Linked by Richard Wareham on Mon 8th Mar 2004 20:49 UTC
This essay describes the surprising results of a brief trial with a group of new computer users about the relative ease of the command line interface versus the GUIs now omnipresent in computer interfaces. It comes from practical experience I have of teaching computing to complete beginners or newbies as computer power-users often term them.
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drsmithy touched on something that really annoyed me about this "experiment". It seems that it was contrived at the outset to satsify the author's predisposition towards using a CLI.
Consider the following statements from the article.
Here a small script was written by myself called 'inbg'...
An appropriate man page was written...
A small addition was made to the user's .login file...
and much else, as well as a great deal of verbal instruction given to the CLI users. The users didn't seem to "discover" the CLI so much as they were subtly led to it.
Contrast this to the GUI users who, as inferred in the article, were left to their own devices. More importantly, their successes and failures were largely unrecorded, or at least only to the extent that they supported the author's hypothesis.
Really, the only conclusion that I can draw is that the users were not so much happy with the CLI as they were with the attention and contrived environment that was provided by the author.