On 2009-02-09, 17:37 GMT, Dan Winship wrote: > 1. Users don't have the manual, and if they did, they wouldn't > read it. > 2. In fact, users can't read anything, and if they could, they > wouldn't want to.
As much as I like Joel and his writing (and particulary this one about user interface), I think he wrote really sloppily here. I have two remarks for this: 1) This was written for user interface designers, not for documentation writers. And the point was IMHO (and I would agree with that) that making awfully complicated user interface and defend it with saying "that everybody should spend good quality time with my documentation to understand how it works" makes sense only for very professional high-end software (yes, you should spend some time with InDesign documentation if you want to be a efficient typesetter) and usually it just an excuse for broken user interface design. However, when a programmer says "Great, I don't have to bother with documentation at all; I hate writing it anyway, so now I have an excuse for not doing it", I am afraid they just misused Joel's writing to cover their laziness. 2) Of course, Microsoft et al. quickly concluded from studies like what Joel cites, that they won't write doucmentation to save money. Current result, that no commerical software has any documentation whatsoever, and people pay for it second time to O'Reilly and others, is quite unsatisfactory. There are many people in this world who are actually literate (surprise, you are not the only person in the world who can read!), and who would welcome some good documentation when they are lost (which is most of the time of course, because Joel's conclusion expected user interface which doesn't need documentation -- where do we have such programs?). The result is that not only we are implicitly saying by our broken user interface design "You are too stupid to use super smart software I wrote" (that's what I hear from many users is the message they get), but also "I couldn't waste my precious time on writing a documentation for you, because you in your dullness wouldn't appreciate my terrible sacrifice and wouldn't read it anyway". And then we are surprised that people are afraid of computers. Sometimes, I think that a terrible problem of free software is that there is no feedback from customers (and their wallets) to the programmers. For most free software programmers I am afraid it acutally doesn't matter if they have any users, and even less how these few users they have are actually satisfied with their software. It is enough (as in some kind of intellectual masturbation) that they could expose their smartness on writing a piece of software. Best, Matěj Cepl _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list