[283] in Athena User Interface
Re: Current thinking on gZephyr
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Fri Jul 14 09:27:36 2000
Message-Id: <200007141327.JAA04550@No-Whammies.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: The events that comprise the history of the universe.
Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 09:27:32 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
Thanks for all the interesting input on zephyr...
--
Aside:
I'm currently in the process of
briefly consolidating all the design comments that AUI has accumulated
(as opposed to the scattered e-mails and text files we have now).
Hopefully, as Bill suggests, I can then "poor plastic" over the plans
and move on to actually implementing some of them.
--
Regarding gZephyr, I agreed with everything people said, though I was
a bit confused by Bill's comment:
> I believe that the majority of zephyr users have no clue what
> "class" and "instance" are all about. Perhaps a sender interface
> that continues not to require users to understand those things would
> be appropriate.
Most users (unless they are in a class, living group, etc., that has a
class/instance) are indeed unaware of zephyrs "group chat" features.
However, I think this is mostly due to the obtuseness of the
command-line interface.
As I tried to describe in my sketches, we intend to present them with
three buttons, "send to user" "send to class" and "send to instance"
with advanced users being able to send to arbitrary triples.
"send to instance" shields users from having to understand that
colloquially, that means "instance of class message." Users do need
to be able to DTRT when someone tells them "zephyr the 6.170 instance"
or "zephyr class fenway" so we cannot hide these categories from them
entirely. We've come up with some sensible defaults that should DTRT
for classes where difference instances do not indicate different
conversations.
In essence, we're trying to give people class/instance functionality
while requiring as little learning on their part as possible, at least
at first. I don't think it would be a good idea to leave out
class/instance functionality altogether, as it's *extremely* useful
academically for informal help, and is used by many Course 6 classes.
(And yes, some Course 6ers get confused by the existing interface.)
It's also a great way to promote voluntary cross-group (or
intra-group) community and informal interaction, which the Institute
has been going crazy about lately. (But implementing class/instance
support comes after personal zephyr support.)
-B.
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Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
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