Hi Johannes, hi all, Please don apologize for long answers. Although it took me some time to read it and more time to answer, I found it quite interesting to read and I think, you got many good points :-)
mixing syntax with semantics
I was aware of the difference between syntax and semantics, I only doubt whether this difference is also clear to the user or to be more exact: at which experience level is the user able to distinguish between syntax and semantics? I would like to give you an answer on that, but I don't know it by myself :-( "What is really interesting" should definitly not be hidden. That's totally correct :-) The point is that "what is interesting" is different for each user group. Maybe we should start thinking about different design for our different user groups? I think the syntax vs. semantics discussion and your notion of the usability test showed also that we need to take care of the workflow to clean up the semantics side of life. One word regarding the term "consistency": when I talk about consistency I want to express that it is important that items that have the same semantics must look the same to avoid user confusion. I want to work on both, the consistency and the workflow side, but up to now I don't have a mandate for this. It is on my to do list to discuss this issue, but I am afraid I won't have any resources for this before autumn :-( The light switches vs. fire alarm buttons is an excellent example. If you look closely at the fire alarms you will also notice that putting a red frame around the button is not sufficient to protect it from misuses: usually it is hidden behind glass and you have an additional explanation message. Which can be taken as a proof, that different semantics have to be explained to the user. Kind regards, Martin -- Martin Schmidkunz User Experience Specialist martin.schmidkunz@novell.com +49 (0) 911 740 53-346 ------------------------------------- SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) ------------------------------------- Novell, Inc. SUSE® Linux Enterprise 10 Your Linux is ready http://www.novell.com/linux -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ux+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ux+help@opensuse.org