Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it) [LWN.net]

Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Posted Feb 28, 2012 15:06 UTC (Tue) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106)
In reply to: Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it) by khim
Parent article: Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

I still cannot agree that Joel is saying what you think he's saying

Every time you provide an option, you're asking the user to make a decision. That means they will have to think about something and decide about it. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but, in general, you should always try to minimize the number of decisions that people have to make.

Note my emphasis. In cases where the user has to make a decision, he's right. In cases where you ask the user to make a decision, he's right. Here we have a case where the user is asking to make a decision.

[snip]but that's completely separate question from the question of the amount of configuration allowed.

As GNOME3 fans will tell you, absolutely any configuration is allowed (via extensions). The question is what level of customization to support by the inclusion of knobs and how easy it is to find those knobs. I say more knobs is better, and put them somewhere a curious and determined user will be able to discover them. If they'd done that the UI decisions may not have been so hard to cope with.