OSNews

While this article indicates that lots of attention was put towards studying the situation, I don't think the conclusions are entirely correct. I think it is true that you can train most any computer user to work with the command line. Note that I am indicating that you can train them. The major difference between a command line and a GUI is that the GUI allows for FAR greater "self discovery" than a command line. Indeed the "menu" of choices is displayed for you, once you get past the initial bell curve of learning the interface's basic functions (and for most people, this too can be totally by discovery as long as they are not afraid of hurting things).

If users complain that there is too much on the screen with a GUI, this does not necessarilly indicate that ALL GUIs are bad and that a CLI is superior and easier. It only indicates that for THOSE users, the GUI of Windows (or Mac or whatever it was they were talking about) is too cluttered and confusing. Truth be told, the GUI of both Windows and MacOS is filled with confusion, contradiction, bad metaphores and inconsistency. This does not mean that the GUI concept is invalid or the wrong path to take.

Look at a Palm handheld. Lots of people who have problems with full blown computers seem to be able to "get" the Palm rather easily. Anyone who is a computer user can definitely get the Palm within a few seconds or minutes. The GUI of the Palm is simplistic, direct, and the device does not multitask or have movable objects.

Anyway... I could ramble on for ages here... the article was well written and I really REALLY liked the repeated statements of the users being people who were NOT stupid. Far too many tech people are lazy with this attitude and just assume that anyone who can't understand what they have known for years must be an idiot. I just take issue with the validity of the conclusions based on the suspecting same kinds of mistakes were made that lots of well meaning researchers make all the time: being unaware of important variables, not fully understanding the subject matter (be that the technology, the psychology or both and more), misinterpreting the results and even misdirecting the expiriments and subjects due to personal prejudice and bias (as much as we try to be objective, the most objective person can still be very subjective when the topic is something the person is very involved in personally - and yes, that includes me too; I have a bias towards GUI because my learning and working processes are extremely visual).