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.
Permalink for comment
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
...and thank you to the pupils, who provided their experiences as well.
Taking up Anonymous, on his/her points in "A GUI-fied CLI?", my understanding of the article is that flyover hints, and such pop-up help were actually what they found confusing.
Imagine: as you type along, suddenly there's a list box full of auto-completion suggestions. We know that we can just ignore it and keep typing, but they may think that they *have* to interact with it, that they *have* to choose one of the suggestions, and what if what they want to do isn't in the list? That's distressing.
I think that the lesson to be learnt not just that if the user wants to know what background tasks are running, they can easily remember to type 'ps', but that they even prefer it, and if they don't know the name of the command, then they are also very happy to use man and apropos to find out. The 'txtspeak' analogy is quite fundamental - if they can jump the gap from 'ps' to 'processes', then what they are typing starts to make perfect sense.
Lots of food for thought.