the new topyli standard » design

topyli’s law and topyli’s second law

topyli — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:20:55 +0000

On technical IRC channels, mailing lists, Usenet groups (remember those?) and Web forums, you often learn a lot of interesting and useful stuff. If you hang in there for long enough, you’re going to learn some more universal truths as well. I have learned a couple of things that I think i may have tweeted about some time or another, but would like to document here too, for future application.

topyli’s law:
When a user asks for help on a problem (s)he is having with $PROGRAM, another user will immediately suggest they switch to $ANOTHER_PROGRAM and use that instead.

topyli’s second law:
When you add an “Advanced” button or tab in the configuration dialog for your $USER_INTERFACE, all your users immediately become advanced.

The second law is actually a special case of mahen23′s law, which I learned on #ubuntu-offtopic. Here it is:
If you create a button, people will press it.

How to design a desktop

topyli — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 13:28:48 +0000

Working on my dissertation, I was going through my field notes again today. I came across this snippet from my IRC logs, concerning the high-level design of the GNOME desktop.

An option where two people disagree on how something will work? Not gnome Automatically figuring out what to do based on the circumstances? Gnome

‘Nuff said. Should apply to any user-facing software.

But yes, even after this Zen moment, I’m still writing the book. =)

tales from the offtopic #22: user-friendly breakage

topyli — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:44:30 +0000

We all know why GNOME is the most popular desktop in the enterprise. It does so much for users — they don’t have to do a thing while the GNOME daemons get things done. topyli and mc44 were trying to convince aubade of the benefits today.

I think it was a pretty noble effort anyway.

tales from to offtopic #21: design for topylies!

topyli — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 19:54:53 +0000

OpenOffice.org has released version 2.4 with many improvements. Congratulations to both developers and users of OO.o! I personally am in no capacity to evaluate it. I’m pretty sure it has about as many buttons and check boxes and sliders as the previous one. I still like Abiword.

The new OpenOffice.org website looks awesome though, double cheers for the clean and usable design!

Inspired by this, and also probably about my previous post, my friends nickspoon and mc44 on #ubuntu-offtopic defined a topyli-friendly design for OpenOffice.org 3.0. There’s still time to make a difference before they feature freeze!

But as mc44 says, don’t get your hopes too high :(

tales from the offtopic #18: sane errors and pie

topyli — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 12:53:01 +0000

Ideally, a Unix program is silent. Only when a program fails for some reason, it must fail spectacularly, providing the user with detailed, helpful error messages. PFA, topyli, riotkittie, and gord all agree.