unity-design team mailing list archive

[Scott Kitterman <ubuntu@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Frederik Nnaji" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 22:30, Scott Kitterman <ubuntu@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>
>> Not all users have the same level of experience.  That's unavoidable.
>>
>
>that's good, diversity is an asset, not a staller.
>
>
>> In general (not always, but in general) more experienced users will be more
>> like to use more command line tools in their regular use of the system.  As
>> a
>> result, I think it's a safe assumption that the typical command line user
>> knows more about the system than one would consider normal for GUI based
>> tools.
>>
>
>Yep, makes sense to me..
>
>
>> More experienced users tend to find excessive warnings about things that
>> are
>> generally well understood to be off-putting.Adding them as Ubuntu specific
>> changes reinforces the notion that Ubuntu is only for beginners and not for
>> people who know what they are doing.  We don't want that.
>>
>> So feel free to put all the training wheels you think are needed in the
>> GUI,
>> but don't extend the same concepts to the command line.
>>
>
>I understand your position and i agree with most of it, too.
>While we surely share the same opinion on much of what has been discussed
>here, i am developing a mental model of how there can be a learnable,
>consistent and semantically correct symmetry between command line interface
>and graphical user interface..
>
>The foundation of my unborn brainchild is that a dialog is a dialog, whether
>in a GUI or in the CLI.. perhaps i'm going too far with my thinking


Text always appears in a context.  Dialogue needs to work in the context it's presented. Part of the context is that provided by the user. Part of it is the visual context.  So because the target CLI user is somewhat different than the target GUI user and because the presentation and interaction are also different it's quite reasonable we would want different text.

Scott K