Re: [PATCH 0/1] improvements to the lightweight desktop example

[John Darrington <john@darrington.wattle.id.au>]

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On Wed, Feb 22, 2017 at 04:48:55PM +0100, Mathieu Lirzin wrote:
     
     Sure it is!
     
     What I meant is that Ratpoison is not the most "intuitive" WM for non
     GNU Emacs/Screen users.  As a consequence adding it in an example
     configuration which is likely to be copy and paste, is maybe not the
     most welcoming thing.  :)
     
     IMHO Openbox or anything which is able to launch a program by "clicking"
     seems more friendly as a default (modulo the accessibility issues which
     to my knowledge are not addressed by any of the "lightweight" WMs).
     

I don't want to take sides in this debate.    At the same time I think "clicking
is more friendly" is a fallacy.  It's more friendly to people who are used to
it, but decidedly frightening to those who are not.

Some years ago, I was volunteering at an organisation which taught basic computer
use to the computer illiterate.  
A lot of the students I taught were: Elderly, female and had arthritis in the fingers
(but all that I dealt with were of sound mind).

Many of them had, in their younger years been employed as typists, so a keyboard
was nothing new to them and were quite happy with it.

The mouse on the other hand was a challenge:

1. I would start by standing over the student's shoulder and give them an 
exercise to alternately push the mouse away from their body and pull it back
towards them, whilst observing the curser ascending and descending the screen.
(Don't tell them to "move the mouse up"!  If you say that half of the students,
will lift the mouse from the surface of the desk!)

2. The second exercise would be an extension of this idea.  I would instruct
them now to move the mouse to the left, and observe the mouse cursor also move
to the left.  Almost invariably the student would first rotate the mouse 90 degrees to
the left and THEN push the mouse in that direction.  This instinct is very 
common with the ladies - It's unintuitive to them to have an object moving
in a direction other than the way it is facing. (Have you ever noticed how men
hold maps with North at the top, whereas women turn the map to that the top
is in the direction of travel?)

3. The next exercise would be to get them to click on a button.  Here 
the arthritis was sometimes an obstacle even if I had set the mouse sensitivity 
very low - but normally with a bit of effort the student could place the 
cursor over the target screen area.  So I would instruct them to press the
mouse button.  This was a often big problem.  The wrist would shake so much 
that when the click came the cursor had moved from the target.

So most of them found "clicking" extremely unfriendly.  Please be very 
carefull when making generalisations like "GUIs are intuitive" "mice are
friendly" etc.  As we said before - it depends uponn the user.


J'



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