Grouping inconvenience, not only usage
- Kawakami
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Why is it hard to use?
If I try to do something that’s not prepared on the menu then I get stuck and don’t know what to do.
There are a lot of tools on the menu. Maybe you don’t know the menus?
Well, even if there are too many menus…
Maybe you don’t know how to search the menu? If you understand the designer’s thoughts and intentions behind what’s given by the menu, then you’ll find the “joy of being proficient”.
Could we use categories like an unidentifiable large group, an identifiable large group (Mobile phones nowadays?), an unidentifiable small group and an identifiable small group (can’t do things not on a menu) as an axis for inconvenience? Where do the benefits lie in each category?
- Shiose
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This is Shiose.
This is a conversation that arose when talking with Mr Kawakami just now. We were supposed to have a discussion on this page, but we almost forgot and would’ve had a discussion in real life…So this all started with Mr Kawakami’s words “Actually TeX is easy to use, but…” to which Shiose replied, “Is [Microsoft] Word really difficult to use? Maybe you’re just not used to it?”
We often hear things like “Specialized editors like word are too prepared and lack freedom”. It’s a similar topic to the differences between html and Web Design software. So, Shiose knows how to use Word perfectly as if it’s his body parts, and believes that there’s nothing you can’t do with Word that TeX can. In fact, Shiose has the impression that TeX is just extra effort and you can only create sentences that lack quality compared to Word.
There are several inconveniences like these. Basically, whether something take extra effort because of its’ inherent structure, or whether the user just less proficient and can’t find things on the menu so finds it inconvenient, even though the system itself is efficient. If that’s the case, then it may already be made efficiently.
As long as we don’t mix up “difficulty of use” from lack of experience with that from inherent inconvenience, I feel that we might not be able to escape the discussion.
So that was our debate.
- Sudo
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Hello, it’s Sudo.
Sometimes I hear the complete opposite logic from Windows users.They say “MacOS is hard to use”. So actually it’s just because there are lots of people who’ve never used it before, but as you’ve said, how we handle “experience” will perhaps be an important factor when discussing “Convenience”.