"We must make Photoshop dramatically more configurable," Nack said. "Presenting the same user experience to a photographer as we do to a radiologist, as to a Web designer, as to a prepress guy, is kind of absurd...With the power of customizability, we can present solutions via task-oriented workspaces"
"We're already making the code modular so that people aren't running what they don't need," Nack said. "Now we need to follow up at the user experience level, so that people don't have to wade through anything not geared towards the task at hand."
interesting, because that's one of the goals with plasma for the desktop. some work was done last night to get the zooming working a bit more the way we want it to, and that'll be an integral part of this approach. though that is probably not directly applicable to photoshop type apps, the idea of zoom-n-pan for tool discovery might not be a completely bad idea to experiment with.
Nack also noted that this won't result in a faster application when measured in clock-cycles, but that the improvements will come when measuring user interaction and perception. when one has to choose between the two, making the user move faster is more important than making the software move faster. that is because the point of software used by people (versus software that cranks through computations or transactions) is to benefit the person using it. making the computer work harder so the user doesn't have to is really the entire point. i feel we kind of lost track of that idea over the last 20 or so years of client computing.
to head off the obvious comments here: this isn't an excuse to ignore performance, but it is a guideline for when to sacrifice performance. at the same time, there are many techniques that can be applied to software designs of this sort that keep them reasonably performant, especially when the design allows software to be easily targeted towards specific use cases (meaning less baggage carried along the way and distancing expensive assumptions away from the core).
3 comments:
This is a really good point. Being a web app developer, this is something that I have think about all the time. With browsers taking *atleast* 2-4 seconds to load a simple page, I often try to find ways to minimize the depth of the navigation tree (I often deal with web apps containing hundreds of pages). If it took 2-4 seconds for desktop applications to respond to clicks, I bet we'd demand more "Speed of Use" over "Speed of Calculation."
I agree on this point as well. It seems that so many people are concentrating over the processing power used that they forget to simplify the means of getting to the method. It's useless to load things in a faster time if it takes you longer to use the tool than the speed gained by the faster calculations. A great example of this is within the mentioned software, Photoshop. If you go to use a filter, it often takes longer to find your filter than to apply it.
I haven't had a chance to try out the desktop zoom yet. Hopefully I'll be able to soon.
I've recently discovered, and very much like, the approach taken by the One Laptop Per Child project on the topic of Zooming.
The kind of zooming that you describe for Plasma is called "semantic zoom": zooming out doesn't just make things smaller, it also changes their iconic representation.
The OLPC uses four zoom levels: Activity (= application), Home (= desktop), Groups (known people, filtered by relevance) and Neighbourhood (all known people).
The main advantage of this approach is that it doesn't force the user to manage the groups of elements/tasks/plasmoids. It provides sensible default groups for common situations, related both to individual and social tasks.
If you just provide a powerful classification tool, but doesn't create good defaults, most people just won't use it. This is what happened to virtual desktops in the last 10 years; even Apple hasn't got it right yet in Leopard.
Only if you show a good example of what can be done with the tool, people will understand how (and why!) it should be used, and explore its possibilities tweaking it to their necessities.
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