Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Author Topic: Should a computer require learning or just be an appliance  (Read 7121 times)

Description:

0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Offline Heiroglyph

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Jun 2010
  • Posts: 1100
    • Show all replies
Re: Should a computer require learning or just be an appliance
« on: November 03, 2010, 06:30:22 PM »
I have to go with other here.

It should be an appliance until you need to do something more advanced, then it should allow obvious ways for you to dig deeper.

Otherwise you're making it too hard on the new users and too restrictive for advanced users.
 

Offline Heiroglyph

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Join Date: Jun 2010
  • Posts: 1100
    • Show all replies
Re: Should a computer require learning or just be an appliance
« Reply #1 on: November 03, 2010, 10:36:13 PM »
We went through a lot of this while creating TriCaster and TriCaster TCXD300/850.

I think we're getting really close to the right balance of simple and powerful for this type of device.

On TCXD, the default actions are good for most uses, but there is a "gear" icon on anything that you can dig into and tweak.

Clicking the gear you get a window showing the most likely tab of information by default and other tabs with other tweakable sections.

New users quickly learn that gears mean options for that item, so they can usually infer where to find more advanced features as they need them because they are always in context.

The new user isn't inundated with options, preferences and menus, but the advanced user can easily get to a lot more powerful tools that we would otherwise have needed to remove to appeal to the huge "ease of use" demographic.

I'm pretty proud of how it turned out :D