1621

To be fair, he didn’t mention the mansion and the yacht.

1622

Well, as I believe was mentioned earlier, there is something wrong with my brain.

1623

I removed my quote, I suggest you edit your post too. Because, seriously, man.

1624

Dude, I’m the guy that everyone has said “I hate to agree with wumpus, but…” about on this forum for the last 10 years.

I kinda like my broken brain, actually. I think it’s been a major factor in my success. Because if your ideas are any good, believe me, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.

1625

So you stand by that statement?

Yuck.

1626

I’m also a child pornographer.

But only for children of age 18 or older, you understand.

1627

I don’t get it. What’s wrong with saying you’re a millionaire with a Wikipedia entry? If I brag about the size of my Johnson, I guess you’ll be on me too?

1628

It’s no Godwin, but wow. Just wow. I’m with you, stusser. This is how we resolve debates on tech stuff nowadays?

Wumpus: respect points lost = 3.

1629

Not a million? Missed opportunity.

1630

Can we flush the last week of activity on this thread. Its gotten weird.

I noticed that iOS just got a hidden edge gesture with the new Control Center. Not even as much as a notification bar to indicate that it exists. Nobody is complaining. I guess we can erase discoverability from the software usability text books now.

1631

I think cheating is a good thing. A way to cheat in discoverability is to have multiple ways to do something. Users will accidentally find one of the ways, and think for a long time that is “the way”. Only later will meet other users that have discover different ways to do it, and learn this new ways. Two different types of users may try to shutdown a computer in different way, so … why not make both ways to work?

Haha.

I was one of the first persons to have a Wiki for a software project (other than well… Wikis having a wiki about the wiki). I remember being scared about it, even having nightmares. If you make a wiki that is, somewhat, about yourself, anyone can come and edit in a page “Tei is stupid.”. Or something much worse, like half truths. You are somewhat safe, with your personaly entry on WP, because wikipedia editors protect you, but I still applaud your courage!.

1632

It actually got two. Swiping from the left edge is “go back” now.

That would be a step backwards in discoverability, but all the default apps still seem to have the left-facing arrows in the upper left corner too, so it’s more of a shortcut like the 4-finger multitasking gestures on ipad.

Swiping up for control center and down for notifications are indeed undiscoverable, though.

1633

Double-clicking a mouse is not discoverable, either.

Hell, half the touch targets on any given touchscreen app are not “discoverable”. It’s not so much discoverability that matters as learnability.

1634

“The myth of discoverability is the belief that in a design it’s possible to make everything equally discoverable.”

He continues in that same vein for the entire post. That’s what the kids call a straw man fallacy. Nobody said everything needs to be discoverable, or that everything should be equally discoverable.

Basic functions like shutting down your computer should be discoverable. Advanced functions like alt-tab to task switch don’t need to be. After starting the post with a trivially disproven fallacy, he goes into more interesting and productive topics like that.

1635

Heh. Scott Berkun is in my improv class. Talented guy.

I don’t know why ya’ll keep arguing with Stusser on the discoverability thing. He’s been on about it for about 31 pages at this point. Not gonna convince him. :)

1636

This is a desktop, and I shut it down maybe once every 2 weeks, if that.

The rest of the time I sleep it. Sometimes with a gnarly Windows Update it will restart itself, which takes no effort from me other than clicking OK (and you know Windows, it’ll restart if it damn well pleases with no input from the user).

And that’s a desktop workstation beast with THREE MONITORS. Guess what that data would look like for a more typical laptop or tablet, which is what most people own?

I don’t think the actual data supports what you call a “basic function”.

1637

Okay, how do you activate sleep? (or hybrid sleep). Wait, same menu.
…
Uh-huh.

1638

Press the power button?

1639

My computer doesn’t wake up from sleep. It goes into a coma.

1640

And again, it might be slightly undiscoverable the first time. Charms>Settings (or Start typing Sleep>Settings bucket), two ‘actions’, same as the old start menu (not even to mention keyboard shortcuts which all you ‘power users’ use, right?). After that, it’s in the same place every time you want it, no matter what program you’re in, whether Desktop or Metro. Discoverability in this case is practically worthless. Desktop users are impacted most (tablet users use the power button, laptop users close the lid), and they’re in the minority nowadays.

So to bring it back to that article, you have a use case where ‘very few people’ do it ‘not very often’. Seems like the kind of thing you’d want to hide a tiny bit. Shrug.