Via the WebWord mailing list, I discovered the article “Bringing KDE Closer to Joe User’s Desktop”. It offers many suggestions on improving KDE’s UI, and I found it to be fascinating. For instance:
As for the “Configure Desktop...” itself, it should have been called “Desktop Properties” or “Desktop Settings”. “Configure” is a verb. Configure implies that the user knows how to “configure” something. Believe me, for a Unix newcomer, “configure” is a dreadful verb. It is a scary command. It might sound funny to you, but never underestimate the psychology of the user. UI is all about psychology. It is all about shapes, colors, pictures, words... Picking the right elements each time is the right way of creating a comfortable desktop environment. […]
It reminds me in some ways of this usability report on GNOME by the Sun GNOME Human Computer Interaction staff. And, man, Linux sure is pretty. I’ll have to give that another try once I have lesser things to worry about.
