Mach es einfach eine Benutzereinstellung
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We editors often request "Just make it a user preference", and similar. This list/essay aims to summarize some of the complexity with that idea, giving the difficulties and benefits.
Schwierigkeiten
Every additional user-preference:
- Adds to the complexity of the [core/extension] code,
- Increases the likelihood of bugs (either now or in the future)
- Increases the long-term code-maintenance task
- Increases the quantity of variations that ought to be tested, in both automated and manual code checks - each variation adds exponential new combinations
- Adds to the complexity of the Special:Preferences tabs for users (hence making everything a bit more difficult (or less likely) to be found)
- Adds to the UI translation backlog
- Adds to the already overwhelming documentation
- Adds new rows to the user-properties database table, which is already too large (task T54777)
- Adds to the quantity of things that need to be considered, when contemplating any additional new features in the same feature-set
- Makes it harder to diagnose bugs
- Must avoid cache fragmentation
Hence, developers/designers/managers/etc are very hesitant to just make a new user preference every time [frequently!] that somebody asks for one.
Vorteile
That said, I (and many of us) adore preferences, and I consider Firefox's "about:config" page to be generally DoingItRight™ as far as power-users are concerned.
I've written a bit more about this in a section at Talk:RfC/Redesign user preferences, which I'll copy below:
An Ode to Options, A Paean to Preferences, A Serenade to Settings, A Cry for Configuration
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—Two staff developers on IRC, discussing improvements to the MediaWiki-software installation process and documentation. ~2014. |
I want to see our Special:Preferences menu become better organized, so that it can grow, with all the tweaks and power-tools that some editors need permanently available – I.e. The things the various overlapping communities have built over the last 20+ years, and continue to create and refine – So that newcomers can find what they're looking for without being overwhelmed, and so that new power-users can find the brilliant tools they didn't know they wanted.
When I sign up for a new website, I immediately go to the settings menu to see: What things I can turn on, and what I might want to turn off (either now, or in the future). When I install a new program, operating system, or game,[2] I immediately look through the Toolbar and the Preferences/Options menu. They tell me a lot about the software, e.g.:
- Technical vocabulary (concepts, keywords, and groupings),
- which settings the developers thought were "useful enough to include, but not crucial enough to set as default",
- which options the specialized-power-users might need, that I might want to investigate or use once I become proficient with the basics.
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— @MrAlanCooper[1] |
This wiki endeavour, requires tools that are as complicated as Photoshop or Autocad, for many editors but not all. Newcomers often need something simple, as do casual-editors.
We need something like Photoshop for power-users, as well as something like MS Paint for the newcomers and casual editors.
- MS Paint is great! It's Welcoming, and easy to learn via experimenting, and easy to create simple (sometimes even complex) projects in!
- Photoshop is great! A dense abundance of menus, and a profusion of tiny and detailed-metadata, for those who need it! For those who spend many hours every day, for many years, working hard within it.
We want and need both ends of the spectrum, and a migration path for users to slowly learn about bits of the complexity without being overwhelmed.
Fußnoten
- ↑ However it really needs some built-in documentation. I previously used an extension which added helpful annotations about each option to the page, but it stopped being maintained.
- ↑ - "So let's start with the options" - Bayonetta review (Youtube)
Further reading
- "You Won’t Use That Cool Feature. So why do all these settings even exist?" at The New York Times
- "[…] three culprits behind ever-growing features. […] Second, products with many millions of users must appeal to people with widely different needs. […]"
- "Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all." Study results from Jared Spool
- "[…] We also asked our participants for background information, like age and occupation, to see if that made a difference. It didn’t, except one category of people who almost always changed their settings: programmers and designers. They often had changed more than 40% (and some had changed as much as 80%) of the options in the program. […]"