The whole point of the GUI is to be more intuitive. If you need to go to the internet to realize how to do the basic stuff, that means your GUI “failed” in its purpose.
That’s still unavoidable for very complex UIs though, but still you measure how good a UI is at helping people accomplish their tasks.
Agreed. And I certainly use a GUI more than a command line.
My point is only that the command line should not be considered “unfriendly” to the user.
I don’t think “intuitive” is the proper metric for determining user friendliness. I think “ease of accomplishing a given task” is much more important. There are many tasks for which the command line is faster and simpler than using a GUI. Windows tends to hide these simpler, faster methods from the user. By regularly exposing the user to the CLI, Linux pushes the user to learn them.
Every button click is a dialog with the computer. It presents you with options and context, and waits for you to make a decision. Using a GUI, even simple tasks are going to take several dialogs to accomplish.
Most of the time, though, the user knows the exact task that needs to be accomplished, and is just appeasing the computer by going through each dialog to get to the point.
In these cases, the command line can enable the user to skip all that uneccessary dialog and go straight to execution of the intended task. I would say that this is not “unfriendly”.
The whole point of the GUI is to be more intuitive. If you need to go to the internet to realize how to do the basic stuff, that means your GUI “failed” in its purpose.
That’s still unavoidable for very complex UIs though, but still you measure how good a UI is at helping people accomplish their tasks.
Agreed. And I certainly use a GUI more than a command line.
My point is only that the command line should not be considered “unfriendly” to the user.
I don’t think “intuitive” is the proper metric for determining user friendliness. I think “ease of accomplishing a given task” is much more important. There are many tasks for which the command line is faster and simpler than using a GUI. Windows tends to hide these simpler, faster methods from the user. By regularly exposing the user to the CLI, Linux pushes the user to learn them.
Every button click is a dialog with the computer. It presents you with options and context, and waits for you to make a decision. Using a GUI, even simple tasks are going to take several dialogs to accomplish.
Most of the time, though, the user knows the exact task that needs to be accomplished, and is just appeasing the computer by going through each dialog to get to the point.
In these cases, the command line can enable the user to skip all that uneccessary dialog and go straight to execution of the intended task. I would say that this is not “unfriendly”.