Survex (interface expectation)

Tue, 16 Jul 2002 22:44:06 +0100

The current, rather misguided attitudes surfaces on the Survex mailing list
distress me rather.  They are all too symptomatic of the attitude of too
many software engineers - namely that the programmer is right and all users
are clueless idiots.

Although I rely on heavily open-source software every day (gcc, Qt, Linux,
Perl, etc ad nauseum) I find the whole open-source free software movement is
tainted by these attitudes of software developer zealots who religiously
insist that their own tried and tested way (which may well work well for
them) is the *only* way.

As somebody who is both a software engineer and a domain-expert (in my case
a structural geologist) I am in an ideal position to create the
'best-of-class' application for the benefit of my users. This involves
spending a lot of time on 'usability' - if I want people to use the tool, it
has to be usable at _their_ level, not mine.  This doesn't mean that I am
clever and they are stupid - it just means that they are not software
engineers - they are geologists.

Likewise, many of the members of this list will have a dual interest, in
both the problem domain - cave surveying - and the means to its solution,
namely Survex software development.  These people too are in an ideal
position to create a 'best-of-class' application usable by cave surveyors.
I'm sure there are many opinions on how this is best achieved, but I can
guarentee that alienating your less technically literate users and potential
users by being abusive to them will result in failure and obscurity for the
project - and deservedly so.

I have always suspected that the reason many software engineers shy away
from graphical user interface design for scientific problems is not because
the command line and a text file necessarily offer more power or
flexibility, but because designing an effective graphical user interface for
such an application is actually a very difficult thing to do well. I have
seen graphical user interfaces which offer power and flexibility well beyond
what it would be possible to achieve on the command line. In a sense
providing only a command-line UI is the easy way out for those not willing
to face up to the real challenge of making the thing easy to use by the
average user.

Now I do not wish to critise the Survex dev team - Survex very largely does
what it says on the tin, and in the final analysis you get what you pay
for - but some of the attitudes aired lately on the list are not condusive
to actually having any users in future - and software without users is
nothing.

Rob Smallshire
Senior Development Engineer
& Structural Geologist
Midland Valley

www.mve.com

> -----Original Message-----
> From: survex-admin@survex.com [mailto:survex-admin@survex.com]On Behalf
> Of Mark Shinwell
> Sent: 16 July 2002 17:22
> To: survex@survex.com
> Subject: Re: Survex (interface expectation)
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 15, 2002 at 05:05:50PM +0100, David Gibson wrote:
> > >The "View" word processor, for example,
> > >later developed into ViewPS by Neil Raine at Acorn, produced, in 1986,
> > >a word-processed (caving) journal on a BBC Micro + Apple laser
> writer which
> > >still looks better than anything I can get out of Word (TM).
> >
> > Andy - you sound like an Arts Graduate who is proud of the fact that he
> > doesnt know anything about science or maths and considers it beneath
> > him. You went to Cambridge fucking University for godsake and if you are
> > unable or unwilling to exercise your brain in learning what *everybody*
> > else does then ... um .. I dont know, be quiet or something.
>
> Well, not *everybody* uses Word at all, and many that do produce shoddy
> documents to be frank.  I think I produced documents using Impression on
> the Acorn which look better than many Word documents I see floating
> around nowadays.  And in particular:
>
> > > I realise that Word is without doubt
> > >the worst piece of software in the universe
> >
> > Actually, Word is very good.
>
> I beg to differ.  There are other tools around which produce far more
> well-formatted documents than Word does.  Yes yes, you can make Word
> produce no doubt the same thing but it requires a hell of a lot of
> effort.
>
> You can often even make a very good guess that a document's been
> produced using Word by just looking at it (and no I'm not joking)!
>
> And let's not even start on the potential security issues involved by
> the way that Word saves its documents...
>
> > >The problem is how to get over to users of Survex that this is *not* an
> > >appropriate idiom for cave survey software. Users need to
> understand about
> > >cave surveying
> >
> > All we're talking about is that when you load up Survex there should be
> > a File menu with options for New, Open, Edit, Save, Save As, and a file
> > history list.  That doesnt seem that contentious to me.
>
> First I observe that commonly-used text editors often provide such menu
> items, and Aven also provides many of them.
>
> Secondly I think "*not* an appropriate idiom for cave survey software"
> sums it up.
>
> New what?  Survey data file, survey project, directory for storing data?
> Oh, surface or underground survey, or maybe a mixture?  etc etc.  Save
> what?  Survey data file/project/current view as bitmap/dxf/pos file etc.
> Something to do with "commit to revision control" might come in
> somewhere too.
>
> I take the point that we don't have a fully-fledged GUI yet for Survex,
> but that is on the way, and is unfortunately very much more complicated
> to design than just saying "we need New, Open, etc".  (There is a
> serious point here about what we _do_ actually need though.)
>
> For example, it's taken nearly 2 years' of work to get Aven's GUI to the
> standard it is: and that is very much more simple than the sort of
> system which would be required to support processing of complicated
> survey projects.  Apart from the design time, the sheer
> coding/debugging/testing time needed is enormous.
>
> I also have to say that, having had a brief play with Compass and Walls,
> which are "proper" GUI applications in some sense, that I found both of
> those very much less intuitive (particularly for viewing caves) than the
> equivalent Survex tools.  Not to say that they don't have any good
> features of course...
>
> A proper GUI interface for printing surveys will probably be one of the
> next things on the list for Aven.
>
> > >In my (contentious ? Moi ?) opinion, users who don't want to
> read a manual
> > >and can't use a command line interface, should probably be actively
> > >encouraged to keep out of the data processing side of cave
> surveying :-)
> >
> > If that were - inasmuch as it could be - the *official* view of the
> > Survex developers then I would be rather dismayed and - were I to have
> > more free time - I would consider it my duty to campaign against the lot
> > of you. :-)
>
> No comment ;)
>
> However, one thought which comes to mind is this: would one rather have
> a suite of tools which take time to learn and are harder to get to grips
> with, but are very powerful; or an all-singing, all-dancing Windows
> wizard-oriented application with a popup Survey Assistant (a little
> dancing clinometer maybe; "it looks like you're fabricating survey
> data...would you like some help?") which doesn't actually do the real
> job as well?
>
> There are also examples of things like the 3D design package Maya, which
> is fully graphical but, as far as I understand, takes a very long time
> to get to grips with indeed.  I expect AutoCAD is like that too...
>
> Mark
>
> --
> Mark Shinwell -- http://mrs30.quns.cam.ac.uk/ --
> Mark.Shinwell@cl.cam.ac.uk
> Theory and Semantics Group, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
>
>
> --
> Survex http://lists.survex.com/mailman/listinfo/survex
>