Chris Pratley’s onenote setup suggestions
Further to the recent post about onenote setup – make sure you also check out the original article that started it all from Onenote developer Chris Pratley.
“A discussion I had today reminded me of a design conundrum we went through with OneNote when we were preparing it for first release. A guy I was talking to today said that he thought (for his web site storage product) it would be lame to put example folders on the site to try to show how to use it, since nearly everyone would actually want something different and unique to themselves. So he wanted to go with a generic, empty space and help text right there to explain that you can make folders as needed to suit your organizational needs.
Funnily enough, we had the same discussion for OneNote back in early 2003 - what should appear when you first start the application? In one camp were the purists who said that the simplest starter set of sections that nearly every user would need would be the best. To support this, they pointed to lots of anecdotes from users complaining that pre-populated spaces really bothered them, since they had to delete what was there. This wasn’t just a hassle - some people had even said that they felt “their” space was violated - that a brand new product should not look like it had been used by someone else. The other camp said that if we just put a reasonable generic sample out there it would do more good than harm. We decided to test the theories.”
Read the whole article here