On Thu, 2009-04-30 at 13:50 -0400, William Jon McCann wrote:
OK, so here's the problem with this. Compromise sometimes works
well
when trying to form rough consensus, or for finding the least
disagreeable position for the most people - for politics maybe.
However, it does not work well as a technique for designing products
that people love to use. When you find the middle ground between
great and awful you don't find good - you find mediocrity and malaise.
Please read
http://headrush.typepad.com/ for more on this topic.
We've been designing compromised products for far too long. We need
to acknowledge that we can't please everyone all the time and need to
make choices. We need to resolve to be great - it doesn't just happen
by accident.
Sorry, but I think you're picking entirely the wrong case to try and
make your point. Try as hard as I can, I can't see how it would be
better to have the Brave New World mixer and a wiki page instructing
people on how to use alsamixer than it is to have the Brave New World
mixer and a second mixer application available in the menus. The total
cost to the design of the desktop is: one additional menu entry. I'm
really having a hard time seeing how this is a terrible design decision.
(and later in the post you repeat the "somewhat atypical system/setup"
canard. "I want to select an input channel" is not remotely atypical.)
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net