Yup. I see it in myself
Me, too -- lest anyone think I believe myself some instantiation of perfection. What I try to do, though, is realize that I'm getting grumpy, and then go somewhere quiet so that I don't leak my grumpy on others. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But I'll be the first to admit that I'm sometimes ALL of the things I tend to rant about; it's one reason why I am expert at ranting about them.
1) If possible make the "Right Thing" the obvious default for
users. If not possible, make the "Right Thing" as close as you
can to a "Duh!" thing (for them).
The harder you make it for them to screw up, the smarter your users will magically become.
The problem, of course, is that this is hard work. Most folks here know I write email systems for Apple. Many of you also know I have an outside consulting house (and attached hobby environment) at plaidworks. Have any of you ever wondered why Apple allows such an obvious conflict of interest -- an employee who also does the same thing as an outside venture?
Here's why -- first, the plaidworks stuff existed before I did email for apple. In reality, they more or less bought my technology (even though I was working for apple at the time doing non-email things) and my outside stuff is grandfathered. But my outside stuff is also my test environment and my prototyping facility. The users there get to use the systems for free, but they also have to put up with my installing stuff and trying it out on them and giving me feedback. I've very carefully built a place where I have a set of willing guinea pigs that I can throw stuff at, and ask them to poke it, prod it, break it and then comment on it. And they do -- and that population is widely diverse, from people who are technically expert in any number of fields to people who can barely log on to AOL reliably. and I've got them trained to talk to me, even (especially) those naive AOL users.
Anyone else out there do that? There's a horrible history among techies to "throw it over the transom" and assume everyone will understand it intuitively and see the genius of it. I come out of the support ranks -- I started as a programmer, moved into system administration, moved from there to support (ten years in the trenches with a phone welded to my ear), and now, I'm building systems designed for non-technical users to use. I've always felt every programmer in a company should spend three months on a phone answering questions -- but it's impossible to find programmers willing to do that, because, frankly, most can't handle it, and most don't want to know what their customers think.
so I come from a different view of this than many programmers. A neat hack is still a neat hack, but it means nothing if it doesn't make things better for the end user (god, it's a very Tron-link koan, no?) -- and I think most programmers don't have a clue what their users want or need, and don't particularly WANT to know. They want to pretend all of their users are clones of themselves -- because deep down in side, they're only interested in writing stuff for themselves.
And there are times when you ARE the expert and what the users want may be wrong (the whole list-* argument that keeps coming up is a classic case of the user asking for things the programmer shouldn't give them) -- but for most stuff, you really ought to be not just listening with the end users, but partnering with them. you write the code; but they're the ones that help you understand how to make the code usable.
I'd translate the reaction, as:
"Umm, oh yeah. Well he's right you know, it kinda isn't a stupid
luser problem, its uhh, that we didn't make the system help the
user when we know we could have."
true, but -- nobody volunteered to actually fix the problem. Instead, they all just got quiet. sigh. but I'm not surprised.
Putting the self-destruct button in the middle of the steering wheel
of the car
but that's okay, we put a nice sticker on it that says "don't push this button".
I/we'll miss you. Go relax. Enjoy. Get some R&R. Take a deep
breath. Please. Then hurry back -- there's a war on ya' know.
I am. I've lost almost two belt loops since I made this decision in April (see, one thing that was always second on my priority list was getting my weight under control). I'm getting LOTS done. I'm already a lot less burnt out -- enough to sometimes be tempted to jump back into things, but I realize I need more than a few weeks away from a modem. and now that I'm headed rapidly towards my mid-40's, and I've been doing this for 20 years plus, and maybe it's time for me to call it a day. When have you done your time? I dunno -- but even pilots in Vietnam were rotated home after they flew enough missions, even if the war continued.
(point of fact. I wrote my first BBS code, in fortran, in 1978. By 1980, it was being used by ~200 users across the state of california. By 1982, I was already involved in various technical and admin activities in USENET, and in 1984, wrote the first usage guides for USENET (which may or may not have been the first formal FAQ for USENET...) and coined the term netiquette. And I've been doing stuff like that ever since...)
