Copyright 2004 by M. Uli Kusterer Tue, 30 Dec 1969 07:58:58 GMT Comments on article blog-sensible-defaults-and-anticipating-user-needs at Zathras.de http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-sensible-defaults-and-anticipating-user-needs.htm witness_dot_of_dot_teachtext_at_gmx_dot_net (M. Uli Kusterer) witness_dot_of_dot_teachtext_at_gmx_dot_net (M. Uli Kusterer) en-us http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-sensible-defaults-and-anticipating-user-needs.htm#comment2 http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-sensible-defaults-and-anticipating-user-needs.htm#comment2 Uli Kusterer writes:
Rafael, I do warn about doing stuff that gets in the way, and I do mention Clippy. FWIW, Clippy & Co. have apparently been removed from Office. And I haven't seen much DWIMery in the negative sense in XP and Vista during casual use recently.
http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-sensible-defaults-and-anticipating-user-needs.htm#comment1 http://www.zathras.de/angelweb/blog-sensible-defaults-and-anticipating-user-needs.htm#comment1 Rafael Bugajewski writes:
Anticipating what the user wants is in the most cases a very bad idea. Empiric test can show that a lot of users have a workflow A and a couple of other users have a workflow B. Still there will be a lot of other user workflows that are different or you haven’t measured / observed / thought of.

We should keep graphical user interfaces as simple as possible, so that almost every user understands your application and can adopt his own workflow. We should assist our users adopting their own workflow with technologies like DnD, AppleScript and other useful frameworks that are given by the operating system.

Microsoft did a lot of DWIM-Interfaces in the past and it was a horrible experience (I don’t know what the current status is).