On 10 Sep 2008, at 20:41, Steven W Riggins wrote:
I for one, being a Mac user since Feb, 1984, am dismayed at the current state of delivering Mac software. My mom never, ever figures out the drag to apps thing. But she does understand "Double click to install" *for whatever reason*
(Scott, I realise you're saying that this is off topic but it's a user experience design issue which both affects cocoa developers (financially!) and can be affected by cocoa developers)
When I bought Microsoft Office X I found a folder on a CD. No installer. I was confused, since coming from the windows world everything had an installer. I had to read the readme and READ that I should just drag and drop the directory to install on my HD - something I hadn't done since the old Amiga days (and even then before Amiga had an Installer app!).
The point is that that I had to read a help file is a usability failure. I was new to macs but not to computers and I expected "press button to install this" experience.
I was fortunate enough to work for Microsoft at the time and bumped into Ben Waldman, an ex manager in the Mac BU (he may have been the head of the Mac business unit actually). I asked him about this and he said that it was his idea personally to have the drag and drop install, because normal people didn't understand installers.
What is the right thing to do is what the majority of your target audience are comfortable with and that generates the fewest support incidents. If you're producing an IDE then probably a bells-and- whistles installer is good but if you're making a cooking timer then maybe mom would appreciate something simpler (like a physical one that sits on the top of the cooker!).
As an aside, I've always found that the notion of "installing" software is a foreign one to non-computer-literate users. Just think of the experience on a mac - you put the dvd in, run the installer, and then everything disappears. Few installers add stuff to the dock. The user needs to know to fish around in an Applications "folder" (whatever the hell a folder is) for something they might not even know the name of. At least with drag and drop the user knows where they've put stuff to actually use it.
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