AOL has how many million susbcribers?
Last number I had was 26 million.
What MLM has a control and configuration interface that would appeal
to the average AOL user?
well -- I think the one I wrote does pretty well (see:
http://www.apple.com/signmeup
http://applenews.lists.apple.com/unsubscribe
http://applenews.lists.apple.com/change
)
although it's set up for a very specific type of mail list and wouldn't generalize out to a discussion list. It handles about 25,000 database updates a day (subscribe, remove, change), and requires, oh, 250-300 postmaster interventions a week or less, if you ignore having to manually whack at bogus bounce messages that don't follow any usable standard. And about 2/3 of those interventions are for people who don't read the instructions and want us to do it for them (and it's our policy to do so; they are, after all, our customers, and our position is that we don't run these systems for OUR convenience. Something I think a lot of list admins don't 'get' -- subscribers are your customers, not your employees)
I'm currently trying (desperately) to finalize a project plan for my next generation of my e-mail beasts. The current one was specced to work well to a subscriber base of about 10 million users, and so far, so good (fingers crossed). But if I don't upgrade it soon, I'm gonna have problems, and it needs to do a whole bunch more, like full international support. One of my current grails is to build a system that'll automatically bring up pages in whatever language your browser says is your preferred language -- I have a neat design for that, if it works.
Would an MLM whose interface did appeal to the average AOL user be
necessarily inherently broken/torqued/crippled in some way?
As I said in another message, sometimes the answer is to have an 'expert mode' -- you have to make things easy for the naive users, but you really don't want to do that by driving your geeks crazy. So build in training wheels, and give them a switch that folds them back out of the way -- and let the user decide when to flip it.
FWIW, I've studied user tendencies a lot. Almost invariably, here's what you'll find. If you have something where you can set something one of two ways (messages or digests, say), 10% of your users HAVE to have it set one way, 10% of the users HAVE to have it set the other way, and the other 80% will simply use whatever your default it. I'm not sure it matters WHAT the default is or what you're setting, those numbers seem quite stable.
This means two things to me. First, it's very important to set defaults properly -- and frankly, messages/digest isn't a no-brainer, either. I really think the default ought to be digest, but that's not how mail lists operate. I think most naive users are happier with digests and not as likely to understand it exists -- and the user who prefers messages is more likely to know how to do that. And digest-as-default really reduces the overhead on the server, too. But I'm not willing to make that kind of change without a lot more research, since it'd be different than most other systems. And second, it sort of points out how silly most arguments over things like reply-to are; most users DON'T CARE. And for those users that do -- you can find a similar group that wants it the other way, too. Which implies admins shouldn't let the squeaky wheels set policy, and it implies that people who write this stuff ought to make EVERYTHING a user option if at all possible, simply to avoid these arguments... (grin)
In terms of geekdom there's more of Joe Redneck than there are of us.
We are, basically, the priesthood. Back in, oh, 1982 or 1984, the Internet was the private hangout of that priesthood. I believe that among the old pharts I know, a lot of the anti-user attitude is really a wish to go back to the Good Old Days (whether conscious or not). And that ain't gonna happen. A lot of my peers did their time and headed off to the vacation house (and there are days when I wish I'd done so, too). I've always felt there were new challenges and tried to reinvent myself to deal with the changes that came along with the net over time -- sometimes successfully, sometimes less so. I've generally had to completely re-engineer my list systems every 18 months or so (or at least redo the documentation from scratch) because the user population changes enough in that time that things that used to be assumed have to be explained, and technology changes require you to rethink what you do and how you do it. If you want a real giggle, try to track down a complete set of revisions to my user documentation for my lists, and see how they change over the years (and how the underlying administrative attitudes change, too...)
"Are they so stupid that they can't see what I'm doing here?"
you know what? sometimes the answer actually IS yes. But I find it's a lot less often than most folks want it to be.
--
Chuq Von Rospach, Internet Gnome <http://www.chuqui.com>
[<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> = <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> = <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>]
Yes, yes, I've finally finished my home page. Lucky you.
Love is the process of my leading you gently back to yourself.
- Saint Exupery
