On Sat, 28 Feb 2004, Nestor Diaz Valencia wrote:
Date: Sat, 28 Feb 2004 11:26:32 +0000 From: Nestor Diaz Valencia <nestordiaz@...207...> To: Alan Horkan <horkana@...44...>, Emanuele Aina <faina.mail@...92...> Cc: inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] Re: 'dialogs' menu (screenshot inside)
Please please, none of those commercial programs has a revolutionary interface. And they haven't spent that much time/money in usability as you think. They are proffesional applications in the graphic design area. This works like this:
Consistancy is no substitute for real usability testing, but consistancy is better than nothing.
Unless you have a clearly better idea then consistancy at least makes it easier to adopt Inkscape for those familiar with the Commercial vector graphics applications than some entirely new or unusual interface.
Although I'm paraphrasing myself Bryce previously agreed with the sentiment that unless you have a better idea then copying software like Adobe Illustrator would be a sensible starting point.
Some of my favourite applications, Abiword and Gnumeric, take the interface of the leading application in that area and embrace and extend it. Jody Goldberg has said many times that Gnumeric does not clone Microsoft Excel it copies and improves upon it and provides a powerful application that is easier for users to adopt.
Nobody will ever mention how nice designed are those photoshop icons or handy is to have a really really small properties palette flotating in the quarkXpress interface.
The beauty is that with any luck by copying you will get these little details right without necessarily realiseing and you can still improve on the bits you know how to do better and get the best of both worlds.
The advantage is less about clear cut usability and more about having a long established userbase, many incremenatal improvements and polished details, third party materials such as plugins/tutorials/books.
By being consistant (unless there is a particular good reason to do otherwise or do better!) we can leverage that existing knowledge base and hopefully attract their userbase too.
On the other hand, all those companies have a graphics suite, why they call it suite? because the try to make the use of the different apps similar (menu order, dialogs, icons)
Is a marketing approach, because in fact vectors are different from raster manipulation no matter how similar you make the tools.
Marketing is without a doubt a factor, if you can sell two programs instead of just one so much the better. But it is also easier to learn a vector graphics program if it similiar to the Raster graphics software you are familiar with.
I know many people are familiar with the GIMP and many want Inkscape to be similiar to the GIMP but Sodipodi tried that (unsucessfully in my opinion) and I dont see much point in Inkscape doing the same and instead I would like to see Inkscape be more ambitious and target what I believe to be a bigger userspace (and definately bigger mindshare among normal users) of Adobe Illustrator/Macromedia Freehand/CorelDraw.
However, proffs are used to it, and as in LInux there are not many choices for graphics design, why not having a coherent or at least a bit coordinated graphics suite?
I would love to see more choice. I think by choosing not to copy the GIMP as Sodipodi has done that Inkscape does provide more choice.
I would like to see a Graphics Suite and a consistant approach but Inkscape seems far more willing to follow the Gnome Guidelines than the GIMP and for the short to medium term i think things like 'cut and paste', 'drag and drop' and fast switching from Inkscape to other applications are more practical and less contentious goals.
I promise you all that I wouldn't keep making this point if i didn't think it was extremely important, thank you for your patience (and thanks for the software).
Sincerely
Alan Horkan http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/