On Dec 28, 2009, at 9:37 AM, Krzysztof Kosiński wrote:
The default for this dialog box would have to be embedding, so it's
equivalent to my solution, but with an extra nuisance of a dialog box.
I'm glad you're finally seeing that there are subtle nuances coming in here. That is the key.
Moreover it disregards a well known fact that users don't read message
boxes, even if they say "WARNING, CLICKING CANCEL WILL DESTROY YOUR
COMPUTER"; this is particularly true for unsophisticated Windows
users, which this solution targets. So your solution does not match
the target persona (Charlie).
Aha! I'm glad you managed to bump up against a couple of the trees there, but again you missed seeing the forest.
I'm well aware of the limitations of dialog boxes. However, you stumbled across the facts that:
1) the more likely a user is to be confused by embedding, the more likely he is to ignore dialogs.
2) when properly crafted, a dialog can 'force' a type of user to make the type of choice a designer wants.
Those can combine with many other subtle factors. One of the simplest combinations is to have a dialog and set the "Bloat all my documents" radio button as default. Anyone who reads "Bloat all my documents" will want to change that, but others (who ignore things) won't.
The actual way to implement things is not quite that simple, but it is a good illustration.
What was the point of writing all the
stuff on the wiki if you just ignored it?
Again, this is a false argument.
The *point* of getting stuff in the wiki is so that it is recorded in an easy to access manner, and can be reviewed and edited by all.
Cyclical refinement is one main factor. And actually you were the one who are ignoring it. I just haven't had time to reconcile all the use cases you have, your personas and the other personas.
But... that is being worked on as we go.
And to answer your rhetorical question directly, the point is to get information onto the wiki and *then* reconcile it, simplify it, and see what patterns emerge.