Re: metadiscourse in popup text

[Manual Writer <manualwriter -at- HOTMAIL -dot- COM>]

In reply to Mike Starr who wrote (in part):
>It's easy to dismiss a field of this nature by saying "Name??? Duh, why
should
>I bother creating a popup for that; everybody knows what their name
is". And to
>a certain extent, that's where I see the thread I responded to  as well
as
>standardized documentation practices going. Just because we know
exactly what
>the user should put in there and why and how and it seems self-evident
we tend
>to forget that the clueless newbie could actually question what we've
>determined is so simple that it requires no documentation. And even
when it
>actually IS the simple explanation, the user sometimes might just need
>validation that what he/she thinks is the simplest and most obvious
answer is
>INDEED the answer. As Joan Hackos said once, "What are we saving those
>electrons for anyway??"

I would have to say that with 10 years software background and a degree
in Computer Science that I rarely classify myself as a newbie on
software issues and yet have found many occassions where an otherwise
simple field that some doc person (I am one myself) ASSUMED everyone
knew what it meant gave me trouble. Of course, the first thing I do is
search on the help file, or use the context of the screens to figure
things out.  Sometimes this all fails and I am left to guess.

So I would expand the difficulty to ALL users, not just "newbies."  In
fact, sometimes the reason this happens is the writer is a newbie on the
software and does not realize there is a reason to distinguish such
fields from their use in other non-related programs. Also, many of the
context sensitive popups are written by programmers who are "newbies" to
writing, so to speak.

Seth Buffington
LRMB Assoc.
"Email: A common mode of communication, sometimes slurred." --s.b.


______________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com


 From ??? -at- ??? Sun Jan 00 00:00:00 0000=