"Chris Mellon" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > You repeatedly have used the word "slickness" as a pejorative. I find > that offensive and it's insulting to users. When I write applications, > I want the interface to be as smooth and trouble free as possible,
It's a perjorative when it's done for its own sake and doesn't really help the user. This happens a lot. When it helps the user, as it sometimes does, then it's not perjorative. > As a matter of time spent in development, I do not find that > non-trivial UIs are significantly easier to develop using web > interfaces. That's possibly true, but a lot of the time, trivial interfaces are enough. Look at Google search, one of the most complex apps ever built (tens or hundreds of MLOC, massive distributed crawler infrastructure, 100's of PhD's figuring out the algorithms, etc.) but its interface is simple HTML that you would probably call trivial. It is quite possibly the most popular application in the world. > As a matter of respect for the user, I'm not going to tell them to use > a trivial UI if a non-trivial one will save them time, learning > effort, or frustration. In order to make this decision, I like to work > with the people actually using it and watch them at work. To see what > kind of extra steps they have to take and where I can save them time > or inaccuracy or frustration. Right. Obviously this has to be decided according to the specific needs of the application. A lot of times, trivial interfaces are easier to learn than nontrivial ones, precisely because they are trivial so there is less to learn. Again look at Google search for an example. Also, at least for in-house applications, while the user's time counts (since their time costs your customer money), your development time and deployment effort also costs money that comes from exactly the same place, so you have to take into consideration the number of users, amount of time they will spend using the program, just how much of that time (if any) a fancier interface will save, etc. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
