[374] in Athena User Interface
Re: Beta, system, and usability testing, p.s.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Richard Tibbetts)
Wed Aug 16 20:39:41 2000
Message-Id: <200008170039.UAA19502@hikari-no-ken.mit.edu>
To: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
cc: Brad Thompson <yak@MIT.EDU>, aui@MIT.EDU, tibbetts@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 16 Aug 2000 18:55:55 EDT."
<200008162255.SAA13154@scrubbing-bubbles.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 16 Aug 2000 20:39:38 -0400
From: Richard Tibbetts <tibbetts@MIT.EDU>
On 8/16 "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> But since this is a usabilty question, I'm not sure what value there
> is to flaming about this on AUI without the usability team's input.
> It is, after all, what they're there for.
Beland, before you send mail like this, have you considered asking
yourself "Will everyone else on AUI flame me for this?". Its a good
question to ask. If the answer is yes, you might consider running it
by the rest of us before saying it. We might have good reasons for
disagreeing.
A couple of points:
1) If we are never going to support a piece of software, and we have
decided this as a team, then you (and anyone else on AUI) are not
allowed to tell people to run it. Especially not usability people who
might decide they like it. Not. Never. Not even a little bit. Not even
with a "we know this sucks". There are only 2 possible outcomes,
either they will get a negative impression of it and have a lower
opinion of AUI or they will like it and force us to support it. No.
Don't tell them about it. Not. Is the negative nature of this
statement obvious yet? Good.
2) XEmacs is not clearly better than emacs. There is a lot of sketchy
elisp code out there on Athena that probably only works with emacs. I
agree with Brad that the support overhead is not worth it to get a
toolbar. If you tell rms what you think the menus should look like, he
will probably listen. I am serious, I got this confirmed second hand
by a couple of people once at rav_eaters, but I was too lazy to sit
down and work up a new menu system.
3) The reason mail gets sent to aui@mit.edu and not cc'd to everyone
else in the world is because it is one member of the team telling the
other member of the team that he is wrong. This short of thing is best
handled internally. In the political climate we are working in, it
needs to at least look like we have our shit together. Please don't
keep forcing us to retract statements.
tibbetts
-*- http://www.mit.edu/~tibbetts -*- finger tibbetts@monk.mit.edu -*-
