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I never said that was the only thing to think about but it is important,
both during the product design phase and the writing phase, to think of ways
to keep your users from hurting themselves. If your application is a
database product, then you have to think about the places where you are
allowing them access to the structure of the database because if you are not
careful, they can destroy the database unintentionally. If you are
documenting a car, you need to consider things you must tell them not to do,
even though it seems obvious to you. Like not touching the tail pipe.
True story - my favorite client of all time who went out of business last
year was getting ready to ship the main product. Since they were a start up,
we all tested the thing. The day before they wanted to go into production, I
found that I could paste a screen capture into a database field on an input
screen. The result was complete corruption of the database. The engineers
were amazed I even thought of it. My moronic behavior delayed shipping the
thing to production for 3 days while they fixed that hole and others that
they found. But no user could accidentally, because the cat jumped on the
keyboard, corrupt the database in that way again.
Users are far more clever than you think. They will come up with stuff you
never thought of - both good and bad. I think that was Andrew's point, in
part.
sharon
Sharon Burton-Hardin
President of the Inland Empire chapter of the STC
www.iestc.org
Anthrobytes Consulting
909-369-8590
www.anthrobytes.com
----- Original Message -----
From: Anthony Markatos <tonymar -at- hotmail -dot- com>
To: <sharonburton -at- earthlink -dot- net>; <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Sent: Friday, 07 April, 2000 8:43 AM
Subject: Re: Of Mice and Morons
| Sharon Burton-Hardin wrote:
|
| .....Is it a good idea to dismiss our readers as unimportant
| because they are morons? No, bad idea. Think of them as morons who need to
| be protected from themselves? Oh, probably a good idea.
|
| Tony Markatos responds:
|
| In the long term, thinking like this is a losing proposition for anybody.
|
| Tony Markatos
| (tonymar -at- hotmail -dot- com)
|
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