Normally I would not reply to a thread after a decision has been done. I do it nevertheless to point out a mistake with the proposal in general. This is to show you where to improve in future when discussion changes of defaults.
On Sunday 15 January 2012 15:13:51 Darrell Anderson wrote:
I quite agree. That's why centered is *not* a useful placement strategy. It requires users to move their windows to have it useable. This is the worst thing which could happen.
Not really. I have used Centered for years. Here is a difference: I configure most apps to open maximized. Those few that I open in non-maximized mode typically get opened for a few moments and then closed. So for me, Centered is useful.
Here we have an important piece of information: you changed your settings to use placement strategy centered *and* configured most apps to open maximized. So what you are using is in fact a "Maximized or Centered" placement strategy which does not exist. Changing the default option does not yield in your desired behavior.
This means in order to really use your proposed default settings users would have to change either other options or more defaults would have had to be changed.
Now during the discussion it was not clear to me that you want further changes. My argumentation was around the placement strategy "centered" which has clear disadvantages. I pointed you to them and asked you to try centered as a placement strategy for a few days (of course I considered this with other default settings and not your own settings) and I also asked you to think not from your point of view. Here I'm sorry you clearly failed as you did not even notice that you had further changes. You need to try to think how the system behaves for the user. This is difficult and needs training :-)
So for future proposals I suggest you to first really try it with default settings. A good way to do that is to create a new user account. Also try to not propose the things you use if you have a highly configured system. Defaults have to be good for a large user base. It is impossible to find defaults which are perfect for all. That's quite an important lesson to learn: you cannot write software to suit all users needs. People are different and that's great. So the best default is hardly the one which works perfect for a subgroup of your userbase, but most likely the option which sucks least for all users is the best one. It's not nice, but especially on defaults it's important to find a good compromise. Also never tailor towards the needs of advanced users. They are advanced users, they find the settings ;-)
Also on an unrelated note: you talked a lot about usability studies and demanded them from me who was in favor of the existing default. Now this is of course completely wrong. You want the default to be changed, so it's your duty to deliver the usability study as a proof to your case.
Cheers Martin Gräßlin