User Centered

It does seem rather jarring- to go from what you'd expect to be a normal to page to hit that speedbump. That first screen should have a "No Thanks" button right next to the continue button.

I think the problem with first runs is that you're forced to make a decision before you know if you'll need to.

I think a large number of people are DIYers to some extent- we should be given a little freedom to poke around and kick the tires a bit. Ideally, like Lawrence posted on OW, a helpful tutor will be right over your shoulder and point out things that are missing or that you're frustrated with... but in (software) reality that ends up being clippy

But these "first runs" always remind me of a family around celebrating x-mas. A kid opens a package and screams with delight, but then dad step in and says "now son, before you open this, let me tell you a few things about how to put it together..."

That kid just wants to get in and dig through. When he can't find Slot B to insert Tab A, *that's* when it's nice for dad to interject. Putting that fatherly guidance into a software user experience is much easier said than done though. The only example I've found that works well is the Mouse Gesture activation menu, I'm not sure yet if I like it because its simplicity or if I'd like (as someone said on OperaWatch) some more call outs to how gestures work.

Good analogy about Dad at Christmas.

Perhaps the best way to avoid the whole issue is to try and tap into our natural ability and desire to explore. From the moment we're born, our little baby brains are asking the question, "what can I do with this?" (the answer until about age 2 is "Oooh! I can drop it!").

Yahoo photo couldn't design their interface so the answer to that question was obvious? I can only think of a few things I would expect an online photo site to be able to do.

- Store my own photos online
- Send photos to someone
- Look at other people's photos
- ...I'm having a hard time coming up with any more

The real issue here is not the intrusiveness of the "help" it's a poor design that doesn't focus in on the important things.

Great usability rant. What are you using for your screen shots?

Not sure what kmaage uses, but I use Hyper-Snap DX

Is it free? I rarely pay for software.

How about this (Freeware):
http://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm

Just found this to that looks interesting:
http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/articles/Cropper.aspx

Anonymous writes: I will check into them. Thanks. Vaspers88 aka Vaspers the Grate, a Blogspot blog slinger.

For screenshots... I use the fancy [PrtScn] button on my keyboard.

Which puts the whole screen into the clipboard.

And then I just toss it into irfanview (free but horrible usability) (paste with Ctrl-V), do a quick cropping...

And then I decrease the color depth to make nice small .png file.

And then myOpera "helps" by converting my 9K png to a 24K jpg when I upload it... unless the images have smaller dimensions (width x height) than some magic threshold. Image 3 came beneath that size, which is why it is still a nice small png.

That second utility I pointed out up there (Cropper) save a few steps by letting you do a region copy (drag a box around what you want) and then even saves it in a file (format of your choosing) and outputs the file to a specfied directory.

Very handy.. the only think I don't like about it so far is that I can't find a way to assign it new hotkey to it when it's resident in memory (to bring it forward)... it uses F8 which I use in Opera for focusing the address bar already.

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