I'll find something else to do.
> The manual isn't the deciding factor.

What I always liked about Perl is that it had and has a good
documentation. (I see your comment forthcoming ... :-)

And let's repeat what is written below

"UI design is documentation."

As for 4.1 the UI design has much improved. In particular I like the search box.

Hannes



> On Thu, 8 Apr 2010, Randal L. Schwartz wrote:
>
>>>>>>> "Frank" == Frank Shearar <frank.shearar at angband.za.org> writes:
>>
>>>> [...] UI design is documentation.
>>
>> Frank> Can I have that on a T-shirt, please? Because that's one awesome
>> Frank> sentence.
>>
>> Back when I was first learning technical writing from some very smart
>> people, our mantra was:
>>
>>  The manual *is* the product.
>>
>> As in, if it's not documented, it *doesn't* exist for the user.  And if
>> it's a good product but badly documented, it will be *perceived* as a
>> bad product.
>>
>> --
>> Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777
>> 0095
>> <merlyn at stonehenge.com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
>> Smalltalk/Perl/Unix consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc.
>> See http://methodsandmessages.vox.com/ for Smalltalk and Seaside
>> discussion



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