Guy Harris wrote:
On Feb 4, 2004, at 2:26 PM, Ulf Lamping wrote:
BUT: don't hide that possibility to novice users! They might have
very different needs compared to yours and might find colorfilters
*very* useful for their needs,
There's a difference between finding color filters useful and finding
a particular *set* of color filters useful.
I don't think anybody's arguing that color filters are never useful to
anybody.
I'm just not yet convinced that we can supply a set of color filters
that will be sufficiently generally useful. If 99% of the users end
up creating their own color filters and throwing away the pre-supplied
ones, it's not clear that it was worth supplying them....
The difference is, that they actually start to do it, see below...
If the underlying problem is just that people don't know that they
*can* color the display, then
1) I don't know that supplying a standard set of color filters
will help much - the user might well just assume that we've hard-wired
the colors into the system, and *still* end up frequently asking the
list how to color the display the way *they* want;
At least in my oppinion, it's one step in the right direction, see below...
2) that sounds more like a documentation issue.
My oberservation to this thing is:
When users start with a new program, they just play around with things.
If they get to a dialog box with some examples, they might play with the
values in it.
For example as they don't want break up things, they usually start with
copying a set and modifying the settings, try to see what the
differences are.
If it's not work as they expected, *then* they start to read the
documentation or starting to ask someone (like me).
When I first started to provide Ethereal to some users (about two years
ago), I got no responses from them, except installation questions for
quite a while.
I saw on the screens, that no one used the colorization feature.
Then I provided my set of settings to the users, including my personal
colorization settings. Now I see, that a lot of my users are starting to
create their own
filters, with some very interesting settings. When I asked them why they
didn't started before, in *all* cases the answer was: "there was simply
a blank dialog box,
and I didn't know where to start with it"
So my opinion is: let the people start to play with things, then they
also start to read the documentation, it's not the other way round. If
you first have to read lot's of
documentation you probably simply won't do it.
Regards, ULFL