Too bad there's no vaccie for "Stupid Syndrome". :-__
Bill Fairchild wrote:
Fast food restaurant chains have a lot of experience with successfully dumbing
down the keyboard of their cash registers. You might try contacting the chief
architect of cash register design for McDonald's:
http://www.mcdonalds.com/contact/contact_us.html
Perhaps someday a keyboard RPQ attachment will have a mechanical arm that emerges which
holds a two-by-four that then smacks the dumb user up beside the head while the monitor
displays a forefinger waving from side to side with a loud "NO! NO! NO!" aural
reinforcement. But dumb users would then use all their intelligence to figure out how to
disable the RPQ.
Bill Fairchild
Software Developer
Rocket Software
275 Grove Street * Newton, MA 02466-2272 * USA
Tel: +1.617.614.4503 * Mobile: +1.508.341.1715
Email: bi...@mainstar.com
Web: www.rocketsoftware.com
-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:ibm-m...@bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of
McKown, John
Sent: Monday, March 01, 2010 8:23 AM
To: IBM-MAIN@bama.ua.edu
Subject: OT: need for "SmartUser"?
This is not really about IBM mainframes. But it is, in a sense, about computing
in general. And, perhaps, why mainframes are viewed as archaic. This is a
slashdot article. The person appears to be asking a serious question. But, how
stupid should computer users be allowed to become?
<quote>
"The longer I do desktop support, the more it becomes obvious that my users don't read anything that appears on their
screen. Instead, they memorize a series of buttons to press to get whatever result they want and if anything unexpected
happens, they're completely lost. Error logs help a lot, but they have their limits. I've been toying with a few ideas, but
I don't know if any of them will work and I was hoping my fellow Slashdotters could point me in the right direction. For
example, I was thinking about creating icons or logos to identify specific errors. They might not remember that an error
about "uninitialized data" but they might be more able to remember that they got the "puppy error" if I
showed a puppy picture next to the error message. Or for times when finding images is too time consuming, you could create
simple logos from letters, numbers, symbols, colors or shapes, so you could have the "red 5" error or "blue
square" error (or any combination of those elemen!
t!
s). I've even wondered if it would be possible to expand that to cover the other
senses, for example, playing a unique sound with the error. Unfortunately, haptic
and olfactory feedback aren't readily available. I like to think that my users would
remember the error that caused them to get a swift kick in the balls. And if they
forgot it anyhow, I could always help them reproduce it. Does anyone else have
experience with ideas like these? Did it work?"
</quote>
John McKown
Systems Engineer IV
IT
Administrative Services Group
HealthMarkets(r)
9151 Boulevard 26 * N. Richland Hills * TX 76010
(817) 255-3225 phone * (817)-961-6183 cell
john.mck...@healthmarkets.com * www.HealthMarkets.com
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