[PLUG-TALK] Usability

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Wed Nov 30 20:47:59 UTC 2005


On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Keith Lofstrom wrote:

> But the interesting thing about this talk was a slide that he showed about
> how these teachers resolved problems and frustrations. Reading the manual
> accounted for approximately zero percent of solutions, while talking to
> classmates and co-workers accounted for 52% of solutions.

> Think about that.  We typically blow people off with "RTFM", but in fact
> people RTFM rarely, and prefer to talk with colleagues and work things out
> together. Like we do on these mailing lists.

Keith,

   I think this is because too many people are lazy. And, there's a growing
tendency among the general populace to not read books or newspapers. This is
an unfortunate reality, and you are correct that software documentation needs
to accommodate these limitations. Perhaps comic books? Or, having a digital
movie made by an advertising agency?

> Some of this is helped by the good manners of our frequent question askers
> - Rich Shepard comes to mind as a champion of the well formed question.

   Thank you. I usually try to find the answer myself before asking. But, when
it's expert knowlege in fields other than our own, we frequently don't know
where to start looking or how to form a Google search term that will elicit
the information we seek. And, I want very much to receive a useful answer, so
being as polite, humble, and precise as I can encourages (I hope!) someone to
take pity on me and respond.

> This tells me that developing more community tools, making it easier to
> communicate and share and just hang out together, may be as important as
> developing computation tools. And though I love good documentation, we may
> capture a bigger audience just by opening a friendly conversation with
> them, and dropping RTFM from our replies for a while. Perhaps we can also
> work with newbies as "question coaches" - helping them offline to rephrase
> their questions to the list in a more answerable way.

   I think we're doing better at this on the list. As a group we certainly know
how to offer community help: the decade of clinics at the Riverdale schools
was a major positive factor for many of us. There's no reason not to hold the
virtual clinics on this mail list with the same patience, good humor, and
positive results as were provided at the physical clinics.

Rich

-- 
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.               |   Author of "Quantifying Environmental
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc. (TM)   |  Impact Assessments Using Fuzzy Logic"
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>     Voice: 503-667-4517         Fax: 503-667-8863



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