Most people don't read manuals. All we can do is make sure our applications are easy and intuitive for everybody. Joomla does pretty well in that area, hence it's success, but the work is never done. And many third party developers seem to confuse 'options' with 'features', and 'configurability' with 'power'.
When working on Nooku, we constantly ask ourselves: "Do we really want the user to make a decision here? Can the system decide this without user interaction?" For each configuration option, users will need to understand
- what it does,
- how it will affect their site, and
- whether that is a good thing or not.
To illustrate the process of making an application easier, let's do a small case study of the SEF feature that is in J!1.5. There are three Yes/No options in the Global Configuration:
| Option | Tooltip message | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Search Engine Friendly URLs | Select whether or not the URLs are optimised for Search Engines |
| 2. | Add suffix to URLs | If yes, the system will add a suffix to the URL based on the document type |
| 3. | Use Apache mod_rewrite | Select to use the Apache Rewrite Module to catch URLs that meet specific conditions and rewrite them as directed |
| Warning: Apache users only! Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess before activating. |
Even though a user knows what a search engine is, that doesn't mean he knows what search engine optimization is. The user might interpret it as "Optimizing the search box in my Joomla site". Let's look at the options again. Concepts that all users can be expected to understand are green, technical terms are red, and orange is in between.
| Option | Tooltip message | |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | Search Engine Friendly URLs | Select whether or not the URLs are optimised for Search Engines |
| 2. | Add suffix to URLs | If yes, the system will add a suffix to the URL based on the document type |
| 3. | Use Apache mod_rewrite | Select to use the Apache Rewrite Module to catch URLs that meet specific conditions and rewrite them as directed |
| Warning: Apache users only! Rename htaccess.txt to .htaccess before activating. |
For a newbie, each red block is a question that needs to be answered before he can make a decision. "What is Apache?", "What is a document type?",... And even a professional CMS integrator, who's testing different solutions and quickly wants to assess if Joomla fits his purposes, will want to answer as little questions as possible.
In part 2 we have a look at how we can make this easier. And for everybody who's in web design or development, read "Don't make me think" by Steve Krug.
