Hi John,
This is a really tough problem to solve. Jewelry plug-ins like RhinoGold and Matrix can design user interfaces for specific sub-sets of our users. But we don’t have that luxury.
How would you change the GUI to work for all the customers you sell to? Perhaps we’re too close to it and can’t see an obvious solution that would work for everyone.
I think you might be picking on an exception here, rather than the rule. To be fair, there are over 1000 commands in Rhino. No matter how you slice it, that’s a lot of tools. I imagine if I walked into a machine shop with 1000 tools hanging on the walls and in drawers I’d feel overwhelmed. Well, honestly I’d probably start to drool, but then get overwhelmed when asked to make something.
We’ve always wondered “are there a few tools that everyone always uses?” and “Could we hide some of them?” and “Are there some that nobody ever uses?”
Early in the Rhino 5 WIP process we started collecting statistics about command usage. We didn’t do it for very long, and arguably we didn’t process the data very well. But what we found was that people always used Open, Save, and Undo. After that, there wasn’t a huge overlap. And even tools we thought “people never used” did get used.
Again, I’m interested in hearing how you’d rearrange the UI to make Rhino better for all your customers